Ian Allan

With fantasy football, people like to toss around a lot of ideas that simply aren’t true. You often hear people say that there’s no difference between kickers or that it’s just luck at that position. That simply isn’t true. Also false is the notion that running backs tend to hit the wall at 30; if you look at the numbers, it’s more accurate to say that running backs tend to hit the wall at 31.

In the chart below, I’ll address the notion that wide receivers tend to “break out” in their second season. Again, not true. When you actually get the numbers out and start looking at them, you’ll see that years 4, 5, 6 and 7 actually tend to be the best ones for wide receivers.

For this mini-study (I’m looking at just a small slice of data) you’ll see that while receivers tend to do better in the second seasons – presumably because they have a better grasp of the team’s offense – they do even better in their third seasons, and it’s not until year 4 that they really start playing their best ball.

I looked at all wide receivers from the last 25 years. Of this group, 224 times a player either caught 90-plus passes or scored at least 10 TDs. I’ll admit it’s arbitrary, but we’ll call that a “breakout” season. If you look at the chart below, you’ll see that only seven wide receivers have put together one of those big-time seasons. There is a jump to 16 receivers in the second year, but there’s another jump up to 21 in the third year. And it’s in year’s four and five, with 32 and 28 receivers, that you see the most of these types of seasons.

So it’s overly simple, at least in my opinion, to go into a fantasy draft with the mindset that there are going to be second-year receivers who will “break out”. Every receiver is different, and they develop at different rates in different offenses.

BIG SEASONS BY WIDE RECEIVERS, 1984-2008
A glance at where the best seasons by wide receivers occurred in their careers. At left is the season of the player (1 = rookie, 2 = 2nd-year player, etc.). At right is the number of players meeting the threshold (90-plus catches or 10-plus TDs). This has occurred 224 times in the last 25 years.

  Yr    No
    1    7
    2  16
    3  21
    4  32
    5  28
    6  24
    7  24
    8  20
    9  14
  10  16
  11     9
  12     5
  13     5
  14     2
  18     1

BIG SEASONS BY WIDE RECEIVERS, AGE
The same chart as above, but by player age rather than NFL year. Only 3 21-year-old receivers have managed to catch 90 passes or score 10 TDs. Only 10 22-year-olds have met the threshold, and so on. Most of the big seasons were achieved by 26- and 27-year-olds.

  Age  No
  21     3
  22  10
  23  13
  24  16
  25  24
  26  27
  27  32
  28  16
  29  20
  30  21
  31  19
  32     9
  33     8
  34     5
  35     2
  36     0
  37     0
  38     0
  39     1

—Ian Allan

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