The third year breakout wide receiver theory has become
one of the most known theories by fantasy football managers because of a few wide
receivers who became dominant during their third season. Unfortunately, this theory is so
well-known that most fantasy sites usually rank all third year wide receivers higher than
they really should so if you want one of them you will have to draft them early and there
are quite a few that do not breakout. In this article I decided to look at all wide
receivers in years two to five and find out if there are actually more third year wide
receivers that breakout. Moreover I looked at the WRs that did breakout and tried to find
criterions that differentiate WRs that do breakout from the ones that don’t.
First of all I just want to clarify that I am using the
term breakout a little loosely and I still include WRs who might have had a strong rookie
season, struggled in their second season and had a solid third season. My two criterions
that a wide receiver had to respect to be considered a breakout wide receiver are:at least 150 points in a point per reception
scoring system, an increase of at least 40 points per 16 games or a 25% increase in points
per 16 games. Since 1993, there have been 110 wide receivers that had a breakout season in
their second, third, fourth or fifth season out of a possible 444 which is equal to 24.8%
of them. To qualify amongst those 444 the only criterion was that the player had to have
at least 300 receiving yards in the previous year. The following chart has the breakdown
of the breakout wide receivers by year:
Year
Breakouts
Number
%Breakout
2
24
72
33.3%
3
37
126
29.4%
4
27
132
20.5%
5
22
114
19.3%
The most interesting thing to notice is that there are in fact more third year wide
receivers that had a breakout season than any other year but the percentage that did
breakout is less than the percentage for second year wide receivers. There is also still
quite a high number of fourth and fifth year wide receivers that did breakout but I need
to find a way to increase those percentages since a one out of five chance at a breakout
wide receiver isn’t much. I applied three more criterions which are that the player
must have had less than 80 catches, less than 1000 yards and 8 TDs or less in the previous
year. These three criterions allowed us to eliminate 93 of the 444 players while only
losing eight breakout players which increased the percentage to 29.1%. The following chart
has the new breakdown of the breakout wide receivers by year after applying those three
new criterions:
Year
Breakouts
Number
%Breakout
2
24
63
38.1%
3
33
107
30.8%
4
26
102
25.5%
5
19
79
24.1%
Those percentages are much better than before and it is quite surprising to see the very
high percentage for second year wide receivers compared to third year receivers. I decided
to take this one step further and try to find more criterions individually for each year
to increase these percentages. Since we are dealing with relatively small samples this is
a little tricky and I had to make sure the percentages were real and not simply a random
coincidence. To make sure of this, when looking for more criterions, I made sure that I
used rounded numbers so that I would not have criterions such as fewer than 63 receptions
or over 13.7 yards per reception. The other rule I used is that I could remove players
from my sample at both edges but not in the middle such that I don’t have a criterion
that says a wide receiver must have fewer than 40 receptions or more than 50. Although
some of the criterions I will find may still be a random coincidence I think that by using
these two rules I will limit that chance.
