974: NFL Draft - Wide Receivers With Studly Profiles

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Speaker 1: This is the Late Podcast with your host JJ Zachertha. J J zacher Retha, what's up everyone. It's JJ Zacharyeson in this episode nine and seventy four of the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast sponsored by Underdog. Thanks for tuning in. The NFL Combine starts this week, so it's the perfect time to finish up this two part series on players who produced like studs in college. Last week, if you missed it, I talked all about running backs. Today we're onto wide receiver. It may be better to start with that episode than I did last week. So if you haven't listened to it, hit pause, go listen, then come back to this one. But the idea for today's show is simple. I only looking at successful fantasy wide receivers in the NFL. I'm then going to look at their college production profiles to see what kind of traits that they shared in college. The final step, then is the layer on top this year's draft class and see if anyone in this year's class had those production traits. I'll see if anyone from this year's class produced like a stud. Now, before we get into the data, remember that the Late Round Prospect Guide is available for pre order right now. This year's guide is even more information than ever before. You get info in everything that goes into my prospect and Year two models. You get profiles for every running back and wide receiver at this year's combine, you get year two profiles for about forty second year running backs and wide receivers. And I've added what I'm calling categories of the model this year that help categorize players into different buckets depending on their overall scores. And both the ZAP model and the Year two to one. I'm putting a lot of effort into this. I think you guys will enjoy it. You can pre order it right now over on lateround dot com for fourteen ninety nine. On March tenth, when it launches, that price is going to go up by five bucks. Also, even though the fantasy football season is over, it's not really over. Over on Underdog right now, you can enter drafts for the twenty twenty five season. If you know your prospects well, if you have a good grasp on free agency, you can have an edge on your competition. If you want to check it out draft some teams, head to underdog Fantasy dot com and sign up. When you do use promo code late round to get up to one thousand dollars in bonus catch. That's underdog fantasy dot com. So what exactly is a successful Fantasy football wide receiver? I asked that same question at running back and I ended up defining a stud running back as someone who gave fantasy managers multiple seasons of fourteen or more PPR points per game since twenty eleven. With wide receiver, we're gonna up that just a bit to fifteen PPR points per game. So wide receiver since twenty eleven who have scored fifteen or more PPR points per game in multiple seasons, and to qualify for a season, that wide receiver had to have played at least eight games. Now, a lot of those wide receivers were drafted a long time ago, not all of them are in my prospect database. Database includes every wide out who is either drafted or at the NFL combine since twenty eleven. So after removing some of the older guys, I was left with thirty four wide receivers. Thirty four stud wide receivers. Those guys range from Nico Collins to Cooper Cup to t Y Hilton to Randall Cobb. It captures the best of the best over the last decade plus. The NFL Combine this year invited forty nine wide receivers. It was forty eight, but Travis Hunter was a laid ad as a wide receiver. He'll be there as a corner and a wide out. Now, what I'm looking to do is compare those forty nine combine invites to our stud sample of thirty four wide receivers, which ones look like they produced like studs in college. To help me out, I'm gonna only use the thing that goes into my prospect model, and that's breakout score. Now, I mentioned breakout score in last week's episode on running backs, and at wide receiver, the concept is exactly the same and it uses the same metric, which is receiving yards per team pass attempt pro rated for games played. Minimum six games played in a season to qualify. Receiving yards per team pass attempt has become a generally accepted predictive metric for wide receivers in the prospecting space. It simply takes a player's receiving yards in a given season and divides that number by the number of pass attempts that his team had. This allows players to work on a similar playing field from the standpoint that a pass heavy offense isn't automatically creating the best production profiles. A player can be really good in receiving yards per team pass attempts while having lower raw production, and a player can have insane raw production but be benefiting from a team that throws the ball a lot. Now, this is obviously not a flawless metric. No metric is. Quarterback play can influence this to some degree, competition can influence it, but it does get signal there is predictiveness to it, so we shouldn't ignore it. Now, receiving ours per team pass attempt, we'll look at that standalone today. That'll be one of the two metrics that we use to compare our st D sample to the NFL combine invites. The metric that I care about more though, is what I introduced before I started rambling, and that's breakout score. Breakout score is like an enhanced version of receiving yards per team pass attempt. It adjusts that number that receiving yards per team pass attempt number for two things, age and strength of opponent. If a player hits a high receiving yards per team pass attempt at a young age. That's telling us that that player is probably pretty good, and a wide receiver is going to have an easier time getting to a high receiving yards per team pass attempt rate when playing at a smaller program than say like Alabama or LSU, So program strength does matter. I take strength of schedule metrics from College Football Reference and I layer that on top to help create breakout score. The Wide Receiver ZAP model, which is my wide receiver prospect model, it really only looks at breakout score. It also looks at rushing production. But breakout score is a key piece to the model, and it's because breakout score alone it's a lot of signal. It's pretty predictive. It's not everything. I've got things like teammates score and draft capital in the model as well, but it's a really important metric. Breakout score comes in the form of a raw number, but I translate it to zero to one hundred in order to make it more consumable for you guys, So when I refer to it, I'll be referring to it on that scale. A score of zero obviously means that the player never broke out. His receiving yards per team pass attempt number was just way too low. A score of one hundred means that profile is absolutely nuts. Today, we're going to focus heavily on that metric, all while throwing in some context and seeing what these combine invites are all about. Okay, So, when looking at her STUD sample group, the average breakout score was eighty two. The average best season receiving yards per team pass attempt to rate was three point zero three. So in their best season, they average a receiving yards per team pass attempt to rate of three point zero three. That probably doesn't make any sense to people who aren't prospecting through data, but anything over the three mark is usually really good. Both of those numbers are strong. I'm sure you'd expect that, because I'm not going to talk about metrics that don't matter. We would expect good fantasy wide receivers to score well in those metrics. Now, let's compare that to this year's class. This year's class has an average breakout score of about forty six, so well below that eighty two mark from our STUD sample. And remember the STUD sample had a best season receiving yards per team pass attempt average of three point zero three. This class is at two point four to eight. Now, there were a few wide receivers from this year's class to hit on those two averages, the eighty two breakout score the three point zero three receiving yards per tem pass attempt rad in their best season. But before we talk about them, let's look at some wide receivers who didn't get there, some of whom didn't even get close. Now, in our stud sample, only three wide receivers failed to reach a breakout score of six six. Those were DeVante Adams, Michael Thomas, and Tyreek Hill. A lot of the later round hits, like a Puka and Akua, they were even able to get to that sixty mark. In this year's class, thirty two of the forty nine wide receivers were below a breakout score of sixty, and some of them are projected to get drafted relatively high. One of them is Matthew Golden out of Texas. According to NFL Mockdraft database dot Com, Golden's currently projected to get select at the end of the first round, and I have plenty of concerns about his production profile. For some context, Golden's breakout score is fifty one point four, so he's not a zero within that metric, but he's also basically average within it. That's because his best season in receiving yards per team pass attempt was well below two. It's one point eight two. Not to be fair, in the model, that number gets adjusted for strength of schedule, and when it's adjusted it looks more like two point two eight instead of one point eight two. But even still that's pretty low. It's still leading to a breakout score of only fifty one. Here's a list of first round wide receivers since twenty eleven who had breakout scores below sixty. And yes, this is an arbitrary parameter. You'll find some Round two players with scores that low who end up hitting at a higher rate, but I still find this really interesting. Those first round wide outs with breakout scores below sixty include Cordero Patterson, Calvin Benjamin Bershad Perriman, Kevin White, Josh Dockson, Zay Flowers, Xavier Lgette, and Ricky piersall. As of right now, the only real probable long term hit out of that group is maybe Jay Flowers. Now, hopefully we see something out of Xavier Loguette, and hopefully we see something out of Ricky Piersal, but right now we just don't know. Overall, though, that's not a great group of wide receivers. Now, Golden's boosted a little bit by teammate scorer, so his profile isn't as high risk as some of the other first rounders in the past. But I definitely think that he's got a high variance profile overall, just based on what we've seen historically. Now, another player with a sub sixty breakout score is Xavier Rostrepo. Rastrepo is a quintessential slot receiver. According to Pro Football focused data, he lined up in the slot on over ninety percent of his collegiate routes that ranked second in the class within that category. Now corner a NFL mock draft database, he's projected to go in the top one hundred right now, but his breakout score is forty eight point nine. Now, I'm not like immensely concerned with this, especially for a slot We'll sometimes get worse profiles out of guys who projected to play solely a slot role at the next level. But for what it's worth, since twenty twenty, we've only had a few top one hundred picks with slot rates as high as Rastreppo's, and three of the guys that got there, kJ Hammler, Trey Tucker, and Malachi Corley, they weren't hits. I think Restrepo's a better prospect than at least two of those three guys. kJ Hamler actually had OK production, but there are still some red flags there. Now, one of the things is za that model looks at for wide receivers is rushing production. It doesn't need like five hundred career yards of rushing production actually caps that number in the model, but getting some rushing production can be helpful for wide receiver scores. A good example of that is with lad McConkey last year. Now, the reason there's some signal there is because when players are used in a lot of different ways in college, that tells us that they might be talented, and that leads me to save Yon Williams. Now, look, he looks like an uber athlete. He's not like many prospects that I've seen come out. He's got a lot of size, with many places listing him at six foot five, two hundred and twenty five pounds. We'll see what the NFL Combine, says this week, but at TCU, he would take snaps out of the wildcat and he'd get a lot of work on the ground. He had fifty one carries for three hundred and twenty two yards and six touchdowns on the ground last year. The problem is, not only did he play a TCU for five years, so he's an older prospect, but he never really got it done as a receiver analytically. At least, his breakout score is zero after a best season yards per team pass attempt rate of only one point three to six. It's very very rare for a wide receiver to hit in fantasy football with numbers that low, like you could point at Tyreek Hill, but he didn't have the most normal journey to the pros and he's an absolute outlier. Now, Williams is not toasting the zap model because of that rushing production, but he's probably the highest variance wide receiver in this year's draft class. Now, there are three more wide receivers I really want to get to real quick who have red flags. One is Jalen Royle's. He started playing college ball at Georgia Military College before transferring to Utah State. He had a good junior and senior season there, including a senior year with a pro rated receiving yards per team pass attempt mark of three point one two. That's above our NFL stud sample. Unfortunately, Utah State doesn't get that much love in the strength of scheduled department, so he got dged for that. His breakout score fell below fifty as a result. I don't totally mind Royals, though. One of his analytical comps ended up being Rashi Rice, which I found really interesting. I think Rice is a little bit more yakability, but Royals does have some of that. It's not a bad comp to have. Next is tes Johnson. I've had multiple people in my mentions and in my email about Tesz Johnson over the last month or so, and I got to say, I kind of see it, but I don't totally see it. For one, he's definitely undersized. Now we've seen smaller wide receiver success in recent memory, but he's been listened at sub one hundred and seventy pounds, which is not ideal. More importantly, the smaller wide receivers who have succeeded historically have come with good breakout scores. Johnson's is forty eight point nine. He's one of those cases where his yards per route run rate is better than his receiving yards per team pass attempt one. Usually those two things correlate, but sometimes they are a little bit different. And we saw hits out of profiles like that over the last couple of years with Lad McConkie and Pukanakup. But for what it's worth, the model like Nikouh and maconkey a lot more than Tess Johnson, so I have my concerns. And then finally there's Nick Nash. He played at San Jose State for six seasons. He started off as a quarterback. Now most known Nash because he won the Wide Receiver Triple Crown last year. He led the Nations in catches, yards and touchdowns and as a result, he was a Bolitni COF finalist, but he lost to Travis Hunter. With Nick Nash as a classic case that I was talking about earlier, where a player has crazy raw statistics, everyone thinks of his production profile must look amazing, but context makes it a lot less appealing. Nash had these monster numbers, but even his unadjusted receiving yards between pass TEP mark was two point seven to one last year. That's good, but it wasn't even as high as our stud sample average, and that was at San Jose State. Now, we should be a little bit lenient here with Nash because he wasn't playing wide receiver at a high level for a super long time. But I've seen a lot of people be really high on Nash as like this year's Day three sleeper. And look, if he finds a spot with a great coaching staff like the Rams, I'll probably be in. But he's gonna be a twenty five year old rookie with production marks that aren't nearly as good as people think. There's a chance that this could go south. So those are the bigger call outs to make for guys who failed to reach a breakout score of sixty. There are tons of players who didn't get to eighty. Travis Hunter's breakout score was sixty six point nine. Now, overall, analytically, he's not terrible by any means, but I don't see generational wide receiver with his numbers. But obviously those numbers need a little bit of context. I feel like I could go on and on with Travis Hunter. So if anyone has a mailbag question, wants to throw that my way about Hunter feel free. And then some other wide receivers who are below that eighty mark but above the sixty mark. You got Isaiah Bond, who was barely below that eighty number el manner. He didn't get there. Jayden Higgins was at seventy four point seven. The vast majority of wide receivers in this class, for what it's worth, did not get to a breakout score of eighty. There were four guys who did, though, Luther Burden, Tenoroa McMillan, a Mecca Agbuka, and Trey Harris. Those are the four wide receivers who all got there. Now, technically Aguka didn't get to a receiving yards per team pass attempt of three point zero, but we'll just consider these four players the analytical studs of this class. Three of them I think are really good. Now. I sent kind of a controversial engagement Baity tweet last week saying that Luther Burden was wide receiver one. I don't usually send tweets like that. I kind of regretted it immediately. It was mostly to get the conversation going. But it's so early in the process. I'm still learning about these players. But make no mistake right now today, I do have Luther Burden as my wide receiver one. His sophomore season at Missouri was probably the best individual season in this year's draft class, and as a result of that, he is the highest breakout score in this class at ninety six point three. Now, there are some troubling signs of his profile that the model's just not picking up on. He had a lot of manufactured touches, a lot of behind the line of scrimmage looks, and he really only had that one great season. So while the Model's going to be incredibly high on him, I think it's okay to approach him with some doubt, but I do think the upside is crazy. He fits that Dj Moore kind of Malik Neighbors archetype that we've seen be successful in this era of NFL. I've got a lot more about Burden in the Prospect Guide. Next is Ted McMillan. I think he's probably a little bit safer of a bet because we've seen multiple seasons of high production from him. Some have comped him to Drake London, but I will say London had an elite breakout score in the ZAP Model McMillan's breakout score is solid, but his eighty three it's not quite Drake London esque, and that's why McMillan's top comps top analytical comps are t Higgins and Courtland's. I think he can make that kind of impact as the top size guy in this class. Now a Mecchaguca he's next. I think he's just a really solid prospect all around. You're looking at an eighty nine breakout score, but his best season in receiving yards for team pass attempt, like I said earlier, didn't quite get to that three point zero mark. But his comps in the model include Robert Woods and Chris Godwin. I'm envisioning him primarily as a slot guy who can play on the perimeter, but be mostly a high, unreliable slot player at the next level. Like I said, I think there's three wide receivers in this class who are really really good. Will probably be in the same tier for me post draft, but we'll see a lot can change, and I'm gonna push Travis Hunter aside for now for obvious reasons. We don't even know how much wide receiver he's actually gonna play. The final player, though, to get these stud wide receiver marks is Trey Harris. I said earlier that Luther burdens sophomore season is the best season in this year's draft class, but Trey Harris's final year at Mississippi that's up there too. His twenty twenty four campaign last year, he had a yards per route run rate over five yards. That is unheard of, especially at a bigger program. We're not talking like some random small school. His receiving yards per team pass attempt, which is pro rated for the record, was three point eighty six. The problem analytically for Harris is that he's not going to get the draft capital more than likely that the other three wide receivers that I just talked about will. But he's also an older prospect. He was in college for five years. He's about to turn twenty three years old, so the model doesn't like him nearly as much as the other players that I'm talking about. I think he is a very high variance wide receiver, but there's still a lot to like. Now. I know that was a whirlwind. I have so many more takes on players in this class, and so many more in depth takes that you can find in the prospect guide. This is more of a primer than anything else, but hopefully you feel more prepared to sit back and watch the NFL Combine this weekend and really enjoy it. That's it for today's show, though thanks to all of you for listening. If you get subscribed to the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast, make sure you are bustrooting for it pretty much anywhere podcasts could be found, and know for to follow me on Twitter and on Blue Sky at Late Round QB. It's a mailbag week. I'll have one for you on Friday. Make sure you get those questions in otherwise, enjoy your week. I'll talk to you then