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Rookie Wide Receivers - Summary

Draft Recommendation: Rookie wide receivers who were drafted in the top 12 in the NFL Draft are very overvalued in fantasy drafts but the others drafted in the first two rounds are worth some consideration.

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 who played at least one game in their rookie year. 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, 46.5% of the non-rookie wide receivers with similar average draft positions performed better than expected. As you can see, by drafting a rookie wide receiver, your chances to make a good pick are 4.2% lower than by drafting a non-rookie wide receiver but this isn’t a huge difference considering our sample size.

Another interesting thing I noticed by looking at rookie wide receivers is that wide receivers drafted early in the NFL Draft performed worse compared to their average draft position than ones drafted later. Since 2000, there have been 15 wide receivers drafted in the first 12 picks of the first round and only two of them performed better than their average draft position in fantasy drafts. In the past few years, Calvin Johnson, Braylon Edwards, Reggie Williams, Troy Williamson, Ted Ginn, Darrius Heyward-Bey and Mike Williams are all top receivers who disappointed in their rookie season. As for the group of wide receivers that were drafted outside the top 12, the data is in their favor as they outperform non-rookies by 2.9%.  

The data presented in this article makes it quite evident that you should stay away from rookie wide receivers drafted in the top 12 picks but you won’t have to worry about this in 2010. Dez Bryant, Demaryius Thomas, Arrelious Benn and Golden Tate are all rookie wide receivers that are worth considering as they were drafted in the late first round or the second round. However, you should also keep in mind that none of the six receivers with an ADP in the top 35 performed better than their ADP so you will probably want to stay away from Dez Bryant. We have to admit that in past years we haven’t been very big on rookies but based on this data, Thomas, Benn and Tate could be good picks in 2010.

See the complete analysis