Only 28 active wide receivers have racked up at least 280 targets within their first three seasons in the league.
Among those 28, only 6 recorded a catch rate of at least 65%, and only 3 of those 6 averaged at least 8.0 yards per target.
All three of those wideouts are also still 26 years old or younger.
One is Keenan Allen, being drafted as the sixth wideout off the board in fantasy football, according to ESPN's Average Draft Position (ADP) data. One is Brandin Cooks, who is going as the WR25.
The third is the unheralded Jamison Crowder, who is being selected as WR45.
If you want to find a season in which Crowder didn't beat that WR45 mark, you have to go all the way back to his 2015 rookie campaign. In 2016, he finished as the WR31, and he stayed consistent with a WR33 finish in 2017.
Even with the changes to the Washington offense this season, Crowder has no business being taken so late in fantasy football drafts.
The Quarterback Change
Obviously, quarterback play is going to have a big impact on wide receivers. So if we're looking for a reason to explain Crowder's low ADP, Washington's move from Kirk Cousins to Alex Smith at quarterback is a top candidate.
And on the surface, it looks like there could be something to that. At numberFire we have a metric called Terrelle Pryor and Ryan Grant this summer. Neither saw a huge workload, but they did combine for 102 targets in 2017 -- accounting for 19.1% of the team's total.
The return of Jordan Reed doesn't look especially likely to cut into the available volume, either. He and Vernon Davis combined for 104 targets last season, and Reed has only ever eclipsed 100 targets once.
They have added Paul Richardson to the mix, and he does stand to eat up a fairly significant amount of the volume that Pryor and Grant's absences free up.
Looking at the way Alex Smith throws the football, however, we could quickly see Smith and Crowder become best friends.
Over the last three seasons, Cousins has yet to post an average depth of target (aDOT) below 8.0 yards, while Smith has not cracked 7.9
| Year | Smith | Cousins |
|---|---|---|
| 2017 | 7.9 | 8.0 |
| 2016 | 7.0 | 8.9 |
| 2015 | 7.2 | 8.1 |
| Total | 7.4 | 8.4 |
If we expand our view to their entire careers, things stay consistent, with Smith averaging a clip of 7.4 and Cousins an 8.4.
Washington has had at least three wideouts see 30-plus targets in each of the last three season (with four doing so in 2015 and 2017), and Crowder had the lowest aDOT of the group in all three years -- by a significant margin.
In 2017, his 7.1 aDOT was 27% lower than anyone else in the group, 2016's 8.1 was 21% lower, and 2015's 6.1 was 34% lower.
Depth of target is quite consistent year-over-year (as you can see with Smith's three-year average match up his career average), so it's a safe bet that Smith will continue to do a lot of his work underneath, where Crowder has proven himself more than capable. This positions Crowder to see yet another increase in market share.
Takeaways
As we all know by now, volume is king in fantasy football.
There's a real chance we see a slight drop in efficiency for Crowder thanks to the quarterback change, but as we saw, even the volume he put up over the last two years would leave him as a reasonable pick with his hugely deflated draft cost in 2018.
Crowder looks to be in line for a career year as far as volume goes, however, which makes him a no-brainer pick for as long as he's going outside of the top 35 or so wideouts.