The Path to a WR1 Fantasy Football Season: Christian Kirk

Editor’s Note: This profile is part of our annual Path to a Fantasy WR1 series. For our methodology and an outline of the process, make sure you read the 2024 Path to WR1 Series Primer.

I know I’m going a little deep with this one. This article series highlights wide receivers currently ranked outside of the Fantasy Footballers’ top 15, to lay down what would need to happen for them to finish inside the top 12. Right now, Andy, Mike, and Jason have Christian Kirk ranked as the WR28, and his consensus ADP is even further down the board. He is being drafted in the fifth round as the WR30.

So why am I talking about him in the Path to WR1 Fantasy Football Season Series? My hypothesis is simple: in his first season as a Jaguar in 2022, he finished inside the top 12, and I think his outlook this year has more in common with that season than with what happened in 2023.

So let’s first take a look into this past season to try to figure out why things went so differently for Christian Kirk and then dive into what would need to happen for him to bounce back to the top 12.

Find out the full statistical projections for the Footballers Consensus WR1s in the Ultimate Draft Kit.

2023 Season Recap

At the beginning of the 2023 season, things weren’t looking great for Christian Kirk’s volume. Evan Engram was starting to become Trevor Lawrence’s favorite target and there was a new big name in the WR room: Calvin Ridley.

It wasn’t a very good season for the Jacksonville Jaguars as a whole, especially after having a very solid 2022 campaign that ended in the divisional round against the Chiefs after beating the Chargers in a dramatic wild-card round comeback. But 2023 was another story. Trevor Lawrence was dealing with several injuries that affected the whole team’s production, including obviously Christian Kirk’s.

He finished as the WR47 but actually wasn’t that bad on a per-game basis, averaging 10.2 fantasy points, which made him a decent flex option. He missed the last five games due to an injury, but even extrapolating his numbers to a full season, his pace wasn’t anything special, because the team in general had a bad season.

Out of the 12 weeks he played, he finished inside the top 12 only once, and in more than half of the games, he finished outside WR2 territory. Will he be able to turn things around this year?

The Path for 2024

With Calvin Ridley out of the picture, there is a path for Christian Kirk to get back into the WR1 conversation. It won’t be an easy or safe path, and it will depend on many things, including some that are completely out of his control. But he has already tasted the glory, and the conditions might be there for him to do it again. So let’s dissect the different aspects of Kirk’s fantasy profile to set some realistic expectations.

Routes

If Christian Kirk wants to finish as a WR1 once again, he will need to create more opportunities and take better advantage of the ones he already has. Data regarding routes is a great way to look into a receiver’s opportunity outlook, as our editor-in-chief Kyle Borgognoni explained in this year’s Path to a WR1 Series Primer. So let’s take a look at Kirk’s routes.

In 2023, he participated in 89.4% of routes, running only 371 and finishing 67th among WRs in routes run. These are not alpha WR numbers by any stretch of the imagination, but let’s keep in mind that he missed five games. In 2022, he played the whole season and ran 518 routes, which is still not elite, but at least it’s in WR2 territory. 

So we know he didn’t run a lot of routes, but his efficiency was not bad. He was targeted 23% of the time he was running a route, which places him above the 20% mark (a requisite to aspire to finish as WR2 or better). He also finished 19th in yards per route run, which isn’t amazing but the important takeaway is that he earned WR2-level opportunities in a very bad season. Less competition and a healthier Trevor Lawrence should help increase Christian Kirk’s volume.

Target Share

This is, in my opinion, the key to unlocking Christian Kirk’s path to a WR1 season. Calvin Ridley’s presence hurt his target share. When both players were healthy on the field, Kirk had a 21% target share. It’s not a bad slice of the pie (again, WR2 numbers) but he will need to be a little bit closer to 30% to aspire to a top-12 finish.

Let’s compare how the pie was split in 2022 and 2023:

*Not on the Jaguars

Evan Engram’s current volume isn’t going anywhere (Lawrence loves targeting him) but look at the WR competition in Jacksonville for 2024. Newcomer Gabe Davis has historically been bad at earning targets and Brian Thomas Jr. is a great prospect who will most likely make some big plays as a rookie, but based on his college stats he can’t be considered a great target-earner. What I mean is that none of them will inherit Calvin Ridley’s full volume. That’s why I feel that Christian Kirk’s situation is much closer to how it was back in 2022. He will be the team’s most targeted wide receiver and there’s a good chance he’ll claim a bigger slice of the pie than he did two years ago, when he only needed 23.2% of the targets to finish as a WR1.

Receptions & Catch Rate

Kirk’s mediocre amount of targets turned into a mediocre amount of receptions. He caught only 57 passes and had a horrible 67.1% catch rate. Trevor Lawrence’s multiple injuries are the ones to blame for this. He had a 6.6 passer rating, and if we take all the passes that weren’t deemed catchable out of the equation, Kirk’s true catch rate goes all the way up to 95%. T-Law is supposed to be much healthier now, so the quality of his targets should improve considerably.

Yards & aDOT

There’s nothing much going in Christian Kirk’s favor in the yards department. He had 787 total receiving yards, averaging only 13.8 per reception. Of course, this is also correlated to the quality of Lawrence’s targets.

He had a 9.9 average depth of target, which is not great but was actually slightly higher than his 2022 aDOT of 9.4. On the other hand, Calvin Ridley had a 13.2 aDOT but a much lower catch rate (55.9%). So Kirk might not be a field stretcher, but at least we know he doesn’t need to be one to aspire to a WR1 season. Let’s leave that highly volatile deep-target role to the expert in scoring zero points every other week: Gabe Davis.

Touchdowns

If I’ve mentioned so many indicators of a WR2 performance in Christian Kirk’s 2023 season, why did he finish as the WR34 in fantasy points per game? Well, he only had six red zone targets and scored just three touchdowns. Players with almost as many receiving yards as Kirk scored more than double the number of touchdowns. 

Back in 2022, Christian Kirk scored eight touchdowns. With an expected improvement in the passing game, there should be a positive regression in this department.

Conclusion

How the volume is split in 2024 will be the key to unlocking a potential WR1 season from Christian Kirk. With Calvin Ridley’s departure and the addition of Gabe Davis and Brian Thomas, the scenario in Jacksonville looks very similar to 2022. If Trevor Lawrence manages to stay healthy, Christian Kirk will have a golden opportunity to reestablish himself as the alpha wide receiver in an offense that desperately needs one. And if he doesn’t finish inside the top 12, at least there are many reasons to believe he is currently being drafted at his floor.