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Rookie Wide Receivers

The 2010 National Football League Draft took place once again at the Radio City Music Hall in New York City in late April. Year after year, once the draft is completed, analysts try and determine who were the winners and losers on draft day. Once training camps begin, fantasy sites and fantasy football managers try to predict what impact newly drafted rookies will have on their new teams. I was curious to find out whether rookie players were generally overrated or underrated by the average manager in fantasy drafts. In this article, I will compare the average draft position for rookie wide receivers to their end of year ranking in fantasy points (in a points per reception scoring system) in order to determine whether or not rookie wide receivers are worth drafting.

For this analysis I decided to look at wide receivers drafted in the first four rounds of the NFL Draft since the year 2000. To be part of this analysis, the wide receivers had to have been drafted in at least 5% of fantasy drafts according to data from myfantasyleague.com and had to play in at least one NFL game in their rookie season. This left us with 78 rookie wide receivers to analyze. As mentioned in my introduction, in order to determine if rookie wide receivers are generally overrated or underrated, I am comparing their ranking amongst other wide receivers before the season (average draft position) and after the season (fantasy points). Of the 78 rookie wide receivers since 2000, 33 of them performed better than their average draft position which is equal to 42.3%. On the other hand, 40.2% of the non-rookie wide receivers performed better than their average draft position since 2000. As you can see, by drafting a rookie wide receiver, your chances to make a good pick are 2.1% higher than by drafting a non-rookie wide receiver, a pretty negligible margin.

It is evident that players drafted later in fantasy drafts are more likely to improve than players drafted early because they have more room to improve. One of the problems with the data presented above is that the average draft position of rookie wide receivers is 61.7 while the average draft position for non-rookie wide receivers is 42.3. Therefore, instead of comparing the rookie wide receivers with all wide receivers, I thought it would be fairer to compare them with only the wide receivers that were between the 39th and 85th wide receivers taken in fantasy drafts. This ensured that the average of the average draft positions for both groups would be around 62. By choosing only that group of wide receivers, the percentage of non-rookie wide receivers that improved increased from the original 40.2% to 46.5%. This means that your chances of making a good pick in your fantasy draft decrease by 4.2% when you choose a rookie wide receiver over a non-rookie wide receiver, not a huge difference.