Admittedly, I’ve had a long week, am pretty tired today, and don’t feel completely up to divulging more draft information to my counterparts. Alas, I promised I’d cover all of the major fantasy positions, and we still have the mess at Wide Receiver to sort out. If you missed the first few go ‘rounds, you can find them here:

Tight Ends
Quarterbacks
Running Backs

For receivers, I can tell you one thing – go with your gut. Oh, I can also tell you that every person in the universe agrees that Larry Fitzgerald should be the top wide out off your draft board. My comment: Word.

Generally, receivers are both easy and difficult to predict. Unlike other positions, receivers follow a more standard career arch, and the effect of scheme, coaching, or quarterback changes are fairly intuitive. At the same time, there is very little collective predictive ability in the fantasy world when it comes to separating receivers on a rank-by-rank basis. That is, it’s near impossible to separate #2 from #5, #11 from #16, #40 from #50, and so on.

What it leaves us with is a wealth of fantasy football advice leading us in all sorts of different directions for receivers, save for Fitzgeezy. So with this admittedly brief analysis, I’m going to point out just how clueless we all are with wide receivers on draft day.

The tiny table below (rather than showing you all of the rankings, composite rankings, ADPs, etc…because you might be in my draft Sunday, Sam) shows the average spread and standard deviation for the receivers ranked in my personal top 50. These spreads are across five different sources (four site rankings and one ADP source). Clearly, we’re all clueless. The average top-50 receiver has a ranking spread of 12.52, meaning that on average a receiver is ranked 12-13 spots apart depending on what source you look at.

So Brandon Marshall could be a stud, a sleeper, or a bust waiting to happen, depending on what magazine you grab off the shelf. Josh Morgan has the largest spread (50 spots, if you can believe it), while Fitzgerald is the only player who is a consensus in any one spot (though Derrick Mason and Greg Jennings are fairly agreed upon as well).

The experts don’t have much of an idea, and I’m sure you don’t either. So with the depth at the position and varying WR drafting strategies, take your time, take your favorite, and take only your own advice.

Oh, and don’t you dare sleep on free agent Matt Jones. Who? Matt Jones….Jones.

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