Anatomy Of A Top 10 Wide Receiver

By Brandon Anderson
8/04/08
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Hopefully you’ve had a chance already to read the other two parts of this Anatomy series. This is my favorite piece of work in the offseason and the one I’ve put the most time into, and I assure you I’m not just going on whims or trying to fit square pegs into round holes. I believe that there is some method to this madness, some science that can be solved or at least hypothesized at, and that’s what I aim to do here. But be aware that there’s more madness at wide receiver than anywhere else, so we’ve got some unraveling to do. The wide receiver is the most inconsistent, frustrating position in fantasy football. So let’s get to work!

Fact #1 – Amazingly enough, only about 3 or 4 WRs will repeat from one year’s top 10 to the following season’s top 10, the worst carryover rate of any position in football.

That’s basically a 2 in 3 chances that a receiver that finished in the top 10 a year ago will stumble out of it this year, perhaps off the radar completely. Think about that for a minute. How good do you still feel about all of those “stud WRs” you’re pinning your hopes on in the 2nd round? Not so great.

Take a look at this list of players below, and see if you can rule 6 or 7 of them out of your top 10 for this year: Randy Moss, Terrell Owens, Braylon Edwards, Reggie Wayne, Larry Fitzgerald, Chad Johnson, TJ Houshmandzadeh, Marques Colston, Brandon Marshall, and Plaxico Burress. I bet all of those guys are in your top 20, and I bet at least 6-8 of them are in your top 10 this year. Ruhr oh.

Facts are facts. Since the 2001 season, there has not been a single season where more than 4 WRs repeated from one year to the next. In fact, there have been two seasons with four repeaters and four seasons with only three! What a mess we’ve gotten ourselves into.

Fact #2 – The surest receiver bet in football is Marvin… um, check that… the Colts #1 receiver.

Woops. Fact #2 was looking great for the decade until last season. Marvin Harrison had placed in every top 10 WR group for the whole decade, with no other receiver even going more than four years in a row anywhere in that span. Peyton Manning is simply so dominant that both his top RB and top WR are virtual locks to be top 10 players, or better.

The Colts #1 receiver is pretty clearly Reggie Wayne at this point. It looks like a very safe bet to expand this rule from “Marvin Harrison is always in every top 10 WR group” to talk about the Colts top target instead. Wayne may not finish at the top overall, but he’ll be in the mix. He stays.

Fact #3 – The second surest receiver bet in football is Randy Moss… as long as he’s not playing for the Oakland Raiders.

Moss had an unmistakable two year gap, the two forgettable years in the black pit of Oakland where he completely fell off the football radar. But outside of that period of time, Moss has been an even surer bet at receiver than Harrison had been. Make no mistake about it – the chances of him coming even close to last year’s performance are absolutely horrible. But barring a huge suspension or injury, Randy Moss absolutely will be in the top 10, and he’ll probably finish easily in the top 5. He is simply that good and always has been.

Probably no argument so far. But do you realize that we’ve got only 1 or maybe 2 spots left for repeat WRs in our top 10?

Fact #4 – The only receiver to make every top 10 list since 2003 is… nope, not Wayne or TO or Steve Smith… Chad Johnson, Ocho Cinco himself.

That’s right. For all of CJ’s antics and all the trouble he seems to find himself in during the offseason, the man downright produces during the season. He puts up the numbers, gets a ton of yardage, and gets plenty of TDs to go with them. He always seems to have at least a couple of monster games, and he has yet to miss a top 10 since he exploded onto our television screens.

Off the field, Chad may be the unpredictable guy out there. Heck, he sure is the most unpredictable guy in the endzone. But all that matters to you is that he’s there, in the endzone, scoring fantasy points for your squad. Ocho Cinco is an extremely polarizing figure. But he’s a freaking talented extremely polarizing figure. Love him or hate him, recent history shows he’ll be right there in the top 10 when the season ends.

Fact #5 – Terrell Owens had not finished in the top 10 back to back years since 2003 until these past two seasons.

On the surface, Owens looks every bit the part of a megastar WR and seems to be similar in many ways to CJ. He has all sorts of media attention, from the good to the bad, but he simply produces on the field. I won’t argue with you there. But all too often, he’s not actually on the field to produce. Owens has only played two 16-game seasons this entire decade and he missed the top 10 in 2003 and 2005 with inconsistencies in his playing time.

There’s no question about his talent. When TO plays, he is consistently among the top 3 WRs in ppg, and he’s quite often 2nd or even 1st. But if you had to really think about it, doesn’t it seem like there are some concerns for this year? There’s the age factor for one thing. Owens is 34 and will be 35 before the season ends. Guess how old Marvin Harrison was last season. How about Jerry Rice when he tore his ACL and his career was never the same? Terrell Owens is an absolute physical specimen, but he’s human after all.

Two years in a row, TO has done everything right and produced but the Dallas circus hasn’t won a playoff game, and the pressure is really mounting at this point. In the meantime, Owens finally landed that last fat contract he’d been working at for the last couple of years. Do you really think that when he sprains his ankle this season midway, he’s going to hustle out there and play at 75% for three or four games? Or do you think he’ll take his money, pout on the bench, and wait for the playoffs to come around where the competitor in him knows that’s all that really matters.

I’m not saying to pass on TO. He will produce as well as any other WR while he plays. But he is due to miss several games this season, and it will cost him a spot in the top 10. Take him, use him, but have a backup plan ready when the inevitable time comes.

Fact #6 – Wide receivers with 80 or fewer catches that finish in the top 10 are in big time trouble the following season.

Since 2001, there have been 9 such players who made the top 10 list despite having 80 or fewer receptions. Not a single one of them repeated their appearance in the top 10 the next season. Not one.

Because these receivers had fewer catches, they also had fewer yards, and that means they had to have had a greater number of touchdowns to make up for that and still finish in the top 10. Touchdowns are a tough stat to repeat year by year, whereas receptions and yardage remains quite consistent for good receivers. Therefore it only makes sense that the highest yardage leaders (see Chad Johnson, for instance) stay consistently ranked high, whereas the high TD guys see their value fluctuate greatly.

Among the 9 such players, the average player caught 15 less passes and scored almost 6 fewer TDs the following season. This trend affects two of last year’s top 10 receivers.

The first is Plaxico Burress. He just barely squeaked into the top 10 last year but looks very unlikely to repeat the gig this time around. If you assume those stat reductions for this season, Plaxico looks to catch about 55 passes for 800 yards and 6 TDs and finish as about the 25th best WR. This probably wouldn’t stun anyone too much. Plaxico is actually one of the 9 previous WRs to do this 80 catch thing and then miss the top 10 a year later. Plus you have to wonder about a guy whose never seemed to have that fire, how will he react now that he has a ring on his finger? I don’t believe the passion will be there to stay on the field, and Burress’ value may plummet.

The other player in trouble is a bigger name – Braylon Edwards. Edwards was an absolute stud out of nowhere last season, scoring an average of a touchdown a week, more TDs even than Terrell Owens. But it looks like an impossible feat to expect Braylon to match those 16 TDs again this year or even get close, especially when you recall some of the fluke plays he made last year in several big moments. Following the trend, Edwards looks to drop to about 65 receptions, 1050 yards, and 10 TDs. It’s still a very nice season, but it leaves him around the 15th best WR spot, and it means he may be a bust in the 2nd round.

Fact #7 – Wide receivers that score more than 15% of their points in one huge game and then make the top 10 that season are at a very high risk of missing the top 10 the following season.

If you think about it, 15% is a pretty huge effort. That means that in one of sixteen games, that player scored about 1 of every 6 points he made on the season. And seeing as how he ended up a top 10 WR, that was one heck of a game, usually 30+ points or even into the 40s.

The problem is that it creates a false positive and moves the receiver up way too far into the rankings, a one game fluke that can jump them 5 or 10 spots from where they truly should have finished. Since 2001, there have been 18 wide receivers that made the top 10 while scoring at least 15% of their points in one game. Of those 18, only 2 of them were able to repeat into the following season’s top 10, Marvin Harrison in 2004 and Chad Johnson in 2007.

Two of eighteen are pretty bad odds, and especially bad when you think about the situations where success did happen. CJ actually had two games each worth over 20% of his points in 2006, but he did essentially the same thing last year, and it seems to be his M.O. at this point. Not many other receivers have the talent to rattle off two monster games on cue every season. As for Marvin Harrison, well he’s only the second greatest receiver to ever play the game. You don’t want to be relying on him for too many examples.

The other 16 that didn’t repeat often fell a long ways out of the top 10. In fact ten of them dropped completely out of the top 25. Sometimes there was an injury or a change of scenery, but that was not often the case. In fact 11 of those 18 players played for the same team in essentially the same situation the following year and dropped out of the top 10 anyway. Over half of these players didn’t do anything different the following season, other than just not having that one monster game. Six of the 11 such players actually finished within a half ppg the following season as they scored the previous season not counting the monster game. Put another way, they were normal top 20 or top 30 WRs who made a fluke top 10 appearance due to one huge game.

Three players make the worry list here. One of them, as already mentioned, is Chad Johnson. But again, as already mentioned, he seems to be the only player in the league capable of consistently getting a couple monster games each season, and he’s already overcome this obstacle once, so he gets a pass.

A guy who doesn’t get a pass here is Plaxico Burress, who scored over 18% of his season’s total in week one last season. This is major strike two against Burress, veritably assuring he won’t be seeing your top 10. The other player hurt here is Terrell Owens who actually scored 41 points in a game last year, over 18% of his season’s total as well. Without that huge game, TO would’ve been just the #10 WR for the year, almost missing the cut, and yet another reason why he indeed will miss that cut this year.

We’re down to four WRs left and only one possible spot, if any, in the repeating top 10 list between Marques Colston, Larry Fitzgerald, TJ Houshmandzadeh, and Brandon Marshall.

It’s probably a safe call to executively rule out Marshall here without a stats analysis. He simply has too many issues right now to use the high pick on him, talented or not. TJ Houshmandzadeh just finished his first full healthy season in three years, and he often seems to miss a game or two. Doing so last season would’ve dumped him out of the top 10, and it looks like he should be a safe bet to score well but finish comfortably right in that 10-15 range again this season. Even when he didn’t miss games last season, he played hurt in the second half and his numbers showed it.

As for Colston, he started out completely stale for almost the entire first half last season before coming on as strong as anyone to squeak into the top 10. He is a tough case because he’s too young to develop many trends, but he too looks like a guy who will struggle to play a full 16 game slate most years. His ppg is very good but not great, so missing even a game or two should be just enough to drop him out of the top 10 ever so slightly, and we could see Jeremy Shockey eat into those numbers as well. Colston was only a couple TDs away from being an afterthought in this piece, after all.

Larry Fitzgerald is a bit of a different story because he has more separation in ppg than the others mentioned. Fitz has essentially been a top 10 WR since the end of his rookie season in 2004, and he’s been better than just top 10 for much of the time. He did miss the list in 2006 but that was mostly due to injury. Fitzgerald simply looks the part of a top 10 receiver a bit more in the stats arena, and he’s a little more consistent with the high TD numbers. He too could miss a game or two, but unlike the previous players, he still has the numbers to make the top 10 even if that happens. Fitz stays.

That means Wayne, Moss, CJ, and Fitz are the choices to stay in the top 10. So who fills the six newly vacated spots?

To be continued…

Continue To Part 2