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Drafting WRs Based on Years of Experience

In an earlier article, I had written about breakout wide receivers and had determined criterions to identify those most likely to breakout. Although it is very useful to know which wide receivers might improve over their previous year’s statistics, it is not enough. I therefore decided to tackle the other side of the problem which is to determine which wide receivers the average manager thinks will breakout. In this article, I will compare the previous year’s statistics with average draft position the next year in order to determine which wide receivers the average manager assumes will improve the most. Once we know which wide receivers the average manager expects to improve, we can determine which wide receivers should be targeted by looking at their statistics in the next season.

In this paragraph, I will explain which techniques I used to complete this analysis but it is a little complicated and not required to understand the major part of this analysis. The main difficulty encountered when making this analysis was to find a way to compare draft position and statistics from every year. I decided to take the previous year’s statistics and make a regression based on average draft position in order to determine an “expected” number of fantasy points for the next season simply based on where the wide receivers were drafted. This therefore allowed me to compare how many points the average manager expects a wide receiver to get compared to the number of points he had in the previous year. All the numbers used in this article are based on the WCOFF scoring system with one point per reception. They are in terms of points per 16 games and only include wide receivers who played more than eight games in that season. When comparing with the next season’s statistics I also used points per 16 games but if a player did not play enough games he was given 100 as his points total for the season.

I decided to breakdown the wide receivers in three categories which are the top 24, 25 to 48 and everyone else. This was done in order to better understand which wide receivers to target at different moments in the draft. The following table includes only top 24 wide receivers. The first column contains the years of experience in the NFL each wide receiver has and is followed by the number of wide receivers that are included in each category from 2000 to 2007. The next column contains the average number of expected points subtracted by the average number of points in the previous year. The fourth column contains the average number of points wide receivers improved in the next season and the final column is the difference between the two where the higher number means a larger overpayment and higher risk.

As expected, all the numbers are positive which means you will generally have to overpay for a top wide receiver. This can be explained because there is a lot of parity amongst wide receivers and many of them drop while many lower rated receivers breakout. This theory suggests that wide receivers in their third, fifth or seventh season in the NFL are much better choices than the fourth, sixth and eighth year receivers. Although one may argue that this is a coincidence, there are more than 20 receivers in each group and the difference is more than 40 points between these groups. To make this a little clearer I have grouped receivers between their 2nd and 11th NFL season in even and odd years:

In this case we have a pretty big sample size and the difference is 27 points between the two groups. Last year, this theory would have kept you away from players such as Lee Evans, Javon Walker and Darrell Jackson. This theory would suggest that in 2008 you would want to stay away from receivers like Chad Johnson, Steve Smith, Reggie Wayne, T.J. Houshmandzadeh, Anquan Boldin, Andre Johnson and Braylon Edwards. One very important thing to understand is that this is a statistical analysis and it could be a pure coincidence but it is something very interesting to keep in mind. I will never tell anyone to stay away from all those names but it is something to keep in mind on draft day, especially if a player has other question marks such as Braylon Edwards. This analysis may also tempt you to draft someone like Marques Colston who is entering his third season ahead of a few of those players. However, I would not recommend staying away from Reggie Wayne simply because he’s entering his eighth NFL season.