NFL
Fantasy Football: 5 Wide Receivers Who Could Outscore Their Higher-Drafted Teammates
These five wideouts could potentially outperform their team's more highly coveted receivers, including Washington's Jamison Crowder.

Michael Crabtree, Oakland Raiders (ADP: 4.10​)

Teammate: Amari Cooper (ADP: 2.05)

It shouldn’t come as much of a shock that Michael Crabtree leads this list. Despite being drafted later than young stud Amari Cooper in each of the past two seasons, Crabtree has came out ahead of him in terms of PPR scoring in both times.

There’s no guarantee that’ll happen again this year, though. Cooper is entering his third season, which is commonly looked to as a breakout year for wide receivers (though that theory isn't necessarily a slam dunk). And, for what it's worth, our projections see Cooper entering the top-10 receiver crop this season, with Crabtree projected for a 15th-place finish.

But there's one particular trend that's persisted over the past two seasons that could again uproot conventional wisdom. Let's look at our signature player performance metric, Net Expected Points (NEP). NEP provides context to traditional box score stats by quantifying player performance over expectation, which is set by historical down-and-distance data. You can learn more about NEP in Seth Roberts out-targeting him in this situation, all while matching or besting Crabtree's effectiveness.

Put simply, if Cooper sees the third-most red zone targets among Raiders wide receivers again in 2017, the chances of Crabtree out-scoring him again increases dramatically.

Prev Next

Related News

An Introduction to FanDuel Research

Jim Sannes  --  Aug 11th, 2017

The Late-Round Fantasy Football Podcast, Mailbag 7/21/23

JJ Zachariason  --  Aug 11th, 2017

The Late-Round Fantasy Football Podcast, Approaching Unique Leagues

JJ Zachariason  --  Aug 11th, 2017