You should know the deal now. WR is the position where talent dictates production perhaps more than any other, and as such I’m very willing to take stands. Fortunately, I’ve had some success with those stands over the past few years.
Here are links to the other positions:
Full rankings and tiers (link at bottom behind the paywall)
For anyone unsure, I’ll group these tiers a couple of different ways.
If I think a tier break is pretty minor, I’ll use a 1a/1b type of nomenclature.
The bigger element is when there is a cliff at the position. There’s perhaps no more important position to discuss this element than at RB, as we look to where the potentially elite names run out and the Dead Zone begins. In those instances, I’ll use this:
As for targets and fades, I will bold all players I consider targets, and italicize all those I consider fades. The goal of the rankings is to have the targets ahead of ADP and fades behind ADP, but ADP varies wildly — especially on some of the sites where home leagues are often played — so know that in a lot of cases I would probably adjust the fades down if their ADPs are lower on your site and the targets up if they are higher. In other words, it’s OK to be higher on the targets than my rankings, and it’s perfectly fine to pass on a fade if he’s the best available in my rankings at a point in your draft.
If you’re looking for more reasoning on a player, I likely discussed them in the Offseason Stealing Signals pieces you can find in the full archive at bengretch.substack.com.
Let’s get to the WR Tiers.
Tier 1
1. Cooper Kupp
2. Justin Jefferson
3. Ja’Marr Chase
Jefferson is the name everyone is in love with, and my ranking here which has Kupp higher and includes Chase — who for many seems not to be in this group — almost annoys me in that it seems kind of light relative to the market on the Jefferson love. But I’m very in on Jefferson.
So why Kupp No. 1? Honestly, the best argument is probably just raw points from 2021, if we really cut right down to it. Kupp posted 25.7 PPR points per game, and then over four playoff games, as I’ve mentioned, was even better. Jefferson was at 19.5, which is very strong, but it emphasizes there was a gap here that needed to be bridged. I very much think that’s in the range of outcomes, but I also think after a summer of taking these guys back to back, that was lost a little bit, and then the Matthew Stafford elbow issue was just sort of the straw that broke the camel’s back where it seemed like there needed to be a reaction with Kupp.
Unless Stafford winds up missing chunks of time, I’m not real concerned about the impact on Kupp, who has the lower aDOT and really only needs to hit on the occasional splash play rather than be reliant on his QB to be able to push the ball vertically consistently. It might even solidify his huge target share and TPRR gains if the team needs to do more of the designed stuff that, again, for 21 games defenses could not (or perhaps would not, because it was a lesser of two evils) stop.
Still, I have no problem with taking Jefferson as the No. 1 WR. Kupp is due to regress; it’s just a question of how much, and I’m basically saying that it needs to be quite a bit and also Jefferson needs to realize that step forward for Jefferson to really bury Kupp, whereas it feels easier to see the path for Kupp burying Jefferson, because that more or less just happened.
As for Chase, I just went back to my Offseason Stealing Signals writeup of the Bengals to link to something I know I wrote, and found that as I shuffled the argument, I somehow pulled that section. I don’t even have Chase’s name bolded in that section, which is because I pulled something out and then didn’t include it again. I did hit on it on Stealing Bananas at one point, but it’s a continuation of the argument I made there about the Bengals’ offense being more aggressive from Week 5 through the Super Bowl, a span of 17 games, where if we control for the team starting run-heavy due to Burrow’s injury, they look way more aggressive. Then there was this today:
That’s more or less what I’ve been arguing might happen with the Bengals, and that’s the quote I’ve been waiting to hear. As for Chase, he only played five snaps in Week 18 (amazingly saw four targets on those five snaps!), so if we pull that game out and only look at his final 17 games played of his rookie year, which again controls for that first month of slow-paced games I wrote about in Offseason Stealing Signals, we have 143 targets for Chase instead of the 128 he had in the regular season (which I wrote was noise). The point I wanted to emphasize there is that was his rookie season, and it’s not some paced figure, but an actual concrete number from his final 17 games; there’s room for growth, and his upside if Tee Higgins were to miss time is astronomical. I legitimately can’t believe I forgot to include that bullet on Chase. The whole thing was an argument that he absolutely belongs in this tier.