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Rookie Wide Receivers The 2008 National
Football League Draft will take place once again at the Radio City Music Hall in New York
City on April 26 and 27. 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 team. 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 64 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 64
rookie wide receivers since 2000, 25 of them performed better than their average draft
position which is equal to only 39%. By doing the same analysis for non-rookie wide
receivers, I concluded that 42% of them 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 3% lower than by drafting a non-rookie wide receiver. It is evident that
players drafted later in drafts are more likely to improve than players drafted early in
drafts 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 62 while the average
draft position for non-rookie wide receivers is 42. 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 40th 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 42% to 49%. This means that your chances of making a good pick in
your fantasy draft decrease by 10% when you choose a rookie wide receiver over a
non-rookie wide receiver. |
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