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2010 Breakout Wide Receivers

Draft Recommendation: Wide receivers who have between two and five years of experience in the NFL with a low touchdown to reception ratio are the best breakout candidates.

The third year breakout wide receiver theory has become one of the most known theories by fantasy football players because of a few wide receivers who became dominant during their third season. Names like Braylon Edwards, Lee Evans and Javon Walker come to mind. Many fantasy football sites such as FFToolbox publish a list of third year wide receivers every year which leads fantasy players to draft them earlier than they should. In this article, I decided to look at all wide receivers in years two through five in order to see if there are actually more third year wide receivers that breakout than receivers in their second, fourth or fifth year. Moreover, I looked at the WRs that did breakout and tried to find criteria that differentiate WRs that do breakout from the ones that do not.

It is important to clarify that I am using the term breakout a little loosely and I still include WRs who might have had a strong rookie season, a difficult second season and a solid third season. The two criteria that a wide receiver had to respect to be considered a breakout wide receiver are:

-At least 150 points in a point per reception scoring system
-An increase of at least 40 points per 16 games or a 25% increase in points per 16 games.

I used different criteria depending on the years of experience of the wide receivers but in general, receivers that had a lower number of touchdowns and whose yards per reception average was not too high were more likely to breakout.

Here are the candidates for 2010 along with their percentage chance to breakout, assuming they play at least ten games and have 300 receiving yards:

Second year – 43.3%: Brandon Gibson, Brian Hartline, Jeremy Maclin, Johnny Knox, Julian Edelman, Kenny Britt, Louis Murphy, Michael Crabtree, Mike Thomas, Mohamed Massaquoi, Percy Harvin and Sammie Stroughter

Third year – 34.1%: Andre Caldwell, Danny Amendola, Devin Thomas, Donnie Avery, Earl Bennett, Eddie Royal, Jordy Nelson, Josh Morgan, Malcolm Kelly, Mario Manningham and Pierre Garcon

Fourth year – 37.8%: Calvin Johnson, Dwayne Bowe, James Jones, Mike Sims-Walker, Steve Breaston and Ted Ginn

Fifth year – 34.2%: David Anderson, Devin Hester, Greg Camarillo, Jason Avant and Maurice Stovall

You might have noticed that the third year wide receivers have the lowest breakout rate and that there is absolutely no reason to believe that the third year wide receiver breakout theory is a good one.

We mentioned in our article on the inconsistency of TD numbers that you will usually want to draft players that had a lower number of touchdowns because it is such an inconsistent statistic. Very few (if any) experts discuss the touchdown to reception ratio but I wanted to see if it could allow us to find breakout receivers. I decided to look at all receivers in their second, third, fourth and fifth year that played a somewhat important role with their team in the previous season but did not get in the end zone for any possible reason (low TD per reception ratio).

Since 1990, 95 receivers have respected our criteria and 41 of them had breakout seasons for a very impressive 43.2%. If you look at receivers who had a higher TD per reception than 0.06, they only broke out 26.2% of the time.

In 2010, there are 11 receivers that respect our criteria, Andre Caldwell, Brandon Gibson, Davone Bess, Devin Hester, Earl Bennett, Greg Camarillo, Josh Morgan, Julian Edelman, Michael Crabtree, Mike Thomas and Steve Breaston.

Unfortunately it is not enough to know which players might break out and it is also important to consider where the average manager will draft those players as well as the current situation for all of these players with their respective teams. All of this will be analyzed in a later article but for now you should keep in mind the names I mentioned and maybe bump them up a few spots in your rankings.

See the complete analysis