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2009 Breakout Wide Receivers

Draft Recommendation: Wide receivers who have between two and five years of experience in the NFL with a low touchdown to reception ratio are the best breakout candidates.

The third year breakout wide receiver theory has become one of the most known theories by fantasy football players because of a few wide receivers who became dominant during their third season. Names like Braylon Edwards, Lee Evans and Javon Walker come to mind. Many fantasy football sites such as FFToolbox publish a list of third year wide receivers every year which leads fantasy players to draft them earlier than they should. In this article I decided to look at all wide receivers in years two through five in order to see if there are actually more third year wide receivers that breakout than receivers in their second, fourth or fifth year. Moreover, I looked at the WRs that did breakout and tried to find criteria that differentiate WRs that do breakout from the ones that do not.

It is important to clarify that I am using the term breakout a little loosely and I still include WRs who might have had a strong rookie season, a difficult second season and a solid third season. The two criteria that a wide receiver had to respect to be considered a breakout wide receiver are:

-At least 150 points in a point per reception scoring system
-An increase of at least 40 points per 16 games or a 25% increase in points per 16 games.

I used different criteria depending on the years of experience of the wide receivers but in general, receivers that had a lower number of touchdowns and whose yards per reception average was not too high were more likely to breakout.

Here are the candidates for 2009 along with their percentage chance to breakout, assuming they play at least ten games and have 300 receiving yards:

Second year – 43.5%: Davone Bess, DeSean Jackson, Donnie Avery, Harry Douglas and Jordy Nelson

Third year – 33.7%: Anthony Gonzalez, Chansi Stuckey, Jason Hill, Steve Smith (Giants) and Ted Ginn

Fourth year – 37.7%: Devin Hester, Domenik Hixon, Greg Camarillo, Hank Baskett, Jason Avant and Santonio Holmes

Fifth year – 35.2%: Brandon Jones, Braylon Edwards, Mark Bradley, Mark Clayton, Nate Washington and Rashied Davis

You might have noticed that the third year wide receivers have the lowest breakout rate and that there is absolutely no reason to believe that the third year wide receiver breakout theory is a good one.

We mentioned in our article on the inconsistency of TD numbers that you will usually want to draft players that had a lower number of touchdowns because it is such an inconsistent statistic. Very few (if any) experts discuss the touchdown to reception ratio but I wanted to see if it could allow us to find breakout receivers. I decided to look at all receivers in their second, third, fourth and fifth year that played a somewhat important role with their team in the previous season but did not get in the end zone for any possible reason (low TD per reception ratio).

Since 1990, 87 receivers have respected our criteria and 37 of them had breakout seasons for a very impressive 42.5%. If you look at receivers who had a higher TD per reception, they only broke out 26.1% of the time.

In 2009 there are ten receivers that respect our criteria, nine of which were mentioned earlier in the article: Braylon Edwards, Davone Bess, DeSean Jackson, Devin Hester, Domenik Hixon, Donnie Avery, Greg Camarillo, Steve Smith, Ted Ginn and Steve Breaston (the only new name on the list).

Unfortunately it is not enough to know which players might breakout and it is also important to consider where the average manager will draft those players as well as the current situation for all of these players with their respective teams. All of this will be analyzed in a later article but for now you should keep in mind the names I mentioned and maybe bump them up a few spots in your rankings.

See the complete analysis