We have built up a bit of a baseline for this season with our player tiers, positional rankings, and all of the 2023 off-season content you can find in one place on the site in the full Draft Kit.
With that content in place to aid your knowledge in how to play the game of fantasy football, I also know some of you are here because you want to know how I am playing drafts out myself this summer.
I want to dive into how I am personally approaching drafts this year at the wide receiver position.
How to Draft:
I will also update this throughout the remaining time in the offseason if we get any significant news that impacts draft approaches.
While even those of you with the draft kit may not have read every word written this offseason, at this stage of the offseason I am operating under the assumption you have at minimum checked out the player rankings page and the individual player writeups in the positional tiers posts.
With that in mind, these pieces will not be as player specific or fully into the weeds on the pros or cons of each player. Instead, they will be more focused on the approach to drafting each position.
Wide Receiver Fantasy Related Articles:
- Wide Receiver Tiers
- Wide Receiver Rankings
- Wide Receiver Trends
- Red Zone Points vs Expectations: Wide Receiver
- Stats That Matter: Wide Receiver
- What We Can Learn From ADP: Wide Receiver
Fill Your FLEX With a Wide Receiver
This opening section is going to reiterate a lot of what we talked about yesterday with the running backs, but it is the most important part of a structural approach in drafting.
You need to lock into your league scoring and lineup settings before anything else.
Does your league reward receptions?
How many wide receivers do you have to start per week?
How many FLEX spots are there?
These are critical components of how aggressive you should be at the wide receiver position.
Elite running backs provide greater seasonal and weekly leverage than elite wide receivers, but the wide receiver position runs down the running back position right away from an overall scoring perspective in both 0.5 PPR and full-PPR formats.
This is why drafting WR-heavy has increased in popularity.
This is also why going after RB workhorse options incredibly early and then drafting pass catchers for several rounds before circling back to the running back position can be successful.
If you are in a league that forces you to start three wide receivers; you inherently need more receivers on your roster than running backs.
If your league has additional FLEX positions on top of starting three wideouts, the necessity for roster allocation to the position is enhanced.
Not only do you want wide receivers in those FLEX positions in non-standard formats because they outright score more points than running backs, but you are also building towards a team strength.
One of the mistakes fantasy drafters often make is that they try to aggressively have the “perfect draft.”
What I mean by that is they are too scared to leave their draft with a roster deficiency to the point that it prevents them from leaving their drafts with an actual roster strength.
Many teams draft with too much of an emphasis on roster balance, but that can leave more surface area for the ice to crack in season.
A balanced draft approach just means that you are more vulnerable everywhere as opposed to being able to calibrate one deficiency in season through injuries, trades, and waiver moves.
Also, you are going to draft very few players that have wire-to-wire season output that is high level. There are an extremely finite number of players per NFL season that are elite scorers from Week 1 through Week 17.
By the time your fantasy season ends, you will be fortunate to end the year with 50% of the roster you drafted in August through injuries, busts, and transactions.
But by drafting with the intention of creating a positional strength and leaving one spot vulnerable, you in turn increase your potential of consistently maximizing your lineup for 17 regular season fantasy weeks through those busts, injuries, altering lineups, and transactions.
You also simultaneously reduce the resources for your opponents in that area.
With wide receivers scoring more points than running backs as we move down the line of ADP, the position I am often more inclined to leave vulnerable to start a season is the RB2 spot.
If you have followed my work in the past, then you are already aware that my preferred strategy in any leagues that reward receptions is Anchor-RB, Hero-RB, or whatever label you want to place on drafting one of the elite running backs and then hammering pass catchers.
While I did lay out the backs you can target for an RB-RB start, the current layout from this season makes Anchor-RB a strong approach once again.
What an Anchor-RB approach allows you to do is chase the best of both worlds.
Successful teams under this roster construction approach gain the value of having an elite running back and the leverage that player provides while also gaining the benefits of maxing out the wide receiver position.
I do not always go with this approach (as mentioned yesterday, you can make a case starting RB-RB this season with the scarcity of running backs that check all of the boxes we are looking for), but this is the draft approach that I have used more than any in my history playing fantasy football since a large amount of the leagues I play in are 0.5 or full-PPR scoring that requires at least three starting wide receivers and have at least one FLEX position (often with multiple FLEX spots).
Those are just the leagues I play in the most.
In leagues that reduce the amount of starting wideouts or do not have added FLEX positions (a general population site like ESPN as an example), it can be viable to keep hammering running backs and leave my last wide receiver spot as the vulnerable position to enter the season.
While elite running back scoring dries out early in drafts, baseline wide receiver production is not only more viable than it is at the running back position but is more abundant in the season than it will be for running backs.
Pairing that with the added element that we are still really good at identifying the area where elite running back production comes from, all that continues to steer me in wanting to jump out of the gates in attacking those workhorse running backs and then shifting towards primarily stacking wide receivers for several rounds.
Tack on the fact that this also allows us to avoid the “dead zone” at running back, and you can see how this all ties together.
Even with wide receivers going earlier this season than ever, you do not need to “zig while others are zagging” because the game is properly calibrating itself.
I do prefer Anchor/Hero-RB as a blanket approach more often than not, but you also can stack WR-WR to open this season successfully.
You can go full WR-Heavy and continue to bypass that “dead zone” of running backs, or if you are brave enough to wade in those waters, I did identify the players from that area of the draft that I am more optimistic about breaking through the undertow.
With that all out of the way, make sure that you have a firm grip on your league format and settings. Understanding your format is the most important element in building out your top-down approach.
Draft Day
I know many of you are here just to peruse the showcase of players that I am looking to target at wide receiver, so let’s run through it.
Early Round Wide Receivers:
I honestly do not see a lot of outright fades this season, so you will be splitting hairs at the front of the draft in most cases when it comes to first-round wideouts.
If I were splitting just raw rankings up into cutoffs, I believe Justin Jefferson, Ja’Marr Chase, Tyreek Hill, Cooper Kupp, and Stefon Diggs are the initial firewall of the first-round wide receivers that warrant consideration over Christian McCaffrey and Austin Ekeler.
If you are picking in draft slots 1-5 and take McCaffrey or Ekeler (even Travis Kelce), you are likely going to be looking at the DeVonta Smith, Tee Higgins, DK Metcalf, and Calvin Ridley portion of the position as what will be available for you in Round 2 in leagues that reward receptions at any level.
While you may be fortunate and have someone such as Garrett Wilson, Chris Olave, or Jaylen Waddle reach you at that stage, you are pressing the issue that they could be gone.
I still would prefer to open with one of those front-end wide receivers as my WR1.
At the running back position, you often have Derrick Henry, Jonathan Taylor, Josh Jacobs, and Rhamondre Stevenson available.
Even with questions surrounding those options, those are players that still fall into that landing area where we are better at drafting running backs. You, of course, also can still take any of those wide receivers available there. I do not have a ton of pushback on any of those receivers, I am just far more comfortable with the options from that group being my WR2 than my WR1.
The short of it is to say that if I am picking in the front half of drafts, I am opening the draft with one of those five wide receivers if possible because you have stronger flexibility in Round 2 versus what you will chasing at wide receiver.
If you are selecting in the middle to the back end of draft slots, this is your hot spot to “split the baby” going RB-WR, or just stacking a WR-Heavy approach comes into play.
One of the misconceptions about the wide receiver position, in general, is that the position is “deep.”
Yes, wide receivers do outscore running backs as the draft progresses, but your difference-making seasons come attached to high capital.
With the market drafting wide receivers now earlier than ever, you can find yourself chasing the position very quickly this summer if you bypass a potentially elite wide receiver at the start of your drafts in the opening two rounds.
This is also one of my main concerns with taking Travis Kelce at cost this summer, but more on that tomorrow.
If you are checking my rankings versus the current ADP in the market, you will not find a ton of outliers. That further reinforces how good the market has gotten in recent seasons.
A few players in the opening rounds of the draft that I am more above the field on are Chris Olave, Keenan Allen, D.J. Moore, and Jerry Jeudy.
The only outliers in a negative direction are Deebo Samuel and DeAndre Hopkins.
Other than that, keep swinging away as you see fit early on around those players.
Middle Round Wide Receivers:
In the middle portion of the draft, I am higher on Diontae Johnson, Brandin Cooks, Marquise Brown, Gabriel Davis, Courtland Sutton, and Rashod Bateman.
Seeing those players stand out is not surprising since they let gamers down a year ago at a higher ADP, but the market has overcorrected itself based on their 2022 performance.
As always, one good rule of fantasy is to be cautious paying for a player coming off a career season while buying low on players that underperformed expectations.
Buying in on Early Careers and Selecting Better Bench Wide Receivers
When we are in the area of the draft where we are adding wideouts that are going to be WR4/FLEX and bench depth, we can find a strike zone in terms of archetypes to look at like we discussed yesterday with the running backs.
The front of the position is going to dry up quickly in your drafts, so we need to know which types of wideouts to invest in during drafts.
One of the best things you can do as a drafter is take advantage of players still ascending the age spectrum that do not have their ceilings fully baked into costs.
Looking at wideouts that have been selected based on their year in the league, here are the hit rates for those receivers beating their ADP, and the rates on WR1, WR2, and WR3 seasons they have produced since 2010.
Early-Career Wide Receiver Success:
| Year | Beat ADP | WR3+ | WR2+ | WR1 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 41.6% | 21.2% | 11.5% | 1.8% |
| 2 | 42.1% | 33.3% | 17.5% | 3.5% |
| 3 | 37.6% | 27.5% | 13.0% | 2.9% |
| 4 | 37.8% | 18.9% | 8.1% | 2.7% |
| 5+ | 36.9% | 20.5% | 12.6% | 3.2% |
If value hunting is in drafts, there is no better tier to buy in on a wide receiver being a major value than early in their careers.
This intuitively makes sense because player pricing is largely based on previous performance. If a player does not have an NFL sample or a very small one without front-end production, that player is not going to cost a lot.
I bring this up every season and here are the numbers to support it. Take as many bites of the apple as you can on rookie and year-two wide receivers.
Garrett Wilson and Chris Olave were full-season success stories at cost last season while Christian Watson, Drake London, and Jahan Dotson were end-of-season lifters.
Kadarius Toney and Elijah Moore did let down last season, but we had major jumps from Jaylen Waddle, Amon-Ra St. Brown, and DeVonta Smith. Even Josh Palmer was a second-year wideout that was a helper for gamers throughout last season.
Not every player in that bucket is going to hit, and you should not build your entire wide receiver airplane out of year one and two players, but we want to make multiple swings on these early-career wideouts because their hit rates are so much higher.
We are forced to pay up for Wilson and Olave this summer, but Christian Watson (WR21), Drake London (WR24), George Pickens (WR37), Jahan Dotson (WR39), Treylon Burks (WR44), Skyy Moore (WR45), and Jameson Williams (WR50) all have draft costs that set them up with the opportunity to clear.
This rookie receiver class was not as strongly touted as in previous seasons, which we are seeing reflected in drafts this summer.
Jaxon Smith-Njigba is the highest-priced rookie at WR30 while Jordan Addison (WR40), Quentin Johnston (WR40), and Zay Flowers (WR41) all are being drafted as WR4 options.
This is also a bucket where you can look at deeper dart throws such as Romeo Doubs (WR55), Rashee Rice (WR61), Marvin Mims (WR65), Jonathan Mingo (WR67), and Alec Pierce (WR70). I am particularly above board with Mingo. You can cast a deeper net with Tank Dell, John Metchie, and Michael Wilson.
Round By Round Targets:
No matter how you open your draft, I want to lay out my favorite targets by round (based on ADP) so that you can always have a lifeline or need to recalibrate in drafts on the fly.
These will be in order, so if a player from a previous round is still available or your draft room is valuing wide receiver at a lower rate overall as a position, then you are catching value.
- Round 1: Justin Jefferson, Ja’Marr Chase, Tyreek Hill, Cooper Kupp, Stefon Diggs, CeeDee Lamb, A.J. Brown, Amon-Ra St. Brown, Amon-Ra St. Brown
- Round 2: Garrett Wilson, Jaylen Waddle, Chris Olave, DeVonta Smith
- Round 3: Tee Higgins, DK Metcalf, Calvin Ridley, Keenan Allen, Amari Cooper
- Round 4: Christian Watson, D.J. Moore, Terry McLaurin
- Round 5: Diontae Johnson, Tyler Lockett, Jaxon Smith-Njigba
- Round 6: Brandin Cooks, Brandon Aiyuk, Marquise Brown, Mike Evans
- Round 7: George Pickens, Gabe Davis, Jordan Addison
- Round 8: Jahan Dotson, Courtland Sutton, Rashod Bateman, Zay Flowers, Treylon Burks
- Round 9: Skyy Moore, Quentin Johnston
- Round 10: Jameson Williams, Michael Thomas, Nico Collins
- Throwing Later Darts: Rookies and Year 2 players. Van Jefferson, Tyler Boyd, Michael Gallup
Keeper Targets:
- Rookie Wideouts: As noted, the first-round wideouts from this draft class are cheap this summer. Even when going beyond those options, Rashee Rice, Marvin Mims, Jonathan Mingo, and Michael Wilson are intriguing swings.
- Year Two WRs: Garrett Wilson and Chris Olave are expensive, but there is a case we could see both in the first round next summer. It is easy to see a path where any or all of Christian Watson, Drake London, George Pickens, Jahan Dotson, Treylon Burks, Skyy Moore, and Jameson Williams have much higher costs in 2024.
- Brandon Aiyuk: Not out of the range of outcomes that he is the best San Francisco wide receiver this season and moving forward.
- 2024 Free Agents: Marquise Brown and Michael Pittman have their 2023 situations priced into their current costs but could have better ones in 2024. Even remaining in Arizona, Brown has that available.
- Rashod Bateman: The flames still exist and he is the cheapest he has ever been.
Takeaways:
- KNOW YOUR FORMAT!
- If your league forces you to start 3WR, then be aggressive in the position early in drafts.
- If your league has FLEX spots on top of starting 3WR, be even more aggressive. You want a WR in your FLEX in any format that rewards receptions.
- If starting with a running back in the first two rounds, then hammer pass catchers immediately and often afterward. Anchor/Hero-RB is still a strong approach in the current draft meta.
- Regardless of how you open your draft, largely hammer wide receivers over running backs in the “dead zone.” Use that area to your advantage.
- Focus on the asymmetrical upside after the middle of the draft. Add rookies and Year 2 wideouts to your rosters as WR4 and bench options.
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