875: An Elite Wide Receiver Class

JJ Zachariason (0:02)

This is the Late Round Podcast with your host, JJ.

What's up, everyone? It's JJ Zachariason in this episode 875 of The Late-Round Fantasy Football Podcast, sponsored by Underdog Fantasy.

Thanks for tuning in.

This year's wide receiver class, it's getting a lot of hype. At this moment over on nflmockdraftdatabase.com, there are 19 wide receivers slotted to go in the top 100 of the NFL draft. Since 2011, no NFL draft has seen more than 16 wideouts go in the top 100 There are so many players to talk about, so many good players. I've given you my takes on plenty of them, so like other prospect shows that I've been doing, I brought on a very special guest to talk about this wide receiver class. And that guest is none other than Matt Harmon. Aside from what he does over at Yahoo, Harmon's known for his amazing work with Reception Perception, where he charts wide receivers and lets us know how well the wide receiver's performing even when he's not targeted. Matt and I sat down for over an hour and really dug through this class. We talked about the high-end guys that everyone loves, but we spent more time on the question marks that exist with a lot of the second and third tier receivers in the class. I really think you're gonna dig the conversation. Now, before we get into the discussion, I want to remind you guys to check out Underdog Fantasy. A lot of the stuff that you'll hear between Matt and me, you can use that information to your advantage with your best ball drafts. And there are best ball drafts going on right now over on Underdog. With best ball, you can get a draft done in minutes, or you can opt to do a slow draft where you get an eight-hour clock. Once you finish the draft, there's nothing more to do. There's no team management, no waivers, no lineup setting. Your lineup is optimized for you each week during the season based on performance.

Because there's a lot of cool strategy involved, I'm planning on doing more best ball content this summer on this show so we can all learn together. So make sure you're signed up now for when that content hits. Just head to underdogfantasy.com or download the Underdog app. And when you sign up, use promo code LATEROUND for a $100 deposit bonus. That's promo code LATEROUND.

Mr. Harmon, it's good to chat with you once again. You were on this show last year to talk wide receivers with last year's class. This year's class better than last year's, I'd say, in total. You do a lot of charting with wide receivers, whether they're in the NFL or with prospecting. And you do this through what you've deemed and called reception perception. For the people who have not consumed that, have no idea what reception perception is all about, which I'm sure there's not many of them, but can you sort of talk about why you started it and what it's all about?

Matt Harmon (2:55)

Well, yes, Mr. Zachariason, I can do that. Thank you for having me on your show and asking such a great question to start. Yeah, so reception perception for people who are not familiar is the methodology that I came up with about 10 years ago now, just a little over 10 years ago, to evaluate the wide receiver position. And the reason I started it was that I wanted to answer the biggest question that I had about football, which is, to me, when watching games on Sunday, like, what the hell are these wide receivers doing when they run off the screen? Because, you know, as fantasy players, we definitely know this, that a wide receiver is lucky to get 8 to 10 targets in a game. Like, that's a good number. You feel pretty good about that. JJ's usage thread on Twitter on Sunday night, they get 8 to 10 targets, they're probably going to have some pretty good little marks there in the usage thread.

But we know that they're also running, you know, 30 plus routes a game sometime. You know, they're playing 60 plus snaps. So to me, because wide receiver production is so inherently dependent and affected by other variables, I wanted to find a way to go in and essentially give the guys credit for and evaluate those other snaps when they're not targeted. And really the biggest thing to me was I wanted to try to quantify the qualitative reality of route running and getting open and really assignment execution if we're getting right down to it.

So that's what Reception Perception is. I go in over an eight-game sample for NFL players and eight games when enough film is available for college players as well.