WR1Room WR Model: How to Stay 1 Step Ahead of Your Leaguemates

As someone who doesn’t have enough free time to watch many college football games but also loves Dynasty Football, I wanted to find a way not to be a step behind everyone in the dynasty community, but a step ahead. Combined with the fact that I love analytics and data crunching, I turned to college data. I wanted to see if there was a correlation between the stats a player had in college to their chance at succeeding in the NFL, so I set off to work. 

Without getting into the nitty-gritty of it all, I used a data bank with the college stats of over 75 WRs fitting the following molds:

• Highly drafted successful WRs

• High drafted WR flops, and

• Late round gems

From this, I was able to tune in on what stats correlated to a strong NFL WR and which ones were red herrings. I say this to show that it’s not something small that I started here. I had a strong set of data that I spent countless hours trying to determine the significance in which data points were good, which ones were not, and then the scale in which to use them. All that played into putting this puzzle together.

What my data led me to were two distinctions which I believe makes my WR Model unique: my WRs fit into two “Presences” and then ranked among 4 Tiers in each. What I mean by that is that a defense is going to react to different players anytime they step out onto the field. That then boiled down to two types which I called: Dominating Presence and Efficiency Presence.

Your Dominating Presence is someone that the defense immediately puts their eyes on, draws your double teams, and is highly athletic. The extreme would be Calvin Johnson. The defense is going to focus on that WR and do their best to stop them. This type of WR thrives on volume; the more volume they get, the more likely they are to rip out a 60-yard TD and win you your week. While if they don’t get that volume, their chances of scoring high is smaller and results in being more of a boom-or-bust player. This Presence relates to a player’s ceiling. The higher their Dominating Tier, the higher a ceiling they have. 

Your Efficiency Presence is someone that eats no matter what, your QB’s safety blanket, the route runner that will have a defender on the ground from tripping over their feet with the wrong step. These are WRs that are highly consistent. They have a high catch % and get you those shorter gains. The higher volume they get doesn’t quite correlate to a higher ceiling, rather this relates to a player’s floor. The higher the volume, the higher the floor that they will score. 

I thought I truly stumbled upon something good. I found these two distinct Presences’ that WRs had to explain and show their uniqueness and what you want in an NFL WR. My model was able to tell you to buy someone like Puka Nacua and never touch someone like N’Keal Harry. I put it to the test with one of the best WR Rookie classes in a long time to get a leg up on my league mates with the following list:

As you can see it was a RAGING flop... I have players that barely saw that field in Burton, Franklin, and Corley ahead of BTJ and Ladd. I used this list to draft in 2024 and ended up 5 steps behind my league mates instead of 3 steps ahead.

Then I realized something...

Sometimes it’s not a problem with the data but rather how you read the data. I was trying to solve a puzzle without properly understanding how to find the significant parts of what makes these Tiers unique and different. About halfway through the 2024 season, I had a brain blast; Draft Capital and Teams!

1st: I learned that historically in the past 10 years, there's been a drop off with regards to WR success once Day 3 of the NFL draft starts. I was looking for consistency, so I set my gauge for WRs who scored 2+ seasons as WR40 or greater. In the last 10 years, there have been:

• 33 1st Round WRs who posted 128 WR40+ seasons

• 24 2nd Round WRs who posted 89 WR40+ seasons

• 14 3rd Round WRs who posted 58 WR40+ seasons

Then it dropped to 19 WRs in Rounds 4-7 + UDFA who posted 73 WR40+ seasons. So, to me, it looked like there was a drop off in WR potential success after the 3rd round of the NFL draft. That means there’s no way I should put a player like Franklin, Baker, Washington, and Walker ahead of players drafted on Day 1 and Day 2. Thus, I had to inherently drop those guys due to draft capital.

2nd: Teams and Target Share. Volume is king in the NFL and that needed to be taken into account here. Someone like Odunze who went to the Bears when they just added Keenen Allen in the offseason was not going to see many targets. While someone like BTJ who went to the Jags who had at minimum 136 open targets with Ridley leaving, had a great opportunity to get volume year one. 

Looking at these two things made me reevaluate my list for 2024 receivers hoping to not make the same mistake in 2025. I had to fine tune and look at this data through a different lens. Here’s what the 2024 draft class rankings looked like taking Draft Capital and Teams into account:

Let’s dive into it deeper: Again, we need to have the right way to view the rankings. By just showing the players and rankings isn’t enough, I wanted to add their strengths and weaknesses to see if their landing spots truly fit the WR or if the landing spots worked against a WR.

Tier 1: Nabers and MHJ. In reality they could probably be interchangeable and if you ask the dynasty community right now, I’d wager most would say Nabers > MHJ. I have MHJ over Nabers because of his situation and they opened up target shares with Brown leaving, but there was a case to be made for me to have them interchangeable because well, who was going to take targets away from Nabers. Either case, I think Tier 1 is still pretty solid.

Tier 2: Odunze, BTJ, and McConkey. I have them all interchangeable in this tier and Odunze scoring higher tiers through the data but having a terrible landing spot. What this tier really tells us is: if you are good sitting 1-2 years take Odunze but if you want immediate production take BTJ and Ladd. In reality, if I was to pick between them again last off season I would take BTJ, Ladd, then Odunze just because values change so quickly in the dynasty community that anyone who drafted BTJ and Ladd already have huge return on investment. While people who drafted Odunze are still waiting; or otherwise put, I would have waited until this offseason to buy low on Odunze and taken BTJ/Ladd last rookie draft as they are more expensive now.

Tier 3: This tier is a flex play or bye week players as a ceiling. As you can see, we have players who scored less than 50 points on the season paired in with Worthy. That might seem crazy at first, but if you look at Worthy, can you tell me with confidence that you would start him in your WR1/2 spot and not in your flex? Then with his strengths and weaknesses we see a picture of what to expect in KC. High Targets in aDot (Average Depth of Target) in college with a weakness of targeted QBR and yards/route to me shows that he is going to be inconsistent; he is going to be boom or bust. Looking back at his past year, in Half PPR Worthy had 5 games with under 5 points while 4 games with over 15 points. I think that fits perfectly in the model of a boom or bust flex play. While the other players in Tier 3 did not hit the flex play ceiling, that doesn’t mean the rankings failed. Rather, they weren’t able to reach their ceiling in the situations that they had. 

With this fine tuning, I truly believe my WR model has merit in predicting the success of an NFL WR. I’m not saying that the rankings are going to be absolutely perfect each year. I’m sure there’s even debate in how my 2024 rankings are, hell sometimes I debate that amongst myself. I had a debate as to which tier to put Jayden Higgins in this year. 

Rather I did what I came to accomplish. I wanted to find a way to predict the success of a WR to go into my rookie drafts a step ahead of the rest of the dynasty world when going into my rookie drafts and I truly believe I found that. That if I went into the 2024 Rookie Draft with what I had now: I wouldn’t have taken Worthy and Pearsall over BTJ and Ladd like I did. 

As I’m not trying to make perfect rankings but rather believe I have found a way to stay a step ahead of in rookie drafts, I would suggest the following:

Use my tier lists from a value perspective. Don’t necessarily take it as this tried and true this is what will happen but rather use it to stay ahead of your league mates: 

• If a player is in a low tier but has a high ADP, stay away from them

• If a player is in a high tier but has a low ADP, get them cheaply now

• If a player is accurately represented tier and ADP wise, get them if they are there

  
  

With that, I leave you with my 2025 WR Rookie Rankings split into 2 lists. The first are your Day 1-2 WRs that have the draft capital. The second is your Day 3 WRs; with the drop off I found I wanted to have separate rankings for them and made a “Who you should have on your Taxi Squad” rankings. Then for reference: 

• Tier 1: Elite Talent is the most likely outcome

• Tier 2: Strong Talent with Elite potential

• Tier 3: Flex/Bye Week Players

• Tier 4: Avoid Players/Sell if they have a good game or two