Fantasy Football: 2026 rookie wide receiver prospect model

Estimated Reading Time: 17 minutes

NFL draft season is in full swing, which naturally comes with a plethora of ways to evaluate potential talent coming out of college with the potential to translate to the next level. This article series is no different, as we’ll add a fantasy football spin to the evaluation process to identify which incoming prospects have a shot to become fantasy-relevant early on in their NFL careers.

Next up is the wide receiver position for fantasy football, where there are several potential first-round picks seemingly every season. This year brings a new crop of options to choose from. To help sort through this year’s options, this model will account for the data and metrics that correlate best to NFL success for college prospects and utilize the key factors for each player to devise a prospect score. Like with any position, there is not one metric that will tell us whether a college prospect will be good or not in the NFL, but the purpose of this model is to combine the metrics and factors that data has proven to be the most relevant while providing weight to those that are more important than others.

For the wide receiver position, in no particular order, we’re looking at career receiving grades, yards per route run, performance versus single coverage, level of competition faced and draft capital, among a few others.

Note: This is the pre-NFL combine version of the article and will be updated with athletic testing scores and any shifts in expected draft capital next month.

Keys

• The prospect pool for this model consists of 255 past wide receiver prospects dating back to 2019. 
• 25 wide receivers drafted since 2019 have become a top-12 PPR finisher for their position at least once (9.8%).
  • Of those 25 top-12 finishers, 16 (64%) of them finished as top-12 finishers within their first three NFL seasons.
  • Also of those 25 top-12 finishers, 9 of them (36%) have been repeat top-12 finishers.
• 33 wide receivers drafted since 2019 have become a top-24 PPR finisher for their position at least once (14.5%).
• 41 wide receivers drafted since 2019 have become a top-36 PPR finisher for their position at least once (18.8%).
• This is an important context when understanding hit rates as many more prospects will not become fantasy-relevant than most, given such a large pool of players.
• However, using this model, the higher the prospect score, the better the success rate will be for each prospect, as highlighted below.

With all this in mind, it’s time to look at this year’s wide receiver prospects in order of expected draft capital to identify our future fantasy football contributors. It should also be noted that these scores should not necessarily be used so much as your rankings, as they should be more of a guide toward the quality of the player. Draft capital and landing spot can and will play a big part in actual rankings, though these scores can help us determine which players to trust or not when it comes time to pull the trigger on these players in our rookie drafts.

Carnell Tate, Ohio State

• Consensus draft capital: 5th overall

• Tate currently owns the top spot for this year’s wide receiver class, though it doesn’t come without some contention in the model, which identifies other legitimate contenders for that spot.
• However, as a potential top-five pick, Tate will be a top pick in rookie drafts this season/
• Tate comes out of Ohio State with a strong profile, delivering a career year in 2025 with an 89.0 receiving grade, 875 receiving yards and nine receiving touchdowns.
• All of those numbers came second to teammate Jeremiah Smith, though that is also target competition we can live with Tate not overcoming.
• That elite target competition did hurtTate’s scoring in the prospect model. His yards per route run, first-down-plus-touchdown rate, and target rate all came in below the 70th percentile among all prospects since 2019.
• However, some of the metrics tied directly to Tate, including his receiving grade (69th percentile), missed tackles forced per reception (37th percentile), explosive play rate (65th percentile) and yards after the catch per reception (26th percentile), were all pedestrian marks as well.
• While the model score isn’t as perfect as some of the other receivers in this year’s class, the comparables for Tate are also not terrible, including teammate Emeka Egbuka (8.53) and Drake London (8.43).
• Being a top-five or even top-10 draft pick does not guarantee fantasy success, as we’ve seen recently with Marvin Harrison Jr. and Rome Odunze, though there is still time for both players, and depending on Tate’s landing spot, he may not be an immediate hit.
• That being said, he’ll get every opportunity to deliver. Given the expected draft capital combined with above-average talent, he should still be one of the first picks off the board in rookie drafts.

Jordyn Tyson, Arizona State

• Consensus draft capital: 9th overall

• Tyson is currently projected as a top-10 pick in this year’s draft, and he boasts a lot of the elite metrics we’re looking for in a wide receiver to back that up and put him in contention as a top rookie draft pick in dynasty leagues.
• Tyson dominated the target share at Arizona State over the past two seasons, which led to high-end production across the board.
• Tyson’s career receiving metrics line up very similarly to Garrett Wilson’s (9.18) coming out of college, including near identical career yards per route run marks, as Wilson delivered a 2.73, and receiving grades, as Wilson earned an 89.1 mark in his college career.
• Wilson also cracked the top 10 in the NFL draft, and if Tyson can translate to the NFL as well as him, then we’ll be getting a quality prospect worth investing heavily in during our rookie drafts.
• All signs point to Tyson being a great bet to make, considering the bucket he falls in and the hit rates of players within that bucket, as highlighted in the graphic above.
• As of now, prior to the NFL combine, Tyson makes a lot of sense as a top-three pick in rookie drafts.

Makai Lemon, USC

• Consensus draft capital: 16th overall

• Lemon leads the way in this year’s class in terms of his current prospect model score, landing in elite company right between CeeDee Lamb (9.28) and Jaxon Smith-Njigba (9.20) in the model.
• Lemon’s stock rose dramatically after an impressive 2025 season where he led the Power-Four conferences during the regular season in receiving yards (1,156), receiving grade (91.4) and tied for the most receiving touchdowns (11).
• Lemon is also the first of these top four projected wide receivers to spend the majority of his career routes working out of the slot (76%), though that isn’t necessarily a negative in terms of his NFL potential.
• Among the top performers in the model, who scored 9.20 or higher, Jaylen Waddle (77%), Smith-Njigba (83%) and even Malik Nabers (57%) ran most of their college routes out of the slot, and all of them have found top-12 fantasy success in the NFL.
• Heading into the NFL combine, there are no real blights within Lemon’s key underlying metrics that we should view as a red flag for fantasy purposes, as he’s scored no worse than the 66th percentile in any one collected metric.
• Considering the strength at the top of this wide receiver class so far, and the lack thereof with this year’s running backs, Lemon should not leave the top five of dynasty rookie drafts this year, and there is an argument for the top three.

Denzel Boston, Washington

• Consensus draft capital: 25th overall

• Boston scores well in the prospect model, but he is also the first real drop-off in quality that we see from these prospective first-round wide receivers.
• The drop-off isn’t significant, as Boston is still a strong potential fantasy prospect, but he would likely kick off the second tier of players at his position if we’re leaning on the model to fuel our rankings.
• Unfortunately, Boston’s 2.02 career yards per route run mark is the lowest score among 81 prospects to score 7.50 or higher in the model. 
• While career yards per route run is one of the biggest key metrics within the model, some receivers have overcome lower scores in that regard, most notably Brian Thomas Jr., D.K. Metcalf and Terry McLaurin — though they are also just outliers.
• Luckily, Boston has no other true red flags in his key metrics, often earning strong marks in most other key metrics, including an elite 95.1 career receiving grade versus single coverage.
• Only DeVonta Smith, Ja'Marr Chase and Tre Harris have scored higher than Boston for their careers against single coverage. Chase and Smith obviously found fantasy success, while we wait on Year 2 for Harris.
• Boston should be in the conversation, along with the top non-Jeremiyah Love running backs, to be the last pick for the top-five picks in rookie drafts.

KC Concepcion, Texas A&M

• Consensus draft capital: 26th overall

• Concepcion is currently the fifth, and final, projected first-round wide receiver according to consensus mock drafts, though compared to the rest, he’s the least intriguing for fantasy purposes at the moment.
• Concepcion, much like Lemon, is the other potential first-round prospect who has spent the majority of his college routes working out of the slot, though his first year at Texas A&M in 2025 was spent mostly outside.
• As the smallest first-round wide receiver (without official measurements), he’s likely to see more work in the slot in the NFL, though he wasn’t overly effective in that role in college.
• Concepcion owns just a career 1.83 yards per route run out of the slot, a 34th percentile mark among all prospects since 2019, while his 74.7 career receiving grade in the slot ranks just 53rd percentile.
• The other concern for Concepcion, assuming he’ll have to play outside some in the NFL as well, is that his overall career receiving grade (25th percentile) and yards per route run (36th percentile) versus press coverage both come in well below average.
• This was also the case for several other highly-drafted wide receivers who ran most of their routes out of the slot in college, including Elijah Moore, Kadarius Toney, Tutu Atwell, Parris Campbell, and K.J. Hamler – all of whom were no worse than Round 2 picks and had to spend at least 30% of their NFL routes on the outside, failing to deliver any fantasy value.
• Not to say that this will be the exact case for Concepcion, but it is enough of a concern to highlight as something fantasy managers may want to be aware of before spending a top-six or so first-round rookie pick on him.