Brian Thomas Jr. has been one of the sole bright spots for the Jacksonville Jaguars through four weeks of the 2024 season. Thomas’ 57.8 PPR points currently leads all Jacksonville players, including quarterback Trevor Lawrence.

When looking at Thomas’ fit in the Jaguars’ offense after the draft, his deep-threat skill set looked to be a good fit with Lawrence’s propensity to throw the ball down the field. But after only one season of elite production in a powerhouse LSU offense, it was fair to wonder how long it would take Thomas to acclimate to the NFL, or if he ever would at all.

After four weeks of his rookie season, it seems like Thomas has given us our answer.

In Week 4, we saw Thomas’ best game to date. And it could have been even bigger if Lawrence had not missed him for a 33-yard touchdown on his second target of the game.

Not just a one-hit wonder, Thomas has also proved fairly consistent, scoring double-digit PPR points in every game except one. And even then, he only failed to clear the threshold by 0.2 points.

While this may not seem overly impressive, it has been enough to land him on the borderline of WR1 territory as the PPR WR14 through four games. Not only has he been highly involved in the Jacksonville offense, but Thomas is also making the most of his opportunities; currently ranking as the WR13 in FPOE per game.

Thomas is also functioning as more than a deep threat, as he is getting an even distribution of targets at all depths of the field.

In most seasons, Thomas’ performance would be garnering more attention. But 2024 is proving to be unlike most years.

Thomas’ LSU teammate Malik Nabers has claimed the overall PPR WR1 spot just four games into his NFL career. Marvin Harrison Jr. is only one spot ahead of Thomas as the PPR WR13, but his NFL pedigree and draft status cast a large shadow. Brock Bowers’ profile proved to be more in line with that of a first-round WR prospect in college, and he has become 2024’s overall TE3 in a historically bad year at the position.

After looking at Thomas’ hot start, will he be able to attract the attention he deserves and finish the season in the top tier of this year’s rookie class?

So far this season, Thomas ranks in the top three of all rookie receivers (WRs and TEs) in essentially every meaningful receiving metric.^[1]The table only features rookie receivers with seven targets or more. A few small-sample outliers pushed Thomas down a few spots in yards per route and yards per target before the list was filtered.

If we take Thomas’ current average of 14.4 PPR points per game and project it across a 17-game season, Thomas would finish with 244.8 PPR points for the season. For reference, that would have ranked as the seventh-best finish of any rookie receiver from the past 10 years.

The fact that two other rookie receivers are currently outscoring Thomas is just a testament to how special this rookie class truly is.

Before we let the Thomas hype get out of hand, we should address the current volatility of the Jaguars franchise as a whole. Every week that the Jaguars fail to win, Doug Pederson gets one step closer to losing his job. While Lawrence has been good enough to help get Thomas to this point, he currently looks further away than ever to delivering on the “generational prospect” label he was given coming out of college. Last year’s overall PPR TE2 Evan Engram has not played since Week 1. The Jaguars’ presumed WR1 heading into the season — Christian Kirk — has started to come on over the past two weeks after face planting in the first two weeks of the season.

Overall, there are currently a lot of storylines to follow in Jacksonville. If most of them continue on their natural trajectories, they will have a negative impact on Thomas’ outlook for the rest of the season. With that being said, even if Thomas is only able to average 10 PPR points per game across the rest of the season, he will still come awfully close to scoring 200 PPR points. For context, that would put him in line with the rookie seasons of players like Garrett Wilson, Amon-Ra St. Brown, and Deebo Samuel.

After leveling the field a bit by looking at TE-premium ADP, it is not a stretch to say that Thomas could end up as the best value of the top-four rookie performers to this point. Due to his name value not holding the cache of the other three, it is very probable that he will continue to be viewed as a lesser commodity in fantasy. While Thomas should certainly be below Nabers and Bowers in TE-premium formats, he may be closer in talent to Harrison than many people are willing to admit.

While Thomas can’t come close to touching Harrison’s aggregate production from college, it is fair to question if Harrison would’ve been able to match up with Thomas athletically if the former would have participated at the combine.

Despite his first-round draft capital, it is safe to say that most people would not have predicted Thomas to start out his NFL career this well. The idea that he may be undervalued in comparison to some of the bigger names in this year’s rookie class is something that fantasy managers should be looking to take advantage of in both redraft and dynasty. And it is probably best to act now, before everyone else starts to realize how special Thomas’ start truly has been.