Welcome back to the Get Better at Drafting series. While last week we covered what to look for when drafting tight ends, today we’re going to start a multi-week focus on the wide receiver position, and how to attack it in dynasty rookie drafts.
Despite not being the highest-scoring position in Superflex dynasty leagues, and despite not being the most scarce, wide receivers are still the lifeblood of dynasty fantasy football. The wide receiver position balances scoring, consistency, health, longevity, and depth better than any other, meaning dynasty teams whose backbone is built through an elite wide receiver corps can remain perennial contenders.
There is so much to discuss about the wide receiver position that we’re going to devote multiple weeks to it. For this week, we’re going to hone in on what “ability” actually means at the wide receiver position, how it’s misunderstood, and the different aspects of ability that are undervalued by the dynasty community.
In following weeks, we’ll devote entire articles to other aspects of valuing the position.
Ability
The single most important thing to understand about wide receivers is that ability trumps all. It comes before draft capital, it comes before opportunity, and it certainly comes before competition. I know that sounds incredibly obvious, but before you roll your eyes, trust me when I say dynasty owners routinely lose sight of this when making actual roster decisions.
In practice, dynasty owners fail to act according to wide receiver ability when they're too profit-oriented on the trade market, or when they get distracted by changes in target competition. In the former case, owners are frequently focusing on the pennies instead of the dollars.
If a wide receiver displays significantly more ability than expected, we need to throw out the qualifiers people are using to explain away their production. Efficient target-earning almost exclusively happens due to talent. The one possible exception to this is if somebody runs extremely hot on shot plays for a short period of time. Generally we can call B.S. on these situations if the production is heavily touchdown driven, and if the player in question was consistently failing to earn targets outside of schemed up touches.
Consider how many dynasty owners “sold high” on Puka Nacua during his rookie season, expecting him to fade away once Cooper Kupp came back from injury. In the end, it was Nacua’s talent that was the signal, not the absence of target competition early on.
At the wide receiver position, targets do not flow down the path of least resistance, they are earned. And while they require playing time, they are not a guaranteed consequence of playing time. Mediocre receivers can go on brief runs of receiving inefficient target share they don’t deserve, but if somebody earns a strong target share efficiently, that does not happen by accident.
Dysfunctional offenses in their death throes may pepper weak players with low-value targets, but this is not a sustainable source of fantasy production. Consider the Wan’Dale Robinson run of Mickey Mouse targets, and how non-helpful it was to your dynasty lineups down the stretch.
By far the most important mistake made by dynasty owners, and redraft owners too, is overreacting to changes in target competition. Except in extreme cases, a wide receiver’s most important target competition is himself.
The most important factor to explain this is target concentration. Teams with more than one great receiver will be more concentrated, and teams with no good receivers will be less concentrated. This is because beyond a fairly low baseline, quarterbacks will not target receivers who fail to earn those targets.
Ceilings
Dynasty owners routinely make mistakes by pigeonholing receiver archetypes into limited ceilings, but target-earning combined with efficiency is a ceiling unto itself. Too many dynasty owners “sold high”on Amon-Ra St. Brown because he “profiled” as more of a WR2 and the Lions then drafted Jameson Williams.
And now we still haven’t learned our lesson. I saw dynasty owners trying to sell Ladd McConkey on the assumption a “true WR1” would be brought in. Stud receivers remain studs no matter what we think they profile as. Efficient target-earning breaks the mold. Archetypes that don't look like past WR1s can start scoring like WR1s because this position is highly player-driven, rather than role-driven.
Once you have a dynasty asset who is both efficient and earning targets, do not assume you know what their ceiling is. And do not assume any new competition will marginalize them. It is absurdly hard for a prospect, no matter the draft capital, to usurp a player who efficiently earns WR1-level targets. It is likewise hard for veteran players to join new teams with an unfamiliar quarterback and do the same. The latter can happen but it’s not in our interest to sell players expecting it.
Re-Rolling
Not only do dynasty owners lose sight of ability-driven signals on the high end by selling early on talented players, they miss signals on the low end too.
If you have a wide receiver who is on the field consistently but who is not earning targets, that’s your signal to re-roll them. For rookies, you can excuse this a bit if it improves over the course of the season, but in general dynasty owners should be more willing to re-roll the target non-earners on their roster, excuses be damned.
For example, going into the 2024 offseason Jahan Dotson had gone on a frankly impressive run of target non-earning on the Commanders. He had valid excuses related to his quarterback play and being tethered to a lame duck coaching staff. As it turned out, the Commanders were completely willing to dump him despite having no depth on the roster, and the odds are slim to none of Dotson ever being a dynasty asset again.
If a player was blocked from a real role, you can remain patient. However, if a player was consistently on the field and not earning targets, that’s a very strong signal, and you need extremely extenuating circumstances to excuse it.
One such circumstance could be players who recently returned from a holdout or major injury, but for the most part, we should be more willing to re-roll players who see the field and fail to make an impact.
Not that we’re clear on how and why we need to keep our eye on the ball when it comes to ability, the next point we need to cover is that ability is imperfectly understood. Loosely speaking, ability can be defined as reliability + talent, and the current dynasty market is really eager to pay for talent but tends to misprice reliability.
Reliability
Reliability and consistency is one of the most important components of wide receiver ability, but it’s the hardest to see on tape and is rarely discussed except as a passing thought.
Nine out of ten times when a wide receiver prospect has a wasted rookie season spent in the coach’s doghouse, it’s because they weren’t reliable. We rarely know what a player is doing in practice, but their attention to detail on weekdays is a major determinant of how much they see the field on Sundays.
We all know and perceive the value of route running, separation, and ability at the catch point. But coaches also need to care about whether a receiver is getting to his landmarks on schedule, reading zones well, securing the ball to the ground, blocking, and selling clear-out routes. On the negative end, coaches care about whether receivers are giving up on routes or alligator arming the ball in traffic.
On-field reliability sets a floor for route participation, and it's non-negotiable for star fantasy assets. Owners who ignore reliability will always be confused about why their players are being blocked by some evil coach who hates fantasy football.
Somebody like Jermaine Burton is much more talented than Andrei Iosivas, but the reasons Burton couldn’t see the field are apparent in practices, and those reasons blocked him from earning a role on Sundays.
While that’s an obvious example, it also explains the continued failure of each Kyle Pitts hype season, or why Adonai Mitchell, Ja’Lynn Polk, and Javon Baker failed to walk into starting roles that appeared to have mediocre-or-worse competition.
In the current cycle, I faded the following prospects due to reliability concerns:
Luther Burden
Not only does Burden not have a good feel for zone coverage, but I’ve also seen him cause a game-losing interception on a “gotta have it” down for Missouri by rounding an out route and taking it too deep.
Ben Johnson is essentially guaranteed to get Burden designed touches in space, but we can't build the whole plane out of designed touches. If Burden isn't reliable down-to-down, he won't get enough snaps to pay you off in fantasy.
For refrence, Burden has an ADP of 15 on the Dynasty Pulse expert consensus rankings.
Jaylin Noel
Noel tends to take his in-breaking routes too deep and lets defensive backs undercut his route. He also drops a lot of balls over the middle of the field, once even causing a bobbled interception.
It’s going to be really hard to win trust in a crowded room unless he improves dramatically in both of these facets, although to be fair that is attainable for him.
Jalen Royals
Royals has a preternatual ability to bait his own quarterback into bad decisions by playing Russian roulette against zone coverage. At no point watching his tape could I predict whether he was going to sit in a hole in the zone, start jogging juuust before uncovering against an underneath defender, or run his way right out of an open window.
If that’s not cleaned up in training camp, Pat Mahomes is not going to tolerate playing this game with him.
Hands
One last thing that’s slightly misunderstood regarding reliability is hands and drop rate. First off, we need to acknowledge that there is a difference between consistent hands and great catch point ability. They’re separate talents, but both tend to be lumped into "hands". The former sets a floor and the latter pushes up a ceiling, and wide receivers can have one but not the other.
Players who don’t make mistakes get to stay on the field. Players who make plays for their quarterback become WR1s. The lack of reliabilty explains why somebody like Dontayvion Wicks failed to make good on his opportunities last season, while the lack of play-making hands explains why Zay Flowers isn’t a difference-maker in dynasty. He leaves plays on the field.
This year, I’m fading Jaylin Noel, Elic Ayomanor, and Savion Williams due to lack of reliability. I was ready to fade Jayden Higgins for lacking that play-making ability at the catch point, but I actually love him in Houston where they already have Nico Collins to do that work on the outside. You're free to draft Higgins with my blessing.
You’ve likely seen on Twitter that drop rate is not a stable metric at the NFL level. In other words, a player with a high drop rate one year shouldn’t necessarily be expected to have a high drop rate the next year.
While that’s true to a degree, I argue that drop rate matters significantly for rookie wide receivers. Not just in games but in training camp and practices too. These two truths can coexist through the lens of survivorship bias.
Suppose somebody performed an analysis with hundreds of wide receiver seasons in it and compared the correlation coefficient between a given season’s drop rate and the next season’s drop rate, and found it to not be statistically significant.
This sample by definition contains only those players who met target minimums in two consecutive years. If some day 2 or day 3 rookie wide receiver failed to see the field because he was a menace catching the ball, he likely won’t get enough chances to hit those target minimums.
So, drop rate is a filter that prevents young receivers from establishing themselves. Whereas for a veteran who posts a high drop rate later in their career, it's more likely to be a fluke. One exception could be elite target-earners, i.e. the Diontae Johnson route to fantasy relevance. This is probably the path Wicks will have to take, but it requires exceptional production outside of the drops.
Ability Against Zone Coverage
When we scout, and when we discuss prospects, we tend to focus way more about their ability to uncover and beat man coverage, but we lose sight of the importance of beating zone coverage.
Don’t get me wrong, to have a star receiver, you need somebody who can perform against man coverage, but when we don’t even bother to think about ability against zone coverage, we become less accurate drafters.
The NFL is trending more and more towards playing primarily zone coverage, with defenses tending to employ it more often than man coverage. Additionally, as more and more quarterbacks with elite rushing ability enter the league, we’ll get more and more teams that consistently face a preponderance of zone coverage.
Ability against zone is a big factor in favor of Tetairoa McMillan and Travis Hunter, who I thought showed good awareness of where to sit and where to keep working to find the next window. I also liked Emeka Egbuka and Jack Bech in this regard.
Players I thought showed worse zone instincts were Luther Burden and Jalen Royals.
Proactive Athleticism
Athleticism and movement ability is crucial to the wide receiver position, but I think NFL combine measurements make us less accurate at drafting, not more. There’s a crucial difference between on-field proactive athleticism, which combines strategy, decision-making, footwork, and balance, to a simple drill that captures a very specific sliver of athletic performance.
The list of top ten combine 40s ever is desolate and bleak. Teams routinely overdraft measured speed, and in general I prefer relying on how well a wide receiver moves on tape instead of relying on their RAS score or general combine measurements.
This year, I worry about Matthew Golden, considering the Packers seem to have put stock in his measured 40 time when drafting him, judging by their post-draft press conference. If that implies they plan to give him a heavy dose of go balls and shoehorn him into an overwhelmingly vertical route tree, he’ll be a fade. If they let him run horizontally breaking routes, I think he has a chance to be a great asset.
In general, the point to make here is that combine drills don’t measure proactive athleticism very well, and this form of athleticism is much more important to the wide receiver position. You can generally tell on tape when a wide receiver is easy to shadow vs when they can force the issue and create advantages.
This is your PSA not to fade Tetairoa McMillan based on 40 time. I’m also going to be listening very carefully to the Titans offseason chatter and try to roster Xavier Restrepo if it sounds like he’s getting a serious chance from the coaching staff.
Conclusion
The current dynasty landscape undervalues reliability and ability against zone coverage, while placing a huge premium on raw talent. While you can't have a star asset without talent, you can get an edge by keeping the reliability component of ability in mind.
Most importantly, avoid losing sight of ability during the ebb and flow of offseason target competition, and be willing to update your priors quickly when a player surprises you with efficient target-earning.
We have finally broken ground on how to evaluate the wide receiver position for our dynasty rookie drafts. While there is more theory to come, the first step was to develop a holistic and complete understanding of what talent/ability actually means at the wide receiver position. With this more nuanced understanding, we can evaluate prospect ability more accurately in our dynasty rookie drafts.