This week on The Edge with Micah Parsons, Dallas Cowboys WR CeeDee Lamb went through his top five receivers in the NFL, and as is the case with any sort of ordered list, it was the topic of debate.
You’ll often see active athletes rank their favorites among their contemporaries, but there is usually an outlier name that pops up due to personal experience or something else that is hard for us as outsiders to grasp.
That wasn’t the case with Lamb, as he put together a list that isn’t all that different from what fantasy football analysts put out there. So that had me wondering, might Lamb be an undercover fantasy expert?
CeeDee Lamb’s WR Rankings
When asked by Parsons to give his top five NFL wide receivers, Lamb responded with Davante Adams, Tyreek Hill, Stefon Diggs, Ja’Marr Chase, and Justin Jefferson.
Did CeeDee cook? 👀 pic.twitter.com/8UIl3RF4L4
— B/R Gridiron (@brgridiron) February 15, 2024
It may have seemed on the podcast as if he was coming up with his top five off the top of his head, but as a man who went to college for communications and a proven savant in the art of the position (you don’t break the Dallas Cowboys record for a single season in both receptions and yards by accident), I think Lamb’s got a method to his ordering of today’s best wideouts.
So I dug in.
My goal was to find a combination of statistics over an extended period of time that would help me reverse engineer Lamb’s rankings in order — and I did it!
- Receptions
- Receiving yards
- Receiving yards on deep passes
- Receiving touchdowns
- Red-zone touchdowns
By evaluating rankings at the position over the past five seasons on a per-game basis (minimum 30 games played) in these categories and summing them, I got the following results (remember that this is a ranking list, so lower numbers are better):
1. Davante Adams, sum of ranks: 15
2. Tyreek Hill, sum of ranks: 27
3. Stefon Diggs, sum of ranks: 34
4. Ja’Marr Chase, sum of ranks: 36
4. Justin Jefferson, sum of ranks: 36
Did I crack the Lamb ranking algorithm? Probably not, but it’s an interesting thread to pull.
My next question — using this logic, where would Lamb rank himself? Here’s the rest of the top 10 if we extend this style of ranking:
6. Cooper Kupp: 40
7. Mike Evans: 48
8. Calvin Ridley: 61
9. A.J. Brown: 64
10. CeeDee Lamb: 74
10. DeAndre Hopkins: 74
This isn’t a bad list in terms of raw talent, but Lamb is way too low on himself if we’re using my jerry-rigged ranking system to project how he’d round out his top 10 at the position. Lamb is my WR3 at the moment for 2024 (the exact spot where he ranks in half-PPR points per game since the beginning of 2022). Over that stretch, he’s the NFL league leader in:
- Receptions: 242
- Games with 10+ receptions: 10
- Games with 15+ half-PPR points: 20
This format of ranking is going to favor receivers with a résumé due to it going back five seasons and pulling per-game data. That got me thinking about the age curve at the WR position and its impact on efficiency. Over the past decade:
- WRs under 25 years old: 1.38 points per target
- WRs aged 25-27 to open the season: 1.41 points per target
- WRs aged 28-30 to open the season: 1.39 points per target
- WRs 31+ yards old: 1.33 points per target
The drop in production at receiver is nothing like that at running back over the same stretch. Over that stretch, 135 times has a running back touched the ball 250 times in a season, and 147 times has a receiver seen at least 130 targets.
The two events happen with similar frequency when looking at the league as a whole, but the age distribution is, of course, considerably different:
- Percentage of 250-touch RBs aged 28+ years old: 16.3%
- Percentage of 130-target WRs aged 28+ yards old: 32%
Kupp, Evans, Hopkins, and Adams are all top-10 receivers by our Lamb ranking system, and they’re all at risk of seeing their fantasy ADP (average draft position) dip a little bit this summer due to them being on the wrong end of the age curve mentioned above.
I’m with Lamb here for the most part; aging receivers don’t scare me much in redraft leagues at the top of the board until I have tangible signs of decline.
MORE: Best Ball Fantasy WR Rankings 2024
Are you interested in drafting the elder statesmen that grade out well? Will we see a downtick production, or are these alpha receivers poised to continue piling up stats?
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