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 2019 season, the first attempt was to use the #24 WR for the year (Calvin Ridley, 135 fantasy points) and take that fantasy total and divide it by 16 for a per game average (8.44 points per game). The next step, however, was to take all of the Top 75 wide receivers from 2019 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 Golden Tate with 109 fantasy points in 11 games, or a 9.91 points per game average - certainly higher than Ridley over 16 contests. 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 points per game. Mike Evans, Davante Adams, Tyreek Hill, and Calvin Ridley 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: 2019 WR Quality Start and Fantasy Point Ranges - Standard Scoring

Table 2 shows us the breakdown of all the Top 75 WRs from 2019 and how many of each type of start resulted for each:

Table 2: 2019 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 the total number of Excellent Starts (248) is comparable to the total Quality Starts (243), which is very different than prior seasons. Two years ago, Excellent Starts exceeded Quality starts by 64, similar to the three prior seasons (60 in 2017 and 2016, 64 in 2015). The reason for the difference is the very high bar set for Excellent Starts in 2019 at 12.4 or more points in a given week. Aside from 2015 (11.5) and 2014 (11.0), no other season in the past 11 years required 11 or more points in a game for an Excellent Start, and last year it took over 12 for the first time. The combined totals of Excellent and Quality Starts for 2019 (493) was also less than the prior two years (510 and 518, respectively), but not by a large margin. The slight decline once again can be attributed to the higher standards for Excellent and Quality Starts. What is very clear, however, is that 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 2019 - Standard Scoring

Now, to dig deeper, let's look at the numbers distributed in two different ways. First, we 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:

Table 4: 2019 WR Start Types Sorted By Value - Standard Scoring

This is a lot of information once again, but some names leap out at us. The first observation is that there were only three receivers on the entire list with seven or more Excellent Starts (Michael Thomas, Cooper Kupp, and Kenny Golladay), and one of these top-end targets (Thomas) was the only receiver on the list with two or fewer Bad Starts. With such a great season, it is no wonder that Thomas toppeed all of the charts last season. These three leading receivers had over 50% of the Net Value for the positive value on the chart. Despite 14 receivers having a non-negative Net Value last year, even if you had a fantasy roster completely comprised of this short and elite list, at least one of your wide receivers would still underperform roughly 25% of the time. That shows how difficult it was to find reliable, quality receivers once again last season. It is decidedly clear that getting two to four top-notch receivers on your fantasy team is critical to success in today's pass-happy NFL.

Lastly, let's sift through the data for you and get right to the heart of the matter with our final table. Here we have the results sorted by value for the Top 48 WRs on the 2020 ADP list.