Ultimate Fantasy Football Strategy - Breakout Wide Receivers

Breakout Wide Receivers
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As shown in the first part of this article, although second year wide receivers are not as hyped as third year wide receivers on draft day they do have a better chance of having a breakout season. To increase the 38.1% chance from the first part of the article, I added two more criterions which are that the player must have had five TDs or less instead of eight and he must have had at least 13 yards per reception in his first year in the NFL. Those two criterions eliminate 30 players of the 63 while only losing seven breakout candidates and they make the percentage jump from 38.1% to 51.5%. This is a great improvement for adding only two additional criterions. It is also interesting to note that only three of the 33 wide receivers had their performance decrease by 25% or more compared to the 17 that improved by 25% or more so drafting players that meet these criterions is a low risk and high reward strategy.

There are four wide receivers that meet those requirements for the 2008 season and they are Calvin Johnson, Dwayne Bowe, James Jones and Anthony Gonzalez. Based on statistics from the past 15 years, two of these should improve their performance by at least 25%. At this point in the off-season it is too early to tell which of these if any have a favorable situation for next season but they are four players to keep in mind for your drafts.

Third year wide receivers are in demand on draft day and although there are many of them that breakout, many of them don’t and it is difficult to predict which ones will. In order to increase the 29.4% chance from the first part of the article, I added three more criterions which are that the player must have had 30 or more catches but fewer than 65 and he must also have had more than 400 yards in his previous NFL season. Those three criterions eliminate 33 players of the 107 while only losing six breakout candidates and they make the percentage increase from 30.8% to 36.5%. Unfortunately it was not as easy as for second year wide receivers to improve the breakout percentage but 36.5% is still pretty good especially since the sample size is much larger than for second year receivers. Out of the 74 wide receivers remaining, there are 27 that increased by 25% or more but still 16 that saw their production drop by 25% or more. This is still pretty good and does show that some third year wide receivers could be worth drafting early and have breakout seasons but there is still a pretty high risk in drafting them.

In 2008 Santonio Holmes is the only candidate who meets the criterions identified above. There are eight wide receivers that had similar stats as him in recent years, four of which saw their production drop by at least 30% and only three had a noticeable improvement. He is someone you might want to consider drafting but it’s likely that he’ll go too early in drafts to be worth the risk and with Hines Ward recovering from his injuries combined with the strong competition at the WR position in Pittsburgh; I would personally stay away from him.