Dynasty WR Thresholds That Matter (Fantasy Football)

In dynasty, you have to make a call a year or two in: are you carrying false hope?

With wide receivers, it can become even tougher to truly gauge where you are at with young players with a relatively small sample size. Young WRs hold so much value in dynasty leagues so trading for one even if you haven’t seen them breakout is always tempting.

For example, if you are still holding onto Jameson Williams, you might be clinging to the recent promises of head coach Dan Campbell, ” [Williams] is going to push to be a full-time starter and that’s what we’re looking for. Everybody grows at a different rate. Maybe it’s taken him a little bit longer, but he is developing and growing. The kid has come on. We got high hopes for him and see him continuing to grow,” Campbell said recently before the NFL Scouting Combine.

The Lions traded up to take the Alabama superstar 12th overall and yet we still haven’t seen him fully involved on an NFL field. I jokingly posted a thread of every single quote I could find from OC Ben Johnson essentially saying he wasn’t quite ready. Beyond quotes, what can you go off of to assess WRs like Williams and their performance on the football field?

In this article, I will identify a few thresholds for WRs finishing Year 1 & Year 2 in the NFL and compare them to their peers in the 2024 Dynasty Pass.

Metrics That Matter

In dynasty, there are a number of factors you might be weighing when it comes to your young WRs:

• What was their draft capital?
• What did I personally invest in rookie drafts? (this can be a bit blinding)
• How did they fit in their NFL offense?
• How did they stack up against their rookie counterparts?
• What did my eyeballs tell me?

All of those questions are valid but sometimes you need some cold-hard data to shake you out of your stupor. If you’re still searching for an oasis in the middle of the desert, but you’re standing in the middle of a cornfield in nowhere Nebraska, chances are you’re suffering from a deeper problem. “Where are we at?” is a valid question that has multiple layers to it in dynasty leagues.

It can be hard to zero in on a couple of metrics and proclaim, “These are the ones worth paying attention to!” There are deeper studies out there (highly recommend Ryan Heath’s chart on stable & predictive stats) but for the sake of this article, we will focus on routes-based data.

We talk all the time about how targets are earned; they show skill.  Routes give context because they mix in opportunity (or lack thereof) for a WR. It is worth noting that route data is not widely available and is often found behind paywalls. Why? It is data and sites like PFF or FantasyPoints have put in a ton of time and hard work collecting this data. Do them a favor and subscribe or at least acknowledge that tracking every single route in every single game in the NFL takes time and a desire for accuracy. In this study, I will mostly use the route data available from Pro Football Focus.

Yards per Route Run (YPRR) gives a well-rounded figure to work with as we are able to simply divide the total receiving yards by the number of routes they run on the field. It is less prone to outlier skewed stats (Yards per Target, Yards per Reception) but it’s not perfect. YPRR needs roughly 11 games or 180+ routes to start to stabilize for WRs.

I do need to caution that YPRR inherently is biased as Underdog’s Hayden Winks noted. Some run-heavy teams (like the Falcons or Ravens) routinely trot out two or fewer WRs while teams like the Rams use 11-personnel like it’s going out of style. You can see how certain players are boosted based on formations like Drake London. Keep in mind the sample sizes for this as well as London ran a TOTAL of 60 routes with 3+ WRs on the field, also known as 438 fewer than CeeDee Lamb. (Thanks Arthur Smith!)

Overall, YPRR is heavily influenced by the number of WRs on the field and there are attempts to produce expected YPRR and adjusted YPRR figures as Tej Seth of SumerSports details. For the sake of this study, we will begin with the simple YPRR metric to compare past draft classes.

Targets per Route Run (TPRR) is another metric we discuss frequently on the Fantasy Footballers podcast. It measures how involved a player is and weeds out cardio kings such as Marquez Valdes-Scantling who might be the best-conditioned players on the field but shots in the dark for fantasy. TPRR closely follows target share but it gives us an even deeper look at team opportunity. When this player is running route, how often does their QB look their way? You might’ve seen the highlight of a long 60-yard TD the week before but when you peel back the curtain, MVS might’ve been targeted just 10% of the time, an atrociously low figure. I wrote a primer on this stat back in 2021 and one of our writers (AJ Passman) does a weekly article in-season.

Anything sub 20 percent is not optimal when you compare it to other WRs. At its core, TPRR is a measure of efficiency; it tells us a player’s ability either to get open or be a part of the offensive scheme. We say it often: earning targets is a skill. And that skill, expressed as TPRR, has a strong correlation with fantasy relevance. Since 2006, 92% of receivers who finished as a WR2 or better (top 24) had a TPRR of at least 20%.

You also have to ask questions to add context around TPRR:

• Is there competition for targets? Many offenses such as Dallas have multiple high-end targets. This is why players like Brandin Cooks can end up among the league leaders in routes run but rank so low in TPRR in target efficiency at 15 percent. In other words, other guys were commanding targets (Ceedee Lamb) and Cooks’ percentage plummeted.
• Is the efficiency off the charts? Efficiency is fun when it’s hitting in your favor every week but eventually, the lack of targets turn into 2-for-22 weeks.
• What type of routes are they running? The nine routes from MVS and Justin Watson are going to draw very few targets.

All of that is to say that for young WRs, we expect there to be a slow burn. However, we also expect that to turn into a blazing inferno eventually…

History Tells a Story

One of my favorite parts of my job (and fantasy football in general) is that we have a wealth of information to dig into. The truth of a player’s outlook (or at least some of the truth) can be in the data if we give ourselves time to parse through it and find meaning. We don’t create meaning or use data to confirm what we think it should say. Rather, years of routes-based WR data can give us some thresholds in dynasty to work from.

What was the process and methodology?

We looked back over the last decade at WRs drafted in the 1st three rounds of the NFL Draft.

This data set from 2014 to the present includes 137 total WRs with route, target, and yardage totals from Pro Football Focus. We focused on their Year 1 and Year 2 results as the “thresholds” to consider. These thresholds are NOT saying “They are below this mark, they are completely done” but WRs in this range are waving a red flag you cannot ignore for their career arc.

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