Editor’s Note: Find out the full statistical projections for the Footballers Consensus WR1s in the Ultimate Draft Kit.
I am beginning to see a trend… for the ninth(!) year in a row, our Fantasy Footballers writing staff can’t stop and won’t stop!
It is my honor to kick off our annual “Path to WR1”series examining wide receivers who are currently ranked outside of the top-15 receivers in Andy, Mike, and Jason’s initial WR projections. The goal is to give some reasoning and definition to our methodology in determining the likelihood of a top-12 fantasy season from a number of off-the-wall candidates.
Our team of writers will be hypothesizing about players that possibly have a shot at finishing the year as a WR1. In the past, we’ve identified some superb potential WR1 values before they were fantasy stars including Chris Godwin, A.J. Brown, and Ja’Marr Chase, when he was a rookie. Last year, our writers were bullish on the prospects of guys like Drake London, Malik Nabers, and Terry McLaurin, to name a few. Actually, Brittney Foxworth needs a giant shoutout for her write-up on McLaurin.
Let me be clear: we are NOT projecting a WR1 end-of-the-year total; instead, we are merely giving the high-end of the range of outcomes for players to show what type of ceiling is in the realm of possibilities. We poll our team of writers and take the consensus percentage of whether that WR is capable of churning out a WR1 season.
Each of these WRs brings a bit of optimism for 2024 and our job is simply to lay out the “path” to a top-12 finish. This journey ultimately comes down to projecting their target share, depth of those targets, receptions, yards, and TDs for the upcoming season. All of these statistical categories are defined and explained in this article.
Let us know on Twitter who your long shot WR1 candidates are using the #PathtoWR1 and tagging @TheFFBallers.
Range of Outcomes Is the Name of the Game
This is a phrase we mention often: a range of outcomes.
Whether people like to admit it or not, projecting fantasy point totals is a guessing game. We forecast usage while also acknowledging the fact that we don’t have all the info. There are many offensive situations where predicting player usage has to be met with humility. We don’t know everything and we shouldn’t pretend we do. I wrote an article entitled Forecasting 101: How to Project NFL Offenses Knowing You Could Be Wrong which highlights some of those points. There isn’t a perfect method but we are trying to set expectations regarding the possible results of a player while also recognizing there are so many more variables at play in football outside of our control. Whether it is off-the-field issues or issues with the coaching staff, each player also has intangibles that are immeasurable.
Ask yourself the following questions trying to write down anything from generalized reactions to actual counting fantasy numbers.
- What is the most likely outcome?
- What is the best case scenario?
- What are you counting on for your team?
WRs are co-dependent on QBs. We also must maintain that none of this can be done in a vacuum as projecting one player’s ceiling can also forecast doom and gloom on a fellow teammate. For instance, if you’re projecting someone like Tetairoa McMillan to sneak into the WR1 territory in 2025, it inevitably must have an effect on his Panthers teammates. We need to consider Bryce Young‘s progression and the context of the Carolina offense instead of singling out only McMillan in our projections. Following the NFL Draft, our own Marvin Elequin penned a range of outcomes article on each of the major positions (2025 RBs, WRs, and TEs) using college production metrics to “bucket” the prospects with other players.
The goal of exploring a range of outcomes (and in this case the high-end) is to see how likely a WR can meet or exceed their draft position. That is how you spot draft values, swing for the fences, and cash in on the right player’s ceiling that wins you a league. What statistical marks does a WR need to hit and what metrics should we pay attention to?
WR1 Marks to Hit
We need to give ourselves a bar to compare with raw projections. I looked at the last decade and compared who finished as a top-12 WR just to outline the type of thresholds we’re looking for in projecting someone on the high-end range.
| Categories | 10-Year WR1 Averages |
| Targets | 146.1 |
| Receptions | 97.2 |
| Receiving Yards | 1305 |
| TDs | 9.3 |
If you zoom in on the last five years, the averages remain stable across all four categories mentioned. Remember, those are simply averages of the best WRs that fantasy football has to offer. Great seasons like CeeDee Lamb in 2023 or Cooper Kupp’s 2021 certainly can skew some of the data. Here are some of the WR1 statistical oddities worth mentioning:
- The value of a WR target has declined in the last few years. Zone Defenses have changed how offenses adjust their gameplans with more short-area targets. 11% of WR targets were Behind Line of Scrimmage each of the last two seasons, the highest since 2018.
This chart below is big and complicated but you can see each area of the field and the progression since 2018 league-wide:
- Two WRs finished inside the top-10 despite finishing with fewer than 1,000 receiving yards: D.K. Metcalf (967) in 2021 and Adam Thielen (925) in 2020.
- The lowest TD total for a WR1 over the last five years was six receiving TDs accomplished by 15 % of the WR1s in this timeframe including my dude Keenan Allen twice.
- The context of the season each WR is playing in makes a huge difference. For instance, Juju Smith-Schuster finished as the WR9 in 2018 despite seeing a whopping 166 targets. In fact, his 241 fantasy points would’ve been better than Chris Godwin‘s WR2 season just a year later. Christian Kirk was a WR1 in 2022 despite the fact his 11.9 fantasy points per game was the lowest of any WR1 in this sample. Ladd McConkey eeked his way in last year but the output was much lower than usual top-12 status.
The Path for WR1s
Let’s go into the why behind what we will be discussing in each WR1 profile. Some statistics are worth mentioning to “color in the lines” and yet statistically speaking, have little correlation with fantasy points.
This is a great quick reference chart to bookmark from Fantasy Points’ Ryan Heath:
Finally got around to re-running correlations to next year's FPG on almost every @FantasyPtsData stat for WRs.
+ First downs are still great, and I've loved seeing the increased usage of 1D/RR around the industry this year
+ Broadly, production > volume > efficiency pic.twitter.com/9wtVbhNEqn
— Ryan Heath (@RyanJ_Heath) April 22, 2025
Routes-Based Metrics
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. Please acknowledge how difficult tracking every single route in every single game in the NFL is and how it takes time and a desire for accuracy. In this study, I will mostly reference 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.
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. Here are the 2024 leaders in YPRR when 2 or fewer WRs were on the field compared to what they produced with 3+ WRs:
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 the the Bengals Andrei Iosvias who might be the best-conditioned players on the field (544 routes run!) 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, Iosivas might’ve been targeted just 11 % of the time, the lowest among qualifying players in 2024. I wrote a primer on this stat way 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%.
Here were the elite WRs earning a 28+ % TPRR in 2024:
You also have to ask questions to add context around TPRR:
- Is there competition for targets? Many offenses such as Philadelphia may have multiple high-end WRs with a super condensed target share. This is why dusties like Jahan Dotson can end up with 324 routes run with 3 WRs on the field but rank so low in TPRR at just 7.4% in 3-wide sets. Woof. In other words, other guys were commanding targets (A.J. Brown & DeVonta Smith) and Dotson’s 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-28 weeks.
- What type of routes are they running? The nine routes from guys like MVS or Mike Williams 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. If you want a deep diver on routes-based metrics, I wrote a big article earlier this offseason (Dynasty WR Thresholds That Matter) putting Year 1 & Year 2 WRs in certain “buckets”.
Rate Statistics
Apart from the routes-based metrics we frequently use
Target Share– The target share, also known as market share, reveals a team’s total passing output and gives us a clearer picture of that receiver’s importance to the passing game expressed as a percentage. Targets have the highest correlation year-to-year for fantasy simply by acknowledging how involved a player will be and how much percentage of the passing pie they get. While we cannot predict usage fully, it’s important to note that a majority of WR1s need to see upwards of a 20% target share. Anyone seeing close to 30 percent is in a different stratosphere and almost a near locked-in WR1 finish.
However, not every target share percentage is created equal. Seeing 23% in the Broncos offense in 2024 netted Courtland Sutton just 81 receptions (on 133 targets) while Wan’Dale Robinson of the Giants caught 13(!) more passes (on the same exact 133 targets) but only an 22.5% share. The percentage of the volume matters, especially because the Broncos were a balanced team ranking 18th in pass rate while the Giants were 7th. The size of the passing pies matter as I once detailed in Do Offenses Have Too Many Mouths to Feed?
Catch Rate– The catch rate of a WR shows how many of those targets get converted into receptions. We need these for projections-sake but for predictions-sake, it honestly doesn’t tell us a whole lot about WR1 status. This statistic is not as “sticky” as others with some year-to-year fluctuations and is not nearly correlative at all to fantasy productions compared to the other counting stats. In other words, year-to-year fluctuations do happen in catch rate.
Use catch rate to convert targets to receptions but don’t use this percentage to distinguish who a WR1 could be by any means. We must take into account the type of routes run by wide receivers. Amon-Ra St. Brown‘s 82 percent catch rate led all WRs in 2024 but when you think about the number of behind-the-line plays, drags, and slants, it’s not nearly as impressive. Compare that with the routes Malik Nabers ran and you can see that his 66 percent catch rate is actually nothing to shy away from especially considering his diverse route tree.
aDOT & Air Yards– Created by ESPN’s Mike Clay, the average depth of target (aDOT) is one of the better predictive metrics for WRs, especially over catch rate and yards per target. This stat is not dependent on the QB and captures that the depth of a receiver’s route is entirely about the pass-catcher. Wide receivers who run deeper routes and are targeted by the QB have opportunity for more yards. Sounds simple but remember, yards are more indicative of TDs despite the fact outliers such as Rashod Bateman‘s 2024 season when he had 9 TDs on just 67 targets. aDOT can stabilize fairly quickly for WRs at only ten games. For instance, a WR like Pickens has a career aDOT of 14.4. He has been consistently targeted down-the-field and therefore projecting within this range helps us with a piece of the puzzle in figuring out his yardage totals.
Another relevant metric in the family of aDOT is Air Yards. Essentially, think about Air Yards as the number of yards from point of release of the QB to the catch point- whether the ball is caught or not is irrelevant as air yards can be classified as “completed” or “incomplete”.
What air yards tell us isn’t only how far the ball traveled in the air but the yards a receiver could’ve gained if he caught the ball. For instance, Calvin Ridley‘s end-of-season yardage total (1017) looks meh and maybe disappointing if you consider he played all 17 games. It ranked 16th among WRs and Ridley felt like a middling WR3 for most of the year. However, he actually ranked #1in the league in total air yards with 1,836. What this tells us is that the Titans (and Will Levis) left a ton of yards on the field as Ridley’s catch rate (53.3%) and catchable target rate (59.2%) was incredibly low (97th among WRs) due to poor targets or deep shots that never came to fruition.
Air Yards aren’t a measure of how much distance the ball actually traveled. Instead, they measure the prospective yards a receiver would have produced if he caught the ball and then was immediately tackled. In other words, they are a measure of intentions, which for fantasy is where we can start our projections.
Counting Stats
Receptions– In order to project a player’s fantasy finish, we need to see the possible range of outcomes and if you live in a PPR league, you know receptions drive so much of what your WRs do. In PPR leagues, this is how to find undervalued target mavens such as Jerry Jeudy. As I stated earlier, projecting how a WR converts receptions from their targets isn’t an exact science. However, the goal of this series is to reveal a range of outcomes and not just one median projection. If I told you before the season that Tyreek Hill would finish with 81 receptions, you would’ve been jumping for joy. Tyreek ended up with one of the most inefficient seasons ever for a WR. Whoops. Receptions are part of the equation but the quality also matters.
Receiving Yards– Yards are another volatile statistic especially when you start using yards-per-catch (ypc) statistics to plug-and-play from previous years. There is variance. Changing a WR’s yards per catch can be the difference between another 1,000-yard season like Mike Evans or D.J. Moore‘s 966 despite the fact Moore saw 32 more targets and had 24 more receptions than Evans. When it comes to projecting yardage totals, we’re trying to highlight a healthy range based on the team’s total pass attempts and the historical data from previous years.
We can say about yards that the higher the amount, the more touchdowns we can expect, and candidates who are due for more TDs in 2025. Our own Marvin Elequin does a great job showing how TDs are volatile and that when you factor in expected fantasy points from 2023, yardage totals are a better stabilizing predictor. Players like Calvin Ridley or George Pickens are begging for some positive regression based on their opportunity and yardage (oh and those TDs). Eventually, things even out.
Touchdowns– Last but certainly not least is touchdowns. I wish I had a secret formula or years of data to prophesy this all-important category that makes or breaks your week. But finding the end-zone and predicting it is a fickle chore. As stated earlier, yards are a helpful marker towards projecting TDs for WRs. However, according to FantasyLabs, the Yards per TD rate has steadily declined over the last decade. Predicting TDs is a tough business.
How do we project TDs?
Well, a good starting place is finding a healthy mix of analyzing the offensive system, the QB’s TD rate, and the number of total team TDs you have to play around with. There needs to be some variance in play. Red-zone warriors can overcome age gaps. Some players are TD monsters every year (Davante Adams) while others have shown that six or seven TDs is their ceiling such as Keenan Allen. Find a range of outcomes for each player. Double-digit TDs aren’t unheard of for players like Mike Evans or maybe a massive 2nd year jump for someone like Malik Nabers in the TD department.
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