Rookie Wide Receivers
The 2009 National Football League Draft took
place once again at the Radio City Music Hall in New York City in
late April. Year after year, once the draft is completed, analysts
try and determine who were the winners and losers on draft day. Once
training camps begin, fantasy sites and fantasy football managers
try to predict what impact newly drafted rookies will have on their
new teams. I was curious to find out whether rookie players were
generally overrated or underrated by the average manager in fantasy
drafts. In this article, I will compare the average draft position
for rookie wide receivers to their end of year ranking in fantasy
points (in a points per reception scoring system) in order to
determine whether or not rookie wide receivers are worth drafting.
For this analysis I decided to look at wide
receivers drafted in the first four rounds of the NFL Draft since
the year 2000. To be part of this analysis, the wide receivers had
to have been drafted in at least 5% of fantasy drafts according to
data from
myfantasyleague.com and had to play in at least one NFL game in
their rookie season. This left us with 70 rookie wide receivers to
analyze. As mentioned in my introduction, in order to determine if
rookie wide receivers are generally overrated or underrated, I am
comparing their ranking amongst other wide receivers before the
season (average draft position) and after the season (fantasy
points). Of the 70 rookie wide receivers since 2000, 28 of them
performed better than their average draft position which is equal to
40%. On the other hand, 41.4% of the non-rookie wide receivers
performed better than their average draft position since 2000. As
you can see, by drafting a rookie wide receiver, your chances to
make a good pick are 1.4% lower than by drafting a non-rookie wide
receiver.
It is evident that players drafted later in fantasy drafts are more
likely to improve than players drafted early because they have more
room to improve. One of the problems with the data presented above
is that the average draft position of rookie wide receivers is 61.9
while the average draft position for non-rookie wide receivers is
42.3. Therefore, instead of comparing the rookie wide receivers with
all wide receivers, I thought it would be fairer to compare them
with only the wide receivers that were between the 40th and 85th
wide receivers taken in fantasy drafts. This ensured that the
average of the average draft positions for both groups would be
around 62. By choosing only that group of wide receivers, the
percentage of non-rookie wide receivers that improved increased from
the original 41.4% to 46.8%. This means that your chances of making
a good pick in your fantasy draft decrease by 6.8% when you choose a
rookie wide receiver over a non-rookie wide receiver.
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