Aside from a couple of names at the top, the list of wide receivers having massive fantasy football seasons looks very different than previous years. Matt Harmon investigates.
As December rolls on and yet another NFL campaign begins to wind to a close, we’re close to full-season sample sizes on some players. The typical retrospective analysis of players is beginning to take place. “This guy is the fifth-highest scoring fantasy player at his position” or “he is sixth in the league in receiving yards.” You know the drill.
It may be more futile than ever to compare players statistically within one specific position group without looking at the historical context.
You’re correct if you feel like 2024 has been a down year for wide receivers. Without question, we aren’t getting the same elite level of production at the top of the league that we’ve seen in recent seasons.
That list is a week old, but even if you take a player like Jerry Jeudy’s updated receiving yard line of 944, fourth-best in the league, and stack it back to last season’s results through 14 weeks, he would rank 14th. It would rank ninth in 2022, 11th in 2021 and 12th in 2020.
We currently have just two 1,000-yard receivers in the NFL through 14 weeks. There were 11 in 2022, eight in 2021 and nine in 2020.
Some of the yardage marks in my X post above are arbitrary cutoffs — welcome to the unavoidable reality of NFL data analysis where the decisions on what’s “meaningful” are utterly subjective — but that doesn’t make the overall point any less instructive. The distribution of guys in that 700-plus yard range is relatively flat year-to-year. We aren’t short on overall impactful receivers; we’re just missing the elite producers at the very top of the position.
There are just two receivers over 190 fantasy points this season and there were eight through 14 weeks last season. After a raucous second-half-of-the-season tear, Seahawks wide receiver Jaxon Smith-Njigba is the WR6 in half-PPR fantasy scoring. His 161.7 points would place him at WR15 last season. It’s just not the type of leaderboard we were expecting to see.
So, what’s going on with wide receivers? Is this the beginning stages of a shift across the league, the results of a big-picture trend or just bad luck for wideouts? Let’s dive in.
We’ll begin with the big-picture topics. Much was made of the decline of offensive football at the beginning of the season. That seems a little silly now in the light of some massive offensive games we’ve seen in recent weeks but it was a major talking point in September because of some of the defensive creativity put on film by certain coordinators.
Yet, as expected, with the season winding down, we are not in some lack of scoring crisis. NFL teams are averaging 22.8 points per game this season, which is up from 2023 and 2022. Receiving touchdowns per game (1.42) are also slightly up from the previous two seasons but rushing touchdowns per game (0.97) are at the highest mark we’ve seen since 2020 (1.04).
Whenever there are any offensive struggles in the NFL over the last few years, many people are quick to blame the influence of a recent mini-revival in defensive coordinators implementing more Cover 2 and more diverse two-high safety looks. Certainly, masterminds on defense are implementing more complex coverage packages, but “two-high” specifically as the boogeyman is an oversimplification. At the very least, it doesn’t hold up as the root cause for the lack of wide receiver production this year.
Per TruMedia, Cover 3 (34.1%) and Cover 1 (20.6%) are still the most predominant coverages league-wide. Those looks feature a healthy sprinkling of man coverage or essentially become isolated matchups in a pre-snap zone look that becomes man-match-based on the route concept the offense throws at the defense. Any of those man or match coverage looks are typically where we see the traditional alpha receiver do most of their damage.
Offenses this year see Cover 2, on average, on 12.4% of plays, which is up only slightly from 2023 to 2020 (11%). According to Fantasy Points Data, defenses have used two-high safeties on 46.9% of opposing dropbacks, right in the same neighborhood as 2023 (47.5%) and 2022 (46.5%).
It’s safe to say that simply playing two deep safeties has not destroyed modern football.
Anecdotally, I’d say that offenses have struggled to combat some of the more creative blitz packages and simulated pressures from the advanced defensive play-callers more than usual this season. That has been a bigger problem for some of the less prepared offenses that simply can’t put their big-boy pants on and block it up.
Still, some of that has been an issue for teams on the negative end of the polar extremes. It’s hard to express this in league-wide data. Defenses blitz on 25.2% of dropbacks, which is in line with the previous three-year average of 25.7%. You can say the same for the 33.9% 2024 league-wide pressure rate vs. 33.9% from 2023 to 2021 and the 2.53 time to pressure vs. 2.52, per TruMedia. Even the prevailing defensive success rate of 58.3% is identical to the previous three-year average.
Overall, while there are a select handful of great and creative defensive play-callers making life difficult for quarterbacks, it doesn’t appear that a defensive revolution is the root cause for this lack of wideout production at the top of the league.
Offensively, some of the best teams have leaned into the run game to combat some of these modern defensive fronts. However, league-wide teams aren’t running the ball more than in recent years, as the 40.6% rushing play rate is identical to the previous three-year average. Efficiency isn’t much different either, as teams average -0.06 EPA per running back rush attempt this season compared to -0.07 over the last three-year average.
However, what has taken place at the top of the league is that the best teams in the league are leaning into diverse run games more often than in previous years. This is something you could see coming as a trend that would define this season, based on where the league was headed. Nate Tice and I discussed this on an offseason show this summer.
One of the key takeaways from that podcast was that some of the better rushing ecosystems across the league were set to be weaponized. We’ve watched teams in recent years be unwilling to settle for efficient production with adequate backs and instead push resources toward acquiring top talent to take things to a new level.
In my view, the 49ers were the first team to do this by trading for Christian McCaffrey and adding him to a run game that’s always good regardless of the back but became something special with a singular talent at the position. Detroit was one of the teams that followed suit by taking Jahmyr Gibbs to pair with David Montgomery behind an offensive line that could have created an efficient rushing attack with just about any back. The Falcons also followed suit in last year’s draft but didn’t get the full results of that until Bijan Robinson’s sophomore season.
The Ravens further weaponized their rushing game by adding Derrick Henry, the Eagles did it with Saquon Barkley and the Packers with Josh Jacobs. All of the teams just listed are among the top 11 offenses in rushing EPA and, outside of McCaffrey due to injury, have a top-level, productive back.
We have seen this pursuit by some of the top teams in football, combined with an inordinate run of good health at that position, impact individual running back production at the top of the league.
The run game is as vital as ever in recent seasons, but given that passing rates are still in the same ranges as we expect, I doubt that this is our smoking gun for the lack of elite wideout production.
Finally, let’s address what I really think is the root cause of all this: good old-fashioned bad luck.
We typically associate running backs with more injury risk, but health has been a more complicated factor for wide receivers this year. The four most efficient wide receivers in the NFL on a yards-per-route run basis are Puka Nacua (3.5), Nico Collins (3.58), Rashee Rice (3.27) and A.J. Brown (3.2). All four have missed multiple weeks, if not significant stretches of the season.
Brown has missed the fewest games of the bunch but has also played in an offense that’s gone away from the passing game thanks to their elite defense and running game with Barkley.
Nacua, Collins and Brown have the type of full-field, elite No. 1 skill set to fill in the production gap at the top of the wide receiver board leaderboard. I’d place all in my first tier “real-life rankings” when looking at the position. If they had played more games this season, they’d all be heavy favorites to be inside the top five in receiving yards. Rice isn’t quite in that group of players but he was going to smash this season absolutely. He was developing into the perfect big slot player to combat modern defenses.
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Another player in that same mold is Buccaneers wide receiver, Chris Godwin. You remember him: the guy who was a top-three fantasy receiver when he went down for the season in Week 7 and is one of the six wide receivers averaging over 80 yards per game this season (82.3).
Maybe Godwin would have slowed down over the course of the season; that is possible. However, I’d say there’s just as good of a chance he would have kept that pace up and had a power slot season akin to the one enjoyed by 2021 Cooper Kupp in this same offensive system.
As I’ve harped on repeatedly over the years, while receivers earn the opportunity and, therefore, production with their talent, the degree to which that scale tips is without question influenced by circumstances. Certain specific talents paired with the right ecosystem and offensive style can post elite-level stats even if their individual profiles wouldn’t place them on that tier. Rice and Godwin were two of the best bets to do it this year but watched their campaigns be cut short due to injury.
To continue the theme of bad luck, two receivers who had elite seasons in 2023, CeeDee Lamb (3.67 yards per route run, 4th) and Tyreek Hill (3.92 yards per route run, 1st) have not missed time with their own injuries, but they’ve played significant portions of the season without their starting quarterbacks. Hill and the entire Miami passing game went missing for months without Tua Tagovailoa under center. Lamb has been able to survive without Dak Prescott, but there’s no question that the current version of the offense does not have the same ceiling.
Also, perhaps for my selfish purposes, I’ll mention that from an efficiency standpoint, Brandon Aiyuk was right up there with many of the above names in 2023. While he wasn’t playing to that standard to start 2024, there’s no reason to think he wouldn’t have turned it around in the back three-quarters of the season. Unfortunately, he never made it to that point because he was also lost for the year in the first half of Week 7. Even if you didn’t think he would have a top-five season this year, he was a possible candidate to leap into the top 10, as was Mike Evans, Chris Olave and, based on the way he started the season, perhaps even rookie Malik Nabers. All four of these players missed multiple weeks of this season.
You can argue that I’m dealing in too many hypotheticals and small windows of missed time — that’s entirely possible as I’ve reached the Olave and Nabers portion of the program. But remember, the wide receiver position is consistently inconsistent in its production, and year-end results are boosted mainly by the presence or lack of spike weeks. We should all inherently know this but based on the way the public reaction of panic to mere variance at this position, it’s a lesson that bears repeating.
A few missed games here, much less a month-plus, can change the picture entirely. You don’t have to look any further than back to Jerry Jeudy, who ranks fourth in receiving yards right now but ranked a lowly 44th in Weeks 1 to 8. Three to four games worth of production, driven exclusively by a quarterback change, completely altered the full-season picture of his campaign. That’s how it goes.
I have some of what I’ll call “pet theories” about the influx of talent at the position that has caused teams to spread the wealth more in the passing game. At some point, with all of these high-end wide receivers entering the draft in almost every single class, there’s just going to be too many guys in receiver rooms and not enough footballs to go around. That’s trickier to quantify and frankly, it doesn’t appear to be impacting the opportunity for top-level wideouts when they’re on the field.
If anything, I think we’re seeing that impact rookie receiver production, considering the depth of the 2024 class looks a bit disappointing from a production standpoint after Year 1, and it may also increase the volatility of Tier 2 and 3 receivers, as the chart shared by Hayden Winks above expresses. Those are pursuits to explore at another time.
In total, it feels rather simplistic to just end this pressing questions about elite wide receiver production with a conclusion that centers around small twists of fate, where top-level wideouts faced bad injury luck and running backs didn’t this year. Alas, that’s where the data, film and anecdotal evidence seems to point us.
While 2024 looks like it will be a down year for wide receivers at the tippy-top of the league, I’m not convinced it will be instructive for future seasons.
