In The Wrong Read, No. 76, Blair Andrews dives into the definition of a breakout season for collegiate WR prospects and suggests a path for improving the metric.
We’ve long defined a wide receiver breakout as a player’s first season in which they achieve a 30% dominator rating. While that has proven to be among the most accurate and discerning measures of college breakouts, it’s not without some flaws. The biggest problem is that it fails to capture some obvious cases.
For example, Jaxon Smith-Njigba — the No. 2 player in Shawn’s newly updated rookie rankings — has never had a season with at least a 30% dominator rating, meaning he has technically never broken out according to our favorite definition of what a college breakout is. That’s right: a player who gained more than 1,600 yards in the Big Ten when he was just a 19-year-old true sophomore and was sharing the field with two NFL first-rounders has never broken out.
You can see how sticking to a 30% dominator rating threshold for WR breakouts looks a little absurd here.
Is Smith-Njigba an Outlier?
Cases in which a player managed at least 100 receiving yards per game yet did not have a 30% dominator rating are not even that rare. It’s happened 34 times since 2011. Some of the other players who’ve authored such seasons include Justin Jefferson, A.J. Brown, Marquise Brown, and Jaylen Waddle. Cases like Waddle’s are particularly interesting, because he, like Smith-Njigba, “never broke out.” His 26% dominator rating in his final college season wasn’t enough to meet our threshold, despite the fact that he shared the field with a Heisman winner who was also drafted in the first round.
We can make some excuses for Waddle because he only played five games that year, but we already see the issue here. Dominator rating is not the best at finding talented players who played alongside other talented players in college. Jefferson shared the field with Ja’Marr Chase. A.J. Brown shared the field with D.K. Metcalf. Marquise Brown (who also “never broke out”) shared the field with CeeDee Lamb.
Lamb himself did not break out until after Brown was drafted, despite amassing 1,155 receiving yards in Brown’s final season at Oklahoma. Indeed, nearly 160 players have had 1,000-yard seasons that did not count as breakouts according to the dominator rating method. That list includes Brandin Cooks, Mike Evans, Jerry Jeudy (twice), Amon-Ra St. Brown, Tee Higgins, Garrett Wilson, and DeVonta Smith.
Of course, there are a lot of players who’ve had 1,000 yard seasons that were not also 30% dominator seasons who are not household names in the NFL. Of the 150 or so other names on that list, perhaps about 30 have had some level of fantasy-relevant NFL success. In other words, it’s probably too easy to get 1,000 receiving yards in a season, which is exactly what dominator rating and market share metrics are trying to correct for. And if your offense is prolific enough, it’s also not necessarily a huge positive signal to gain at least 100 yards per game. (Nearly all the fantasy-relevant players mentioned above also met at least one other breakout metric detailed in this article. The exception is Jefferson’s 2019 season. But he was sharing the field with Chase, and had already broken out in 2018.) However, perhaps there are other ways to correct for overall team passing volume.
