Just How Good Are These Receivers?
Are we getting ahead ourselves with this wide receiver class?
(Photo Credit: AP)
After a long week in Indianapolis that featured inappropriate questions, dazzling performances and plenty of hungover sports writers, we’re starting to get a clearer picture as to how the draft and free agency will shake out. A clear favorite for the first overall pick has emerged, coaches are being more open about their plans, and certain prospects are separating themselves from their peers.
Outside of anything involving Caleb Williams, the biggest story to come out of the combine was how talented the wide receiver class is. We’re hearing terms like the “the best wide receiver class I’ve ever seen” getting thrown around, and as many as ten prospects are getting first round buzz.
While there’s no doubt this class is extremely talented, I think the hype train is getting out control. In fact, we have some recent evidence to support that.
The 2021 draft class appears to be on their way to being one of the best first rounds ever in terms of talent selected. Just like this year, most of the hype from that class was centered around wide receiver-and for good reason. There were 15 receivers picked in the top 100, and 17 of the top 112.
Much like this year, there were a consensus top three in that class. JaMarr Chase, Jaylen Waddle and DeVonta Smith were top ten prospects and all three were selected accordingly. Through their first three seasons, they have more than lived up to the hype. Chase is one of the top five receivers in the league while Waddle and Smith would be on everyone’s top 20 list, if not the top 15.
However, the rest of the class is a mixed bag. The table below shows receivers picked 4-17 in the class.
Obviously, St. Brown is a stud and Nico Collins appears to be in that category as well, but the rest of the class been anywhere from mediocre to disappointment. It’s also notable that the three best receivers from this group were the 11th, 14th, and 17th receivers selected.
2021 wasn’t the outlier. Using Pro Football Reference’s Weighted Career Approximate Value Metric (wAV), wide receiver has the largest % decreased in wAV from the first round to the 2nd round over the past four seasons.
It’s a relatively small sample size, and wAV becomes a much more reliable stat when measuring players with longer careers, but even deep wide receiver classes still produce a dramatic drop off in production after round one. For a better visual, here is every receiver since 2020 selected in the first three rounds but excluding the top three receivers.
There was a great run in 2020 with Jefferson, Aiyuk, Higgins and Pittman but the the drop-off is steep after that group. Moreover, there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that receivers four, five and six are going to be any better than receivers nine, ten or eleven.
That leads us to this year’s class. Here were my consensus top 100 receivers going into the combine
Like 2021, there are a clear top three who in my opinion, are every bit as good as that trio. I would not be surprised at all if all three are considered top fifteen wide receivers by their third season.
But outside of those three, there was only one other receiver that was a consensus first rounder. I expect that to change after the combine, but this does highlight that the film of this class didn’t exactly blow away the best NFL draft talent evaluators in the media. Recent history also suggests that similarly graded receivers did not perform up to their pre-draft expectations.
Conclusion
There’s no doubt this is a good wide receiver class. Maybe using previous years’ performance is dumb because this is the receiver class like no other. It might truly be a historic outlier that produces eight or nine elite receiving threats.
What I think is more likely, is this class will closely mirror 2021. The top three will be great, two or three players from the second or third tier establish themselves as dynamic receiving threats, and the rest fall somewhere between average or inconsequential.
But where it really gets tricky is I don’t think any team can identify with any degree of certainty which of the players from the second or third tier will end up being a star vs. who ends up not being a meaningful contributor. And I don’t think based off their current consensus ranks, that this class is dramatically more talented than the previous four years. Which is why if I’m a team in need of wide receiver picking near the top ten, I’m doing everything I can to land one of Harrison, Nabers, or Odunze.