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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. |
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