Fantasy Football: One Wide Receiver to Target in Each Round of Your Draft

Round 3: Terrelle Pryor, Washington

Average Draft Position: 3.03 (WR13)

There are four wideouts going in Round 3, and it's an interesting group comprised of Terrelle Pryor, DeAndre Hopkins, Demaryius Thomas and Keenan Allen.

It would've been hard to imagine saying this 12 months ago, but Pryor may be the safest of the group while also possessing the most upside. In his first full year as a wideout, Pryor was pretty darn excellent with the Cleveland Browns in 2016, and now he's part of a much better offense in Washington.

He was a standard-league WR2 (top-24 wideout) seven times last season, which is one less WR2 week than both T.Y. Hilton and Julio Jones had. But where Pryor really stood out was how he produced relative to his Cleveland teammates, and we can peep that by using our Net Expected Points (NEP) metric.

For those of you who are new to numberFire, NEP is the metric we use to track the efficiency of both teams and players, with the team side being adjusted for strength of opponent. A three-yard completion on 3rd and 2 is wildly different than a three-yard completion on 3rd and 4, and NEP helps account for that by tracking the expected points players add to their team's total over the course of a season. For more info on NEP, check out our glossary.

Using Reception NEP per target and Reception Success Rate, the latter of which is the percentage of a player's catches that resulted in an NEP gain, we can see just how good Pryor was compared to Cleveland's other receivers last year.

Obviously, Pryor got a ton more looks than these guys, but he was also more efficient than them despite the volume. For reference, the 2016 league averages for wideouts in Reception NEP per target and Reception Success Rate were 0.66 and 83.91%, respectively.

So, in his first full year as a receiver, Pryor was better than a league-average wideout despite playing in a pretty poor environment for offense.

Washington doesn't have an offensive problem, as they've ranked in the top-10 in schedule-adjusted offense in each of the last two years, per our numbers. Kirk Cousins is a huge part of that, and he gives Pryor the upside we mentioned earlier (along with the fact that, you know, Pryor has been a receiver for about 25 minutes, so he could keep improving).

To no one's surprise, Cousins was vastly superior, according to our numbers, to any of the Browns' quarterbacks last season. (The rank shown is each passer's rating among all quarterbacks with at least 100 drop backs.)

Pryor was really good a year ago, and he's now in a much better offense, one which has 214 targets up for grabs thanks to the departures of Pierre Garcon and DeSean Jackson. Pryor has a safe floor and big-time upside, and he's a dope third-round pick.