You’ve heard me talk about the WR Window before. It doesn’t just impact these tiers, it impacts everything I’ve written about strategy.
In part because of the way stats are accrued in this sport, and perhaps setting aside quarterback (perhaps not) — wide receiver is the position where fantasy scoring is most driven by actual player talent (relative to role/situation). It’s why the most impactful thing I think I can do every offseason is the full team-by-team TPRR reports of the individual players’ peripherals; the ways that RB rankings evolve over an offseason — especially outside of the young, transcendent talents — are going to be heavily impacted by team approach, offseason moves, etc. Situation and expected role. But at WR, so much of what I wrote in those early April pieces is still heavily weighing into the August rank of those players.
It’s also the position where I focus more on the “long view,” which is to say really trying to understand a player’s past dating back before 2022, potentially several years. In many cases, that means going back to college to understand what a player’s true skill level might be, and then certainly making adjustments for anything that’s seemed to evolve in their career, maybe health-wise, and just accounting for where they are now.
Another way to do that, though, is to go forward. One of the ways I employ “long view” thinking is to sort of use that available past data to also think through the way we might look back on a player several years from now. It’s very similar to how Shawn Siegele and I like to predict the first and second rounds of 2024 fantasy drafts, something we did on two recent episodes of Stealing Bananas.
One guy I’ve written about being high on and have been asked to defend that stance multiple times this offseason is Chris Godwin. Godwin’s one that I liked as an underrated prospect years ago (throwback RotoViz link incoming), and he delivered on that promise early in his career with two strong seasons (2.03 and 1.87 YPRR) as a bit of a downfield weapon at aDOTs of 13.2 and 12.8 yards in part-time roles as a rookie and sophomore. Then over the next two years, he posted YPRRs of 2.24 and 1.94, while his aDOT settled in at 10.3 and 10.1 those seasons and he build out more overall volume. In the 2019 season, he was WR2 overall in PPR points per game, and in the years since he’s been WR15, WR7, and WR18.
Now, his efficiency hasn’t been as strong the past two years, as he’s worked as more of an underneath weapon for an aging Tom Brady. As his aDOTs fell to 7.6 and then a very low 6.0 last year, so too did his after-the-target yardage efficiency like YPT. And yet, he offset this lower role with more volume on a per-route basis (TPRR) and his YPRRs of 1.97 and 1.76 the past two years at those depths aren’t at all bad.
And then there’s the big context that in 2022, his career-low 1.76 and career-low aDOT and all of those things were impacted by him coming off an ACL tear where he was a question mark for Week 1 even into last August, but he played through it at less than 100% — I’ve referenced this before but he himself referenced finally feeling 100% in the reporting around their Week 10 game in Munich, and in fact from that game through the end of the year (playoff game included), his YPRR was up at 1.90, and he averaged 8.25 catches and 79 yards per game over 8 games, a 140-catch, nearly 1,350-yard pace. Now he’s that crucial second year removed from the ACL tear.
There’s a reason this guy was a Round 1 or Round 2 dynasty startup pick at one point of his career, as well, and while his circumstances have certainly gotten a little sketchier with Baker Mayfield at the controls — and while the Buccaneers’ offense might not score enough points for Godwin to be much more than a target compiler — I continue to believe the discount we get in 2023 drafts more than accounts for the situational concerns for a player I also believe would be going in the second round with a good QB and probably the fourth with even a decent one. That we can take him in the sixth makes him a small miss, big hit player, where the situational issues are baked in and there’s a chance this is a guy we look back on after his career and just acknowledge he was a really good WR who won at all depths, and the 2022 year was one down rehab year before he continued that stellar career. He’s only 27 years old until February, by the way, as one of those guys who started his NFL career at 21.
Does that mean I’m all in on Godwin? No. He’s just a great launching point for how I do my WR analyses. I’ve had Godwin compared to a variety of different players, and been asked to make a case for Godwin against that player with a focus on Godwin’s current offensive expectations. But almost always, the defense would be the “long view” things I just wrote about, and that the other WR doesn’t have as strong of a “long view” in the same way.
Now that “long view” doesn’t require six years of NFL data to build. In fact, for most young WRs, it’s heavily dependent on what they did at the collegiate level, and then it’s dependent on me going into the future and looking at where I expect them to be in 2025, and thinking through what kind of production in 2023 and 2024 would have gotten them there. If you want to crystallize why you should target Jaxon Smith-Njigba, consider the spots Shawn and I put him in our 2024 first and second rounds, and then consider what type of production we’d need to see at some point in 2023 to get him there. We’re talking about “competing for Offensive Rookie of the Year” production, or — short of that — at least a second half that is top 10 among all fantasy WRs, and that type of production necessitates that the 12 personnel and routes FUD will be looked back on as overblown.
You’re entitled to be lower on JSN from a “long view” perspective, but that gets to a broader point about youth and upside curves, and how we’re trying to attack players that can crush ADP, because those ones win leagues. And overwhelmingly, the ADP crushers at all positions are the ones where the market didn’t know what they were yet — first-time breakouts where their eventual long-term talent wasn’t baked into their price, because of stuff like 12 personnel concerns that becomes a footnote in that player’s career as people look back and go, “In hindsight, that was kind of silly to think would be an issue for a guy this good.”
I talked through this a little bit as it related to Amon-Ra St. Brown and Garrett Wilson, and how I have them ranked ahead of Stefon Diggs, A.J. Brown, and CeeDee Lamb in last night’s Signals Gold livestream. I’m dropping the link here sort of as a preview to what that service is, as I’ve had several people ask for clarification, but in the future these will stay hidden for access for Signals Gold members only. A big thank you to the few people who showed up to this first trial run, and we got through everyone’s questions in about 90 minutes. We’ll do one more (or maybe two if I can find the time) streams here before Week 1, and then it will pivot to a weekly in-season Q&A livestream on Tuesday nights, giving you guys a chance to ask direct questions after Stealing Signals goes live but before your waivers run. Again, to access that, you need to be a Signals Gold member, which is $149 annually and will give you access to all of the benefits of a normal subscription plus all of those streams through the end of the season.
[If you do want to upgrade to Signals Gold, you actually have to shoot me a note and I have to manually issue a pro-rated refund on your current subscription so you can re-subscribe to Gold, since there’s not currently an easy upgrade function in Substack on your end.]
Alright, let’s get to the WR Tiers! If you need a walkthrough of how the tiers work, there’s more in the intro to the RB Tiers piece, but the Cliff’s Notes are:
Bold means the player is a target, while italics means he’s a fade
The “Big Tier Break” denotes areas where there is a legit cliff
I’ll also use nomenclature like 1a and 1b to denote when there are mini-tier breaks
You can also find the QB Tiers breakdown here, the TE Tiers here, and the full rankings document here.
Let’s do it.
Tier 1
1. Justin Jefferson
2. Ja’Marr Chase
3. Cooper Kupp
4. Tyreek Hill
I finally decided to bold these guys as “Targets,” even after saying I didn’t really feel the need to. For me, Hill is a solid fourth behind the other three, but he still belongs in this tier and is still a target once the other three go off. His volume in 2022 was astronomical — he lapped the field in wTPRR, for example — but I have a bit more concern about the stability of his unique first-year production in a new offense.
I’ve written about the other three at length, and health aside, I don’t have the same type of concern. And while I’ve had people argue Hill’s ceiling is just as high or higher than anyone in this group, I’m not sure I buy that element either. One thing I’ve tried to talk through in the past is slotting past production into a range of outcomes, i.e. we tend to think of everyone’s 2022 production as the 50th percentile of a range where there was equal potential for more or less, even after we talk about the floor and ceiling stuff in advance of the season and often the season breaks such that it was a clear ceiling-type year.
For Hill, his 2022 was probably somewhere in the 75th or 80th percentile range. That’s not a bad thing, and it shifts his range up, but I do think there’s more statistical room to move back than keep pushing it. Kupp by comparison has a ridiculous 30-game stretch with Matthew Stafford, Jefferson’s numbers are absurd, and Chase is one where it’s a scary thought but he’s probably not yet hit the 50th percentile (and definitely not the 80th) of his range.