If you’re like most fantasy players, the early portion of this week has been all about the waiver wire and what you can do to improve your team by picking up the best available players from week 1. Even if you wind up adding the player(s) you want the chances are it will come at some expense: You might have to sacrifice your waiver priority or you’ll have to blow some of your waiver budget. Either way, you probably wish you had added a player or two from this week’s top waiver wire pickups before the games were played in week 1.

With this in mind, we thought it would be interesting to take a look at which fantasy experts were believers in this week’s hot waiver wire additions last week based off of each expert’s week 1 player rankings. The experts in this list can officially say “I told you so!” and we won’t hold it against them since they were touting these players before everyone else.

Top Waiver Wire Pickups

Player: Legedu Naanee (WR), San Diego
Expert Consensus Rank: WR #49
Early Believer: FantasyFootball.com (WR #31), Fantasy Sharks (WR #35), FantasyCafe (WR #35)

• Naanee burst onto to the scene vs. the Chiefs by racking up over 100 receiving yards and a touchdown. While FantasyFootball.com ranked him the highest among our tracked fantasy experts, it’s also worth noting that Fantasy Sharks was ahead of the curve by being the only expert to predict that Naanee would outperform Dwayne Bowe for the week.

Player: Darren McFadden (RB), Oakland
Expert Consensus Rank: RB #33
Early Believers: David Dodds – FootballGuys (RB #14), Sigmund Bloom – FootballGuys (RB #14)

• In years past, McFadden has been one of “those guys” for fantasy owners. You know, the type of player that gets drafted relatively high based on potential yet never pans out, making fantasy owners wonder why they suckered themselves into drafting him in the first place. Whether or not this season turns out to be McFadden’s breakout remains to be seen but both David Dodds and Sigmund Bloom were all over his solid performance on Sunday (95 rushing yards, 1 TD). Both experts noted the opportunity McFadden had with teammate Michael Bush out of action and they correctly ranked him in their top 15 RBs.

Player: Austin Collie (WR), Indianapolis
Expert Consensus Rank: WR #60
Early Believer: Walter Cherepinsky – Walter Football (WR #37)

• Collie was so lightly thought of in week 1 that he went unranked by over 40% of the experts that we monitored. 11 catches, 163 receiving yards and 1 TD later and we quickly realize that Collie won’t have any issues getting ranked by all the experts in week 2. Walter Cherepinsky from Walter Football was one of the few experts to see Collie’s week 1 potential as he ranked him a full 23 spots better than the expert consensus. In fact, Cherepinsky was the only expert to rank Collie ahead of Mike Sims-Walker (JAC). Considering that Sims-Walker had as many fantasy points as you and me combined on Sunday, this turned out to be pretty good advice.

Player: Nate Washington (WR), Tennessee
Expert Consensus Rank: WR #56
Early Believer: FantasyFootball.com (WR #23)

• Nate Washington is another wide receiver on our list and he seemingly came out of nowhere to turn in a solid performance in week 1 (88 yards receiving, 1 TD). FantasyFootball.com was the lone site to have an early read that Washington could be in for a productive day. The gap between their rank and the Expert Consensus Rank for Washington was a massive 33 spots. Even the next closest rank to FantasyFootball.com’s (#39 from Mike Krueger – FFToday) represented a difference of 16 rank slots. Simply put, FantasyFootball.com was ahead of the curve on this one while Washington’s performance caught almost everyone else off guard. I think this is where Chris Berman comes in and says in the odd tone that only he knows how to use: “THAT’s why they play the games.” Indeed it is, Chris.

Player: Peyton Hillis (RB), Cleveland
Expert Consensus Rank: RB #41
Early Believer: Fantasy Sharks (RB #19)

• Hillis is another player that few expected much production out of in week 1. He was unranked by nearly a third of the experts we monitored yet Fantasy Sharks had him ranked as a viable starter as their #19 RB. This turned out to be good advice as Hillis’ performance resulted in him being the #15th ranked RB in terms of fantasy points for the week (using Yahoo! STD scoring).

Additional Popular Waiver Wire Pickups

If you’re curious about how the experts stack up for the other popular additions of the week, just click each player’s name below to get an instant read on which expert had the player pegged correctly:

Mark Clayton (WR, STL)
Brandon Lloyd (WR, DEN)
Steve Breaston (WR, ARI)
Eddie Royal (WR, DEN)
Fred Taylor (RB, NE)
Matt Hasselbeck (QB, SEA)
Marcedes Lewis (TE, JAC)
David Garrard (QB, JAC)
Jermaine Gresham (TE, CIN)

As you might have noticed, this list doesn’t include players who are being picked up primarily due to injuries (Michael Vick, Brandon Jackson, etc). The rationale here is that it’s difficult to predict injuries in advance so it’s best to leave those players out of an analysis like this. Also, please note that all of the rankings above were taken from rankings that were published prior to the Thursday night game.

Feel free to let us know your thoughts and whether or not you think we’re missing someone important. And stay tuned if you like keeping up with the accuracy tracking of fantasy experts because very soon we’ll be releasing the complete week 1 accuracy results by position for all of the experts in our study.

Photo Credit: Link