Blair Andrews pens Part 3 in a series helping you build super teams through a better understanding of wide receiver breakouts.
Since the early days at RotoViz we’ve spilled plenty of words explaining why you wanted to take a fast and furious approach to WR drafting. But we’ve spent even more time helping you find the right WRs. Of course, the NFL continues to evolve and fantasy managers continue to adapt. How should we be attacking our leagues in 2024? That’s the focus of this series on all things wide receiver.
In Part 1 we looked at WR breakouts by experience and found that Year 2 remains the key season we want to be targeting. In Part 2, we broke out these results by age and discovered that although Year 2 breakouts happen at all ages, we still prefer younger WRs over those who are older. There are ways to get even more specific, but before doing so, it’s worth reminding ourselves why we care so much about WR breakouts.
The Top Wide Receiver Seasons
The top WR seasons by FFPC Best Ball win rate since 2017 have overwhelmingly come from outside the initial rounds. Only one season in the top 10 was by a player drafted in the first round, and only three were by players drafted before Round 5.
| Player | Position | Season | ADP | PPR | Win Rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cooper Kupp | WR | 2021 | 53.3 | 412.9 | 31.1% |
| Juju Smith-Schuster | WR | 2018 | 47.3 | 283.5 | 22.5% |
| Tyreek Hill | WR | 2018 | 30.6 | 305.4 | 20.3% |
| D.J. Chark | WR | 2019 | 285.4 | 218.4 | 19.9% |
| Puka Nacua | WR | 2023 | 296.1 | 284.4 | 19.6% |
| Stefon Diggs | WR | 2020 | 66.4 | 314 | 19.5% |
| CeeDee Lamb | WR | 2023 | 11.2 | 371.7 | 19.3% |
| Tyler Boyd | WR | 2018 | 310.9 | 221.1 | 18.8% |
| Deebo Samuel | WR | 2021 | 91.7 | 314 | 18.6% |
| Justin Jefferson | WR | 2020 | 167.9 | 251.9 | 18.5% |
If you ask why so many of these players were undervalued, it’s largely because they had never produced these types of seasons before. In all but four of these instances, it was the receiver’s first season above 200 PPR points. Cooper Kupp, Tyreek Hill, Stefon Diggs, and CeeDee Lamb had all broken out prior to the seasons above. But in every other case, drafters didn’t have any player-specific track record to give them confidence these players could reach these heights. Even in the cases of Kupp (coming off a down season and getting a new quarterback) and Diggs (changing teams), there were significant question marks.
Should We Have Seen This Coming?
As a site, we were higher than consensus on many of these players before their top-10 win-rate season. It’s possible we were just lucky, but there were also many clues for those who were paying attention. Here are the seasons immediately prior to those above (minus the rookies):
| Player | Season | Age | reEP | reFPOE | PPR |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cooper Kupp | 2020 | 27 | 202.7 | 4.2 | 210.2 |
| Juju Smith-Schuster | 2017 | 21 | 132.4 | 59.3 | 191.7 |
| Tyreek Hill | 2017 | 23 | 166.9 | 68.4 | 239.2 |
| D.J. Chark | 2018 | 22 | 51.8 | -20.4 | 31.4 |
| Stefon Diggs | 2019 | 26 | 146.4 | 65.1 | 217.6 |
| CeeDee Lamb | 2022 | 23 | 237.9 | 42.8 | 285.4 |
| Tyler Boyd | 2017 | 23 | 52.1 | 4.4 | 56.5 |
| Deebo Samuel | 2020 | 24 | 70.5 | 7.6 | 80.7 |
All but one of the previous seasons featured positive efficiency in the form of fantasy points over expectation — in many cases it was extremely positive. While it’s the case that many of the previous seasons counted as breakouts, it was possible to see secondary breakouts on the horizon.
