Hello, and welcome to another great DFF article. In this piece, I will be looking at a large majority of the WRs in the NFL and dissecting their performances so far this season. I will be looking at all WRs who have played 200 or more snaps this season. I used PlayerProfiler.com’s Data Analysis package to pull stats like Target Share, Target Rate, and Yards per Route Run for these players. Then, I sorted them from worst to best, and I will highlight anything that I thought was interesting. Hopefully, we can use this to identify buys and sells, as well as fraudulent producers, which players are really good, and which are really bad. Let’s dive right into the numbers.
Top Performers
In the chart above, I have listed the current top 15 performers in Fantasy Points per Game (FP/G), Fantasy Points per Route Run (FP/RR), Target Rate, Target Share, and Yards per Route Run (Y/RR). These metrics can be quite helpful when determining how well a WR is playing in a given season or over a particular period. For now, we are just trying to use the current season to tell us more about the rest of the season. The first surprise was seeing Brandon Aiyuk so high on this list. He has been a very efficient WR to this point, but he is lacking in one area compared to the rest: points per game. This is caused by the 49ers being such a low volume passing offense. Even though Aiyuk is very efficient, it can be hard to overcome that. However, I think this points out a great buying opportunity for managed leagues, and especially Best Ball Dynasty leagues. If the Niners ever find themselves trailing or even in a more competitive game, Aiyuk will have a very high chance for a spike week because they will be forced into more throwing situations. As a result, Aiyuk’s efficiency will be able to shine.
Really quick, I would like to pat myself on the back here: two of my favorite Dynasty WRs coming into the season were A.J. Brown and Amon-Ra St. Brown, and those two are balling as they find themselves both in the top five of this list. Another thing this list helps identify is that Puka Nacua is the real deal. He even finds himself ahead of his teammate, Cooper Kupp. A lot of that might be because he was running solo with Stafford to start the year, but still being grouped in with these other elite talents is a great sign to me that he is here to stay.
Another couple of players I would like to highlight here are Mike Evans and DeAndre Hopkins. Two big-bodied WRs that win at the catch point have been having pretty good seasons this late in their careers. Baker has been awesome, and it has been keeping Mike Evans very relevant. Hopkins seems to have gotten a boost with Levis starting, as he always seems to look DeAndre’s way when he gets in trouble or needs a first down. I like the odds of these guys continuing to produce later into the year. Lastly, I want to highlight Nico Collins here as he had a hot start to the season and has cooled off lately but has still been very efficient as a whole. I especially like Nico because I think he will be able to grow with Stroud and find themselves together in Houston for a long time.
Low-Efficiency WRs
Oh man, that’s a lot of red. Here, I want to highlight some players that many had hope for this season or are normally at least efficient players. 97 NFL WRs qualified for the list, and rookie first-round pick Quentin Johnston is currently 90th. In case you need me to tell you, that is awful. He has been in the perfect situation, too. Mike Williams was hurt almost immediately, and Josh Palmer is now hurt as well. So, he should easily be a productive number two behind Keenan, right? Wrong. Based on how poor he has been so far this season, it is very unlikely that he will be a productive Dynasty player. I am looking to get out for a mid-early second.
Rashod is a player that had been efficient but could not find the volume in recent years. So far, he has not seen the volume, but now he also isn’t efficient. He was coming off an injury to start the year and has slowly been looking better, but I do not have much hope going down the stretch. If Bateman cannot turn it around to end the season, he may become a dead Dynasty asset.
I wanted to highlight Gabe Davis because he seems to be different than he was in the past. He was typically an efficient player with a lower FP/G than expected. But this year, he appears to be a low-efficiency player with a higher FP/G than expected. This makes me like Davis even less because now his FP/G is overachieving instead of underachieving. Getting off of him while people still think he is an efficient high-variance WR with room to grow could be profitable.
Christian Watson is a similar story to Bateman but was probably better. We never saw legit production out of Bateman, but we did get some elite games out of Watson in 2022. But this year, they find themselves in similar groups: low efficiency, low FP/G, and low pass volume offenses. That is not a recipe for success.
Michael Thomas has not been the stud he once was, but he has been a solid flex piece for most of the season. His FP/G is being bogged down by his recent outlier zero-point performance. He is no longer an elite asset, but I think he is a great guy to earn about 10 points for your flex position consistently.
Overachievers and Underachievers
For this part, I want to highlight overachievers and underachievers and speak on whether we should be excited or concerned. Rashee Rice has been downright awesome so far and blew my expectations out of the water. I think he is legit and will be a piece the Chiefs use the rest of the season and throughout the 2024 season. Josh Downs has been doing well this year; he hasn’t been amazing, but getting into the top third of this list as a rookie with multiple QB changes is a good sign.
I think Downs is legit, and I am a big fan heading into next season. Demario Douglas has been interesting thus far. He has been efficient when put on the field and is targeted at a high rate when he plays. Unfortunately, he does not play a ton, but that is growing. His FP/G has also increased in the last few weeks as he has gotten more involved. Maybe we have another Jakobi Meyers budding in the North East? I think Douglas is here to stay, and it would not surprise me if he led the team in receiving for the rest of the season.
I have similar thoughts for DeVonta Smith and Tee Higgins, so I will group them here. I certainly do not think they are all of a sudden bad or even mid-WRs. But I do believe this shows a good reason why it is hard to spend elite prices on team WR2s in Dynasty. DeVonta Smith is more of a deep threat than Tee Higgins, which helps him score more points. But they are both largely volume players, and it is hard to see good volume when you share snaps with an elite alpha on a good team that wins consistently. These guys are always available to have spike weeks, but it is tough to rely on them weekly. I am a fan of selling guys like these in Dynasty when they reach that top-ten range.
I like looking at these numbers before the season, during the season, and again at the end of each season. I think it can help describe what happened in a season more vividly than trying to go off your memory of what happened for each player. You can then use that to have one step over your league-mates who are just going off memory. I hope this can help you get some deals done, and if you are interested in seeing the full list of players, you can find them here.
Wow, you read all the way through! Thank you, I appreciate you using your time to enjoy my content. If you would like to talk to me about my article or ask me any generic Dynasty or trade questions. You can find me on Twitter @ChrisMiles1017. Shoot me a DM; they are always open. Come join the #DFFArmy, where I provide #Dynasty, #Redraft, and #Analytics content for @DFF_Dynasty. Thank you so much!
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