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Finding 2020's breakout wide receiver: A.J. Brown

In this series of articles, I’m looking at the breakout potential for second-year wide receivers. The series started with Marquise Brown, then moved to N’Keal Harry and Deebo Samuel, and now it has progressed to the next receiver selected in the 2019 draft, A.J. Brown. Technically, you can say that Brown broke out in his rookie season, finishing as WR21 in PPR leagues. But Brown was a part-time player for a good portion of the season and has the potential to move into an elite tier of fantasy producers in his second season. 

[Editor’s note: Subscribe to PFF ELITE today to gain access to PFF’s Premium Stats and new Player Grades experience in addition to the 2020 NFL Draft Guide2020 Fantasy Rookie Scouting ReportPFF Greenline, all of PFF’s premium article content and more.]

One of the best ways to determine the range of outcomes and probability of success for fantasy players is comparing them to similar historical players. In this analysis, I’ll compare Samuel to hundreds of receivers drafted since 2006 and project the likelihood of his breakout based on those who had the most similar size, college production, draft position and rookie metrics. 

METHODOLOGY

The matching methodology for this set of articles is similar to that for the 2020 wide receiver and running back prospects, where I found the closest statistically comparable players using principal component analysis (PCA) and the euclidean distance between the players' components, and then gave each a “Similarity” score based on percentile of distance. 

The metrics for PCA are: draft position, weight, rushing attempts per game, market share of college receiving yards (CFB MS), college yards per reception (CFB YPR), rookie yards per route run (YPRR), rookie average depth of target (aDOT), rookie PPR fantasy points per game (PPR/Gm) and top-24 fantasy weeks (Top-24). All college numbers are from players’ final seasons.

A.J. BROWN COMPS

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