974: NFL Draft - Wide Receivers With Studly Profiles

JJ Zachariason (0:11)

What's up, everyone? It's JJ Zachariason. In this episode, 974 of The Late-Round Fantasy Football Podcast, sponsored by Underdog, thanks for tuning in. The NFL Combine starts this week, so it's the perfect time to finish up this two-part series on players who produced like studs in college. Last week, if you missed it, I talked all about running backs. Today, we're on to wide receiver. It may be better to start with that episode that I did last week. So if you haven't listened to it, hit pause, go listen, then come back to this one. But the idea for today's show is simple. I'm going to be looking at successful fantasy wide receivers in the NFL. I'm then going to look at their college production profiles to see what kind of traits that they shared in college. The final step then is to layer on top this year's draft class and see if anyone in this year's class had those production traits. I'll see if anyone from this year's class produced like a stud. Now, before getting to the data, remember that the Late-Round Prospect Guide is available for pre-order right now. This year's guide is even more information than ever before. You get info on everything that goes into my prospect and year two models. You get profiles for every running back and wide receiver at this year's combine. You get year two profiles for about 40 second year running backs and wide receivers. And I've added what I'm calling categories to the model this year that help categorize players into different buckets depending on their overall scores in both the ZAP model and the year two one. I'm putting a lot of effort into this. I think you guys will enjoy it. You can pre-order it right now over on lateround.com for $14.99. On March 10th when it launches, that price is going to go up by five bucks.

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So, what exactly is a successful fantasy football wide receiver? I asked that same question at running back, and I ended up defining a stud running back as someone who gave fantasy managers multiple seasons of 14 or more PPR points per game since 2011 With wide receiver, we're gonna up that just a bit to 15 PPR points per game. So wide receivers since 2011, who have scored 15 or more PPR points per game in multiple seasons. And to qualify for a season, that wide receiver had to have played at least eight games. Now, a lot of those wide receivers were drafted a long time ago. Not all of them are in my prospect database. That database includes every wide out who was either drafted or at the NFL combine since 2011 So after removing some of the older guys, I was left with 34 wide receivers, 34 stud wide receivers. Those guys range from Nico Collins to Cooper Cup to TY. Hilton to Randall Cobb. It captures the best of the best over the last decade plus. The NFL combine this year invited 49 wide receivers. It was 48, but Travis Hunter was a late ad as a wide receiver. He'll be there as a corner and a wide out. Now, what I'm looking to do is compare those 49 combine invites to our stud sample of 34 wide receivers. Which ones look like they produce like studs in college? To help me out, I'm going to only use the thing that goes into my prospect model, and that's breakout score. Now, I mentioned breakout score on last week's episode on running backs, and at wide receiver, the concept is exactly the same. And it uses the same metric, which is receiving yards per team pass attempt. That's pro rated for games played, minimum six games played in a season to qualify. Receiving yards per team pass attempt has become a generally accepted predictive metric for wide receivers in the prospecting space. It simply takes a player's receiving yards in a given season and divides that number by the number of pass attempts that his team had. This allows players to work on a similar playing field from the standpoint that a pass heavy offense isn't automatically creating the best production profiles. A player can be really good in receiving yards per team pass attempts while having lower raw production. And a player can have insane raw production, but be benefiting from a team that throws the ball a lot. Now, this is obviously not a flawless metric. No metric is. Quarterback play can influence this to some degree. Competition can influence it, but it does get signal. There is predictiveness to it, so we shouldn't ignore it. Now, receiving yards per team pass attempt, we'll look at that stand alone today. That'll be one of the two metrics that we use to compare our stud sample to the NFL combine invites. The metric that I care about more, though, is what I introduced before I started rambling, and that's breakout score. Breakout score is like an enhanced version of receiving yards per team pass attempt. It adjusts that number, that receiving yards per team pass attempt number, for two things, age and strength of opponent. If a player hits a high receiving yards per team pass attempt at a young age, that's telling us that that player is probably pretty good. And a wide receiver is going to have an easier time getting to a high receiving yards per team pass attempt rate when playing at a smaller program than say like Alabama or LSU. So program strength does matter. I take strength of schedule metrics from college football reference, and I layer that on top to help create breakout score. The wide receiver zap model, which is my wide receiver prospect model, it really only looks at breakout score. It also looks at rushing production, but breakout score is a key piece of the model. And it's because breakout score alone gets a lot of signal. It's pretty predictive. It's not everything. I've got things like teammates score and draft capital in the model as well. But it's a really important metric. Breakout score comes in the form of a raw number, but I translate it to to 100 in order to make it more consumable for you guys. So when I refer to it, I'll be referring to it on that scale. A score of obviously means that the player never broke out. His receiving yards per team pass attempt number was just way too low. A score of 100 means that profile is absolutely nuts. Today, we're going to focus heavily on that metric, all while throwing in some context and seeing what these combine invites are all about. Okay, so when looking at our stud sample group, the average breakout score was 82 The average best season receiving yards per team pass attempt rate was 3.03. So in their best season, they averaged a receiving yards per team pass attempt rate of 3.03. That probably doesn't make any sense to people who aren't prospecting through data. But anything over the 3 mark is usually really good. Both of those numbers are strong. I'm sure you'd expect that, because I'm not going to talk about metrics that don't matter. We would expect good fantasy wide receivers to score well in those metrics. Now, let's compare that to this year's class. This year's class has an average breakout score of about 46 So well below that 82 mark from our stud sample. And remember, the stud sample had a best season receiving yards per team pass attempt average of 3.03. This class is at 2.48.