Positional overview and philosophy
Wide receivers are the lifeblood of a best-ball team. There’s no corner-cutting here. The WR pool is a fountain from which you need to drink deeply.
You don’t just want to keep up with the Joneses at wide receiver. You want to flaunt your wealth in front of the Joneses in the most ostentatious way possible. You want to drive slowly past the Joneses’ house in your new German sports car with the windows down and the music cranked up high — preferably something with heavy bass.
Pat Fitzmaurice’s Best Ball Wide Receiver Rankings & Tiers
Wide Receiver > Running Back
There are fantasy managers who are always going to prioritize RB over WR, and they’re set in their ways and can’t be convinced that WR is the more critical position in best ball. But make no mistake: Wide receiver is the more important position in best ball.
It’s simple math. You need to start three wide receivers, and you only need to start two running backs. You also have a flex position that a wide receiver can fill, so your lineup might include up to four WRs in a given week. That’s a big cannon, and you’re going to need a lot of gunpowder to fire it.
Wide Receiver Position Shallow or Deep?
The biggest fallacy in fantasy football, which you’ll hear every year, is that the wide receiver position is deep. This is false.
In a 12-team best-ball league, there will be at least 36 wide receivers starting every week. Some of the players who wind up manning the flex position are going to be wide receivers, too, so that means approximately 40-45 wide receivers every week whose scores count. That’s a considerable number. Then factor in injuries, which will make us dive even deeper into the WR pool.
There’s no way of knowing which player will end up in your flex spot in any given week, but you should probably plan on it being a WR, and I think that’s more realistic than thinking you will have a third RB in your flex most weeks. The injury and bust rates at the RB position are too high.
The folks at RotoViz.com have long preached the importance of winning “the race to the flex.” What they mean is that if you aggressively attack a single position early in a draft, you can have a very good player manning your flex position. (Obviously, we don’t know who our top scorers will be in any given week, but stay with me on this one.)
Let’s say you draft wide receivers with four of your first five picks, and you use your fifth-round pick to get your fourth WR — your flex guy. Here are the receivers with fifth-round ADPs in Fanball drafts: Amari Cooper, Amon-Ra St. Brown, Michael Thomas, Mike Williams, Marquise Brown, Jerry Jeudy, Elijah Moore, and Brandin Cooks. Not a bad group, huh? If one of those guys is your fourth WR, that means your flex WR will be better than some managers’ WR3s and maybe even some WR2s. You’ll literally be flexing on your opponents.
Keep grabbing those wide receivers early on. Stay ahead of the competition.
How Many Wide Receivers is Enough?
How many should you draft? Generally, try to get 8-9. Going with only seven WRs is risky — a couple of injuries could crush you. If the draft falls in such a way that you simply can’t resist the early-round value at other positions and you don’t have an edge at the WR position, you might want to draft 10 of them and hope quantity makes up for the lack of quality. I’ve seen people take 11 WRs in drafts, but that’s excessive.
Stacking Wide Receivers
I wrote about stacking in my positional overview of quarterbacks. The premise is that you want to pair quarterbacks and pass catchers from the same team because their success is correlated. If your quarterback throws a TD pass to one of your receivers, that touchdown is an especially impactful play for your team because you’re being doubly rewarded. The benefit also accrues over an entire season. Let’s say you draft new Jaguars WR Christian Kirk, and you draft Trevor Lawrence as your second quarterback. If Lawrence has a breakout season, Kirk will likely have a good season, too.
Capitalize on the power of stacking when shopping for receivers.
Factor in Absences
And as with other positions, downgrade wide receivers who will miss time. In conventional season-long leagues, you get replacement value from whoever you put into your lineup in place of an injured player. In best ball, an injury means one less player capable of contributing to your score. Injuries are going to pile up as the season wears on. Don’t compound your problems by rostering someone who will miss significant time with an injury.
Let’s look at some wide receivers to avoid and target in best-ball drafts.
Avoids
Jaylen Waddle (WR – MIA)
He’s still being drafted as a top-15 receiver, but Tyreek Hill‘s arrival will limit Waddle’s target upside, and it’s also going to limit the average depth of Waddle’s targets. As a rookie, Waddle had an aDOT of 7.1 yards. It would have been nice to see him get more high-value targets in 2022, but that isn’t likely to happen after Miami shoved in all the chips to land Hill, possibly the most dangerous deep-ball artist in the game.
DeAndre Hopkins (WR – ARI)
The league gave Hopkins a six-game suspension for violating its policy on performance-enhancing drugs. Name-brand value is why Hopkins continues to go in the fifth round of most drafts, and that’s too early for a guy who will miss that much time.
Chris Godwin (WR – TB)
Fade the injury optimism here. Godwin tore his ACL on Dec. 19. Recovery times for ACL tears are getting faster, and it’s possible we could see Godwin on the field in Week 1. But that’s a big leap of faith, and even if Godwin can play that soon, will he be 100% effective?
Tyler Lockett (WR – SEA)
Lockett has built goodwill with many fantasy managers in recent years, but are you willing to draft him in the WR3 range when he catches passes from Drew Lock or Geno Smith and shares targets with D.K. Metcalf?
Michael Gallup (WR – DAL)
Here’s another player recovering from a significant injury sustained late in the season. Gallup tore his ACL on Jan. 2 and could very well miss the start of the regular season. He currently has a 10th-round ADP.
Jameson Williams (WR – DET)
The electrifying rookie from Alabama is generating a lot of buzz. Still, Williams tore his ACL in the Jan. 10 National Championship Game against Georgia and had to be considered a long shot to take the field for the Lions in Week 1. Williams isn’t likely to be a high-volume receiver whenever he suits up in Honolulu blue for the first time.
Targets
Ja’Marr Chase (WR – CIN)
His overall ADP in Fanball drafts since April 25 is 8.7, so it’s not as if he’s being disrespected. I would take him either fourth or fifth overall, after Jonathan Taylor, Christian McCaffrey, Cooper Kupp, and Austin Ekeler. I’ve talked to some best-ball managers who hate picking in the middle of the first round, and Chase is the solution to that problem. He had 81-1,455-13 as a rookie and might only be scratching the surface of his talent.
Michael Pittman (WR – IND)
He had a hefty 25.7% target share for the Colts last year, and the only significant addition to Indy’s WR room was second-round rookie Alec Pierce. Pittman also gets what should be at least a slight QB upgrade, swapping out Carson Wentz for Matt Ryan.
Brandin Cooks (WR – HOU)
We keep drafting Cooks as a WR3, but he keeps producing like a WR2. He’s topped 1,000 yards in six of the last seven seasons, and he’s once again ticketed to be the alpha receiver in Houston.
Darnell Mooney (WR – CHI)
The Bears inexplicably failed to provide young QB Justin Fields with new pass-catching weaponry, save for overaged rookie WR Velus Jones, widely regarded as a third-round reach. That’s bad news for Fields but good news for Mooney investors. Last year, the underrated Mooney had 81-1,055-4 on 140 targets and might be in for even more targets in 2022.
Rashod Bateman (WR – BAL)
The trade that sent Marquise Brown to Arizona on the first night of the NFL Draft clears the runway for Bateman to take off in his second NFL season. High-volume TE Mark Andrews will catch plenty of passes this fall, but Bateman is the clear favorite to lead the Baltimore receivers in targets.
Allen Lazard (WR – GB)
It’s hard for people to get their heads around it, but the reality is that Lazard is probably going to be the de facto No. 1 receiver in Green Bay this season now that Davante Adams and Marquez Valdes-Scantling are out of the picture. Even if second-round rookie Christian Watson is a stud right away, Lazard should still be able to return a profit on his 12th-round price.
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Pat Fitzmaurice is a featured writer at FantasyPros. For more from Pat, check out his archive and follow him on Twitter at @Fitz_FF.
