Welcome back to another edition of our fantasy football analysis!
Today, we're diving into the world of the NFL Draft, with a targeted focus of wide receiver draft capital. We'll sift through the data, exploring patterns and correlations to uncover insights the NFL draft provides us for our Fantasy Football rookie drafts. This will be the first such blog post that dives into NFL Draft information - combine data will be included in follow-up posts as well!
The data includes drafts from the year 2000; however, the data source I'm using appears to have missing information from some of the earlier drafts during this time period, so some of the percentages might not be fully accurate. Additionally, it includes players who are still active. This means rookies and other young wide receivers who may still deliver a career best year. That being said, I believe this exploration should serve as a solid basis for understanding the relationship between NFL Draft capital and Fantasy Football success rate.
When looking at fantasy success, we must first define what we call fantasy success. For the purposes of the upcoming tables and plots, fantasy success is for a wide receiver to post at least one WR4 or higher season. In other words, a player will be marked as tier 1 if their best season in their fantasy career is a WR1 finish, tier 2 if their best season in their fantasy career is a WR2 finish, and so on. Not the highest bar, but that means they had at least one season where they were useful as a flex play in most leagues.
If we break down the data by round and success tiers, we end up with the following success rate stats:
You are likely getting a decent wide receiver in round 1, as there's about a 40.54% chance they end up with at least one WR1 season and about 14.86% chance they end up with at least one WR2 season. So, if you draft a wide receiver with first round draft capital, they chances of them putting up at least one WR1 or WR2 season is about 55.45%. Not horrible from an otherwise blind perspective - you still have a better shot than a dart throw of getting a useful player in fantasy there.
Now, while the overall success odds decrease a little bit in round 2 - the success rate is spread out a little more, with about a 24.71% chance of getting a WR1 season and about a 14.12% chance of getting a WR2 season. Overall, you have roughly a 63.53% chance of getting at least one useful fantasy season here. Not horrible, but also not ideal.
Round 3 is where the dart throw might not be worth it. You still have about a 16.67% chance of getting a WR1 season, but your overall success rate has dropped to 45.83%. We need more information to be successful when drafting from this crop of players.
Rounds 4 and 5 are were the chances of success drastically diminish. Less than one out of three wide receivers taken here in the NFL draft have a useful fantasy season.
Interestingly enough, you have a higher chance of a successful fantasy wide receiver if they were drafted in round 5 instead of round 4. This not only applies to higher end talent, i.e. players who had at least one WR1, but also to overall success rate. So, 10.41% of wide receivers in round 5 put up at least one WR1 season, compared to 4.69% in round 4, and 29.16% of round 5 wide receivers succeed compared to 25.01% of round 4 receivers that succeed.
So, I guess the glimmer of hope is that for the fantasy cost of a wide receiver taken in rounds 4 or 5, you might get some good bang for your buck, as one out of 4 in each round should have at least one useful season.
Round 6 and 7 wide receivers almost never succeed, with about 12.73% succeeding in round 6 and 9.3% in round 7. That being said, your odds of getting a WR1 season out of a round 7 pick is higher than round 6 and almost equal to round 4 - the difference being about 0.036%.
A summarized table of success and bust rate by round:
For those who are more visual learners and would like to see success rate against draft round:
Alternatively, success rate against the best finish to a season a wide receiver has:
Lastly, a bar plot of bust rate:
So, if we are blind to all other information, your best bet of getting a fantasy relevant wide receiver is by far from grabbing a receiver drafted in rounds 1 or 2. You will also have slightly less than a 50% chance to find useful fantasy receivers that were drafted in round 3. The rest, without any other data, is pretty much a crapshoot.
For alternative visuals of the two plots above, please visit the appendix.
Given the first, second, and third round offer decent chances of getting at least one season of a fantasy relevant player, let's dive deeper and see what the breakdown of success rate is by draft position.
Let's start with a table breaking down draft position in just the first round:
A wide receiver taken in the top 3 picks of the draft has always delivered a WR1 season. It's a small sample size of 4, but that is so information that bears relevance for this upcoming draft. I don't think I would shy away from MHJ if he were taken at 3 by the Patriots - I still would prefer he lands in Arizona or with the Chargers.
The distribution spreads out a lot more for picks 4 and 5, with the hit rate of a WR1 season dropping to 50%. A wide receiver taken here still has delivered at least a WR3 season, so it seems a receiver taken at 4 or 5 still provides a fantasy starter - not bad. It must be noted the sample is also tiny here, at 6.
Picks 6-10 drop in quality a bit, but the chances of getting a WR3 season or better from a player here is about 78.57%, and the chances of getting at least a WR2 season is about 50%. Still likely to get a quality starter here at some point, based on the historical data. Sample size of 14 is also a bit better here, but not ideal.
Things get interesting at the 11-15 picks. The overall success rate drastically drops to about 55.56%, which is the worst percentage until picks 81-96, of the bins created. It is a pretty noticeable outlier. Makes me wonder if this is the range where teams tend to reach for players.
Pick bins 16-20 and 21-32 are pretty similar to 6-10. The overall success rate of both of these bins is lower than the 6-10 range, but in both cases it at or above 70%, which is only a 15% drop, or so, from the 6-10 range. Also, the odds of a WR1 season drop a bit in both of these bins, but the WR2 season percentage is higher, again compared to the 6-10 range. The sample size for picks 21-32 is quite good at 31 samples.
If we were to combine some of the bins to get larger samples sizes, we get the following table:
A top ten pick is still likely to deliver excellence in fantasy. Picks 11-20 drop off quite a bit, although there's a higher than 50% chance of getting a WR1 or WR2 season from a receiver drafted here. The tail-end of the first round, picks 21-32, offer better success odds overall and for a WR1 season. So, there does seem to be something happening with those mid-first-round wide receiver picks.
Now looking at rounds two and three:
Round two seems to have a good overall success rate in both pick ranges 33-48 and 49-64, with the former being as about 64.10% and the later at 62.22%. It seems like the back half of round two offers more elite talent, with more WR1 seasons and a better hit rate than the first half of round two. That being said, picks 33-48 are more balanced and offer success across the board.
The first half of round three is pretty comparable to all of round two, with a total success rate of about 59.38%. It seems that the chances of a WR1 and WR3 season are lower here, but this pick range has a higher chance of getting a WR2 season, than any of the round two ranges, with 18.75%. Additionally, a WR4 season is equally likely. A fantasy asset does seem somewhat likely to come out of the first half of round three.
The second half of round 3, with picks 81-96, offers about a 30% chance of getting a WR1 or WR2 season, but the overall success rate drops to a little under 42%. For a receiver drafted here, that's not a terrible risk for such a high reward.
It seems there is good value to be had from wide receivers drafted from late round one, round two and round three. To better see the overall success and bust rates from these pick ranges, here is a summarized table of hit rates and bust rates for the bins analyzed above:
Those hit rates are encouraging for round 1 and 2 picks. I would even feel somewhat confident grabbing a receiver that is drafted in the first half of round 3.
For a more visual perspective, a plot displaying hit rate against draft position:
Additionally, hit rate against best fantasy season:
There's confidence to be had with taking a receiver that has been drafted in the first two rounds. Moreover, there is value in early third round guys. Useful information to know.
With that, the analysis on draft capital for wide receivers has been completed. I think there's a few things to mention and summarize before ending the article.
First, round one wide receivers, specifically top ten wide receivers, usually turn into usable fantasy asset at some point in their career. That being said, not all round one wide receivers are the same. It seems that the top five picks are safe assets, and the same can be said for picks 6-10. Picks 11-15, for some reason, appear to be just slightly better than a 50-50 bet. From 16 onward, the wide receiver tends to be a safe asset, offering opportunities for good value picks in rookie drafts.
Second, round two and the first half of round three receivers have solid hit rates, once again providing an opportunity for good value in rookie drafts. The remaining rounds are very much a crapshoot, but round five does tend to offer more value than round four - again, another chance to capitalize on arbitrage.
Lastly, I would like to point out that these are correlations and historic patterns that I am observing. I am not proving or showing causation. Although there might be some degree of causation involved, as NFL teams are more likely to spend higher draft capital on better talent, that evaluation process is not entirely objective.
So, these numbers should serve more as useful information and factors to take into account, rather than deciding how you should select and evaluate your rookies. As a proxy, blind draft capital appears to be a valid strategy for hitting on players; however, the goal will be to use this as a building block to obtain more interesting and valid indicators of potential success for rookies.
I hope to see you all in the next piece, thanks for reading!
Cheers,
Alex