How to find Wide Receiver Value in 2017 Fantasy Football PPR and standard drafts
According to both MathBox™ and the Fantasy Outliers team, these Wide Receivers could return higher value than ADP and ECR this year.

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Wide Receivers in PPR? They are relatively easier to predict
We all know Wide Receivers are important in PPR leagues. Most people go WR+RB heavy. So how do you consistently find wide receivers at a good value relative to draft position throughout the draft? Get lucky? That’s the status quo. Hopefully, after reading this article, you’ll need a little less luck to draft a good receiver core.
While most leagues go running-back-heavy at the top end of the draft, according to our analysis of competitive leagues, it’s wide receivers who have historically returned the best Total Season Value at the top end of the position. Since 2011, the top 3 wide receivers have netted an average of +37.2 points, compared to +30.2 for running backs, across the course of a 13-week fantasy football regular season.

If Wide Receivers are such a hot commodity, how does one find value in the draft?
Good question. Our MathBox™ is here to help. We built multiple Gradient Boosting Regressor machine learning models to help us get a better understanding of the Wide Receiver position. To learn more about the models, how we built them, and their projected error rates, check out this article.
Now, let’s compare MathBox™’s projections with Expert Consensus Rankings (ECR). This is where we will really find some sneaky value in fantasy drafts.
We took the Points Per Opportunity and Opportunities Per Game predictions and extracted each player’s projected value versus the top 20 wide receivers. We call this the Value Vs. Tier 1 and 2 Players metric in the chart below:

Concretely, Antonio Brown’s +3.50 means that we think he will beat the typical Top 20 Wide Receiver by 3.5 points per week on average.
Key takeaways for finding value at Wide Receiver in PPR leagues
In order to get you a breadth of opinions, we’ll go roundtable across the Fantasy Outliers Team to share each of our key insights with you.
Dave Seal: While MathBox™’s first two picks, Antonio Brown and Julio Jones (+3.5 and +2.2 pts/wk, respectively), are exactly in line with ECR, the next two picks are not quite what you would expect. Demaryius Thomas and Julian Edelman are ECR’s 19th and 20th best wide receiver. I like the Julian Edelman pick and he’s someone I’m going to target, but Demaryius Thomas? I just don’t really see this could possibly be. I mean, who’s throwing him that ball?
Another one that stood out is Michael Crabtree as the 9th highest WR according to MathBox™ and 15th in ECR. Before I saw this projection, I had actually been looking to target him in the draft, as he’d returned positive value the past couple of years in the later rounds of the draft. But it looks like everyone is catching on — and MathBox™ apparently ain’t no fool either. Taking this a step further, MathBox™ has him rated above Amari Cooper, who many consider to be the WR1. Cooper had a slight edge last year, but both according to our analysis of competitive leagues, both had positive values.
Some decently good values are Golden Tate at #10 MathBox™ vs. #14 ECR. Larry Fitzgerald is #12 for us vs. #17 in ECR. At around 10 OPG, Fitz is a pretty solid, stable player. He’s getting older, but in case you were wondering, injury risk for wide receivers historically doesn’t increase on average, even at his age.
We’re not sure if MathBox™ has as much of an infatuation with Tyreek Hill, but his projected Points Per Opportunity is through the roof. He’s a second year player — so the models might be a little shaky — but that said, he could be a potential guy to target in the 6th or 7th round.
It’s surprising that MathBox™ thinks A.J. Green #15 and Dez Bryant #16 are overvalued in ECR at #7 and #10, respectively. I could see that, especially for A.J. Green, since the Bengals have such a diverse set of offensive weapons. The models are also down on Michael Thomas and Brandin Cooks, which I’m not so sure about. I’m choosing to ignore both of those projections, because the second year models aren’t great and the situation changes may be too much for the MathBox™ to keep track of. I guess we’ll see.
Some late-round value guys to consider are Martavis Bryant, Ted Ginn, Kenny Stills, Mike Williams, and J.J. Nelson.

David Harbarger: For Julian Edelman and Demaryius Thomas, they both are projected to have about 11 Opportunities Per Game, which is quite high. So maybe that’s why they’re standing out. If you don’t buy that, and think they’re more of 9 OPG kind of guys this year, that would put them at replacement level. But even then, replacement level is at about the 10th best wide receiver, so it’d still be a good value. I’m looking for both of these guys, especially Edelman.
Terrelle Pryor stands out at #11 MathBox™ vs. #22 ECR. He was good last year, and now he has a better quarterback and a better offense. If you can get him in the middle of the 6th round, he has the projected value of a 3rd rounder. Go ahead and start counting your fantasy winnings. I got him off the waiver wire on a couple of teams last year, and he helped my team out. I’m definitely looking at him this year to provide a bit of a mid-round bump.
Two guys I really like later on are Randall Cobb and Martavis Bryant. We have them at #19 and #20 and ECR has them at #29 and #35 within position, respectively. That’s a pretty meaningful difference from ECR. These are two guys I’m going to target in the pick 80 to pick 100 zone. People have been waiting for Randall Cobb to come back for a couple of years, but what this is telling me is that he’s going to be in the low-end WR2 range.
Clay J. Seal: I actually found myself saying, “glad to see Antonio Brown ranked at the top after last year” like he let someone down. If Le’Veon Bell is available for the whole season, it could get really fun for both of them. I’m also interested to see where A.J. Green lands. Right now the experts like him a lot more than MathBox™. Does he stay healthy? Is there finally such a spoil of riches on the Cincinnati offense that it may limit his opportunities? He was fifth in Total Season Value last year despite missing Week 11 on.
The Daves mentioned it in one of the podcasts, but don’t sleep on wide receivers if you’re in a PPR league. Conventional wisdom says go running back, but that doesn’t seem to be the case, necessarily.
Chris Seal: Forgive me, I know this graph is messy. But it’s what I’m going to use when drafting my own teams this year, so I thought it could be helpful. Here, you have the top 30 WR’s ordered by ECR on the y-axis (left-hand side ) and Value vs. Tier 1&2 on the x-axis (the bottom). Bigger circles and green means that they are projected to have a positive value / be a WR1, and smaller circles and red mean they are projected to have a negative value / be a WR2 or below. If a player falls in the upper-left-hand side of the graph, that means MathBox™ values him (or her) more highly than ECR.
Basically, I’m targeting anyone at or above the dotted line in the chart below.

Just to be clear, Demaryius Thomas pick isn’t a hangover from the Peyton Manning 2014 squad. For the last two years, the Broncos have had mediocre offenses, so MathBox™ knows the situation he’s in and still thinks he’s going to do well this year. I’m not sure he ends up the third best wide receiver, but I also wouldn’t just write this projection off.
So, Demaryius Thomas and Julian Edelman — possibly Michael Crabtree, Golden Tate, Terrelle Pryor, Larry Fitz — I’m coming for ya! Even though they’re slightly below the line, you can’t really go wrong with Odell Beckham Jr., Jordy Nelson (who has a very high PPO), and Mike Evans, either. MathBox™ and ECR are close enough that they’re pretty much in agreement.
Finding Wide Receiver draft value in standard scoring leagues
You get the hang of it by now. Here are Mathbox’s wide receiver projection ranks vs. ECR in standard scoring leagues:

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