WR3 By Committee

Photo: Imagn Images

Over the past several seasons, there have been quite a few very popular articles that look at an interesting approach to building a fantasy team with late value picks. Based on the theory of using both Strength of Schedule ("SOS") and taking two players as a combination to build one very good starting duo, a committee can be built as a standard fantasy league strategy. In general, this is usually a wise move for some positions where depth is not as big of a concern (usually quarterbacks and defenses) because there is rarely a need to pursue an elite option at these positions early in the beginning stages of a fantasy draft.

So with this in mind, I started to think about what else can be done with the committee approach. Tight end? Perhaps. Running back? Maybe. Wide receiver? Hmmm, that's really intriguing, but we should probably look at say the third starting option - Fantasy WR3. What if you could grab two wide receivers later in the draft that could combine to perform on a WR3 - or even WR2 - level, based solely on their current projections and their schedule? Now we're talking. This really got my attention, so I went after this. Let's take a look at how I went about this and then we can digest and discuss the results.

ELIGIBLE RECEIVERS

So how to begin? Defenses and quarterbacks are relatively easy to committee together. There's usually only one quarterback and certainly only one team defense per NFL club, so the approach is pretty simple as far as picking out which players/teams to try and pair up. When it comes to wide receivers, the line is not quite so easy to draw, but I needed some basis to pick which players it made sense to try and combine for a decent committee. I decided that I would use the following criteria to decide which players to start with for evaluating:

CRITERIA #1 - WR37 AND BEYOND

This seems pretty simple. If we want to have a duo that puts up WR3 numbers, that means we want WR36 or better production - else we would just draft WR36 or higher and forget the whole idea. So here is the list of players with which I started, based on their average draft position (ADP):

Table 1: Wide Receivers WR37-WR60 Based on ADP

Notice that the list goes past WR60 since some wide receivers in the WR61-WR75 range had projections comparable or better than WR60, so they deserved to be included (and highlighted for your drafting benefit).

Now we have 27 guys to pair up and see how they do. That makes 351 potential committees, so there had better be a decent one (or several, we hope) out of all of those couplets. Now, before I go over the method of how to pair them up and the results, we need one more rule:

CRITERIA #2 - NO MORE THAN ONE WR FROM ROUND 7 AND ONE FROM ROUND 8

This could get tricky here, but understand the overall goal. The point of WR3BC is to free up the first six rounds of your fantasy draft to pursue two or three receivers after grabbing a stud running back in Round 1. After six rounds you can have two or three running backs, two or three wide receivers and possibly even a stud quarterback or tight end, depending on your personal preference, or even to get your WR3 and then have the WR3BC be your WR4. Flexibility is the name of the game here. We all want value in our drafts, and having the ability to grab two WRs in Rounds 7 and 8 to act as our WR3BC gives us that ability.

There is some good news – all of the WR3BC candidates have ADPs that put them in Round 8 or later, and only two of the wide receivers - Sterling Shepard (ADP 91) and Larry Fitzgerald (ADP 93) - are in Round 8 itself. There are some other wide receivers that might go in Round 8 (slightly earlier than ADP), so planning on taking two of them could leave you scrambling for your ninth pick if you wait too long for your WR3BC choice. We will have to keep all those details in mind when we look at the WR3BC result because it would not make sense to expect two of these receivers to make it into a committee combination based on their ADP.

So what do we do now to figure out some WR pairs?

CRITERIA #3 - USE FOOTBALLGUYS WR STRENGTH OF SCHEDULE

This sounds pretty simple, doesn't it? Just take the wide receiver strength of schedule to figure out when certain players are more likely to score well. The method here is similar to what the Projections Dominator and Draft Dominator do for you - take the projected fantasy points and slice them up over 17 weeks based on the strength of schedule, which can be called the distributed fantasy points for each wide receiver.

After the distributed fantasy points were tabulated for all 27 receivers on a weekly basis, the next step is to just compare all of the possible running back pairs to find the best duos for WR3BC. So here we are - time for some results.

Table 2: Wide Receiver #3 Committee Pairs

Okay, that is a really big table, but the plan here was to be thorough. As you can see, we have some very good pairs to select from for WR3BC. So digging in, there are 99 pairs in Table 2 to consider, so there are a number of options. Let's also take a look at how often some of these guys show up on the table:

Table 3: Wide Receiver #3 Committee Pair Appearances by Player

That is a pretty big result, with five receivers on that list with double-digit appearances, so it is very likely that at least one or both of the WR3 committee duo will come from the top of Table 3.

PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER

Now that we have 99 possible pairs to consider, what exactly does that mean? Should we just take one of the best options on the list and call it a day? Well, yes and no. Remember our goal - find a pair of running backs that can combine for WR3 (or better) fantasy production. To figure that out we need a better metric, so here are the projections for WR1 through WR36 (and beyond):

Table 4: Projected Fantasy Points for WRs 10-36+

Based on Table 3, we see that WRs beyond the Top 10-15 are really jumbled based on their ADPs and projections. The Top 15 are all projected for 220+ points this season, with six more in the Top 30 projected to top 200 points. The rest of the WR2 and WR3 candidates (anywhere from WR19 to WR35) have little to no separation, as most of the receivers are projected to score 170-200 points. This is where things really start to get interesting. Based on projections alone, two receivers (Larry Fitzgerald