Quality Starts: Wide Receivers

Photo: USA Today Sports

There are some fantasy football players that believe that the lineup you pick can lose you a game just as much as it can win a contest. Having a player give you a consistent performance week after week can be considered more valuable than a player who goes off every third week and then takes two weeks off between those fantastic performances. Consistency has a value, and it does not take much of a leap to understand that players that you can rely on for solid games when you need them (such as in your postseason) are a huge advantage.

Baseball has a term called "Quality Starts" for pitchers, which is a statistic that represents how often a starting pitcher will put up a good (not great, just good) performance in a given game. The bar is set neither high nor low (six innings pitched, three earned runs or fewer) so as to gauge a decent performance. The theory behind it is that if your pitcher gives you a Quality Start, your team has a fighting chance to win a given game.

So now we need to translate this to football. What is "quality" for each position? How do we define a "Quality Start" for quarterbacks or running backs or any other position? Looking back at the 2018 season, the first attempt was to use the #24 WR for the year (DeDe Westbrook, 132.7 fantasy points) and take that fantasy total and divide it by 16 for a per game average. The next step, however, was to take all of the Top 75 wide receivers from 2018 and sort them on a per game average. That method can account for missed games or a per-start performance metric, which is how most fantasy team owners would decide their roster for the week. The WR24 on a per-game average basis last season was DeSean Jackson, with 114.5 fantasy points in 13 games, or a 9.54 points-per-game average - significantly different from Westbrook’s 11.9 average for the season. The reason that this is the better baseline comes from four strong examples of receivers that were outside of the Top 24 wide receiver performance list for the season, but averaged more than 10.5 points per game. Cooper Kupp, A.J. Green, Will Fuller, and Emmanuel Sanders were all fantasy starters when they were healthy, and their strong points per game averages pointed to that fact. Therefore, using the per game average is by far the best method. Now it is reasonable to also acknowledge that taking WR24 seems a bit arbitrary, but if you are looking for a bare minimum of quality, the 24th WR should be the "worst starter" in your fantasy league as a WR2 and a great WR3.

Next, we move on to the next question - one of quantifying the quality. At what point do we decide whether or not a wide receiver has given us a quality performance? Here is where it gets a bit murky, but looking at the distribution of WR performances by starters over the season and it becomes evident that the using the 24th WR average and adding or subtracting a percentage gives us a good range for a WR Quality Start.

Using the WR Quality Start range, we can also define a bad performance or an excellent performance as either falling below or exceeding the Quality Start range. Table 1 gives us the fantasy points that it takes to fall in each of the three areas:

Table 1: 2018 WR Quality Start and Fantasy Point Ranges - Standard Scoring

Table 2 shows us the breakdown of all the Top 75 WRs from 2018 and how many of each type of start resulted for each:

Table 2: 2018 WR Start Types Sorted By Top 75 WRs - Standard Scoring

That's a lot of info to digest, so here is some help. First, we see that there were far more Excellent Starts (287) than there were Quality Starts (223), a difference of 64 starts. That difference is comparable to the prior three seasons (60 in 2017 and 2016, 64 in 2015) and the threshold for Excellent Starts in 2018 (10.6+ fantasy points) is nearly identical to 2017 (10.6) and 2016 (10.8). Last season's 287 Excellent Starts was almost exactly the same as 2017 (289), but what is also telling for both seasons is the decline in Quality Starts (223 and 229 both seasons). The combined totals of Excellent and Quality Starts for the past two years are 510 and 518, respectively, down from 604 in 2016 and well below every season since 2009 (ranges are from 554 to 606 from 2009-2016). Despite the NFL becoming a very pass-happy league, finding solid wide receivers each week looks to be getting more and more difficult. Table 3 summarizes a few of these trends:

Table 3: Excellent and Quality Starts - 2009 to 2018 - Standard Scoring

Now, to dig deeper, let's look at the numbers distributed in two different ways. First, I need to define a valuable starting wide receiver in this system. We want a WR that will win more fantasy games than lose them, so we want either "Quality" or "Excellent" starts. Using a simple formula of scoring each type of start, we can define the value of a given NFL wide receiver. Here is the formula:

STARTING FANTASY WR VALUE = EXCELLENT STARTS - BAD STARTS

We neglect to look at Quality Starts because they neither win games nor lose them on average - they are just average WR performances. We only really care about how often he helps our team vs. how often he hurts it. Giving a "-1" value to bad starts and "+1" to excellent ones does this for us.

On with the results, sorted by value: