Pat Fitzmaurice has gone position-by-position to provide you with fantasy football draft strategy and advice. Here’s how Fitz is preparing for his fantasy football drafts. His primers include fantasy football draft strategy, targets, rankings, tiers, and more.
Here are each of Fitz’s complete Fantasy Football Draft Primers: QB | RB | WR | TE
Below we dive into some of his fantasy football draft strategy and advice.
- Fantasy Football Draft Kit
- Fantasy Football ADP
- Best Fantasy Football Tools
- Free Fantasy Football Mock Draft Simulator
Fantasy Football Draft Strategy & Advice: Wide Receivers
Let’s explore some fantasy football draft strategy and advice from Pat Fitzmaruice.
Wide Receivers
The most important setting is the number of wide receivers you have to start each week.
If you’re only required to start two wide receivers, it’s OK to be somewhat laissez-faire in your approach to drafting wide receivers. It’s acceptable to merely keep pace with your competitors at the WR position, provided you’re building positional advantages elsewhere.
But if you’re required to start three receivers, you should invest heavily in the WR position.
Wide receiver is a crucial position in 3WR leagues simply because receivers make up such a large percentage of your starting lineup. If your league requires you to start 1 QB, 2 RBs, 3 WRs, 1 TE and 1 FLEX, at least 37.5% of your non-defense, non-kicker starters will be WRs. That percentage jumps to 50% if you put a WR in the flex spot.
Your goal in 3WR leagues should be to overwhelm your competitors with superior WR firepower. Ideally, your WR4 will be better than everyone else’s WR3 and perhaps even better than some people’s WR2.
In my 3WR leagues, at least three of my first five draft picks are wide receivers, and in many drafts, four of my first six picks are receivers.
The scoring system is another important league setting.
Full-point PPR leagues tend to drive up the overall value of wide receivers — particularly the high-volume receivers. Standard (or, if you prefer, “non-PPR”) leagues reduce the overall value of receivers and close the gap between high-volume receivers such as Garret Wilson and lower-volume, big-play receivers such as Jameson Williams.
Wide Receivers Are (Usually) More Predictable Than Running Backs
If you want to ensure high-quality production from your wide receivers, you need to pay up because what you pay for at the WR position is usually what you get.
I say “usually” because last year was an atypical season in this regard.
As I mentioned in my 2025 Running Back Primer, the RB and WR positions had an atypical injury dispersion in 2024. Normally, the RB position has higher injury rates than the WR position.
But last season, Christian McCaffrey and Isiah Pacheco were the only quality running backs to miss significant chunks of the season due to injury. At the WR position, high-level performers Brandon Aiyuk, A.J. Brown, Nico Collins Stefon Diggs, Mike Evans, Chris Godwin, Tee Higgins, Puka Nacua and Rashee Rice all missed at least three games.
In most years, we’ll see running backs taken in the mid to late rounds of fantasy drafts emerge as impactful performers. It’s often because lead running backs get hurt and backups are thrust into important, fantasy-relevant roles.
Rarely do we see the same sort of thing at wide receiver. The only hugely pleasant surprise at wide receiver last season was rookie Brian Thomas, whose ADP in half-point PPR leagues was WR46, 109 overall. And perhaps we shouldn’t have been so surprised by Thomas, who was a first-round draft pick after all.
Check out Fitz’s full Wide Receiver Fantasy Football Draft Primer 
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