1075: The Death of the Fantasy Football WR2

**JJ Zachariason** (0:02)
This is The Late-Round Podcast with your host, JJ Zachariason.
What's up, everyone? It's JJ Zachariason. In this episode 1075 of The Late-Round Fantasy Football Podcast, thanks for tuning in. First off, it feels good to be back. Feels great to be back. Second, wide receivers really sucked in fantasy football this past year. Now, I'll be doing my yearly episodes on the things I got right and the things that I got wrong next. But I need to start this offseason with an episode on what I think was the biggest storyline in fantasy football this past year. Wide receivers were really, really bad. It's something that I brought up on the show periodically during the season. When I'd make my weekly rankings, wide receiver was always borderline depressing. There were like eight good players who we cared about, and then there were just a giant group of guys of like 20 to 30 of them who could be mixed around. There wasn't much stability and predictability at the wide receiver position. And end of season data shows that too. In 2025, wide receivers in some scored the third fewest amount of PPR points that we've seen since 2011 Perhaps what's more interesting is that when you tally up all the running back wide receiver and tight end PPR points, wide receivers made up about 46% of that total. That was the lowest that we've seen since 2011 by a full percentage point. So when we look at the number of fantasy points scored by non-quarterbacks, wide receivers scored their lowest proportion of that pie in the last 15 years. You can see this on the individual level too. If you look only at relevant weeks, so you remove the final game of the season and you use a minimum threshold of seven games played, we had 13 wide receivers get to 14 or more PPR points per game in 2025 That was the second lowest mark since 2011 In 2024, that number was 26, double what we saw in 2025 When it came to 16 or more PPR points per game, we had eight of those players in 2025 In 2024, that number was 13, and since 2011, the average has been 12.4. It's not until you get to 18 plus and 20 plus points per game where you start to see some normalization. The super elite wide receivers existed in 2025 We had six of them with 18 PPR points per game or more. We had two of them with 20 or more points per game. So to put all of that another way, wide receivers didn't score a lot of fantasy points in total last year, but we did still have elite wide receivers in fantasy football. It was mostly that next group that really suffered. The obvious question now is why? There are a number of directions that we can go with that question. Were there more wide receiver injuries among the elite players, leaving less elite talent to score points? Did that next tier of wide receivers just not play very well? Did they just have a weird season from like a touchdown standpoint? Has something fundamentally changed with the way offenses are running in the NFL? Now, there might be at least something to that injury thing. If you look at top 10, top 20, and top 30 wide receivers by ADP, and focus only on relevant games, again, removing that final week of the season because a lot of players rest, the 2025 season was below average in games played in each of those groups when compared to all seasons since 2014 Top 10 wide receivers by ADP averaged 13.3 games played. That's driven largely by Malik neighbors being out. That was the fourth lowest mark out of those 12 seasons. When looking at top 20 wide receivers, it was actually the absolute lowest. That's because Tyreek Hill, Terry McLaurin, Garrett Wilson, and Mike Evans all missed significant time. And then among top 30 wide receivers were back to fourth lowest. And keep in mind, the NFL season has one extra game these days. So could injuries be playing some role in the low wide receiver scoring last year? Yeah, probably some role. When players of a decent caliber get hurt, inferior players are going to have to step in and fill that void. And that's not easy. Just look at the Jets when Garrett Wilson went down. But that's not everything. To me, the injury stuff is just a small piece of the puzzle. Let's shift back to production for a second. I already mentioned how wide receivers scored the lowest proportion of points that we've seen since at least 2011 They also saw their second lowest target share during that time frame. Why not set a target share just above 58% in 2025? In 2024, that number was two percentage points higher. The year prior, almost the exact same. We haven't had a target share this low at wide receiver since 2017 Naturally, a lower target share means fewer targets, fewer receptions, fewer yards, and fewer touchdowns. Just naturally. Touchdowns drive this game, and they can be volatile. So that's another place to look with this wide receiver season and how weird it was. And yes, wide receivers, they scored fewer touchdowns than normal in 2025 In fact, their 58% receiving touchdown share was almost nine percentage points lower than 2024's. That's objectively pretty nuts. Their touchdown share from 2025 was actually the absolute lowest that we've seen since 2011 And maybe there's a little favorable regression that's going to stem from this. The thing is, we know wide receiver targets were down. Their actual targets per touchdown rate wasn't that different from previous seasons. So how wide receivers were converting was actually pretty normal in 2025 They just weren't getting the looks that they usually got. The piece of information I haven't shared yet that brings a lot of this together and takes us down this new rabbit hole is how targets were generally distributed in 2025 Not just at wide receiver, but at running back and tight end too. Like I already said, we saw this low of a wide receiver target share back in 2017 The difference in 2017 though was that running backs were the ones who benefited most from that lack of wide receiver target share. For example, back in 2017 when wide receiver target share was the lowest that it's been since 2011, running back target shares were around 21.6%. That's the highest mark of any season since 2011 Meaning those wide receiver targets were basically going to the running back position. But this past year, running back target share was 18%.