Fantasy Football: The Top 5 Rookie Wide Receivers for 2018
For NFL rookies, their prospects as players and fantasy assets come with a lot of assumptions and guesstimates. The majority of their evaluation comes via college stats, draft capital and training-camp chatter.
That being said, it's become more and more important to research first-year players. In 2017, a handful of rookie running backs made their presence known in fantasy football, and while the receiving class disappointed as a whole, with top-10 picks Corey Davis (fifth overall), Mike Williams (seventh) and John Ross (ninth) tallying 24 games, 45 catches and 0 touchdowns between them, we witnessed a pair of surprising seasons from second-day guys JuJu Smith-Schuster and Cooper Kupp.
After going undrafted in the majority of 2017 fantasy drafts, Smith-Schuster finished as fantasy's top rookie receiver with 58 catches, 917 yards and 7 touchdowns for a total of 133.7 standard-league fantasy points (in 14 games). Kupp, a late 10th-round pick in fantasy, ended the year with 114.9 points on 62 catches (94 targets), 869 yards and 5 scores.
Sometimes, it's impossible to predict surprise performances like that. In fact, we had those two near the bottom of this same article a year ago. But they were on our radar all the same.
Based on our algorithms and projections (standard scoring), who should you be keeping an eye on among this year's abbreviated list of relevant rookie receivers? Let's take a look.
