You’ve heard alot about wide receivers. A lot. Like, seriously, SO MUCH WIDE RECEIVER TALK. Something that we have posited in basically every single article on this site about the 2014 wide receiver is “The bigger, the better”. We like our WR’s and TE’s very tall and with a solid accompanying weight… but why?

This is not an exhaustive post with correlations and causations. Rather, this is a simple explanation exercise demonstrating just WHY it is so important to us at Rotoviz for our WR’s to be larger than average. The following table was generated on Pro-Football-Reference by searching for all double digit receiving TD seasons over the last 5 NFL seasons.

Results

• 37 of the 50 double-digit touchdown receiving seasons the last 5 seasons have come from players 6’2 or taller. That’s 74% of seasons.
• 76% of the total TD’s in the table came from the >6’2 players.
• What do 6 of the 13 sub-6’2 seasons have in common? Peyton Manning, Aaron Rodgers or Ben Rothlisberger as the quarterback. If a small WR is going to succeed, in a fantasy context, it’s likely that they will need elite QB play.
• 37 of the 50 double-digit receiving seasons came from players weighing more than 205 pounds (that number extends to 39 if I would have made the cutoff 204 instead).

As I continually explain on twitter, street corners, classrooms (anyone who will listen really), size matters. The Wes Welkers and Reggie Wayne’s of the world are great, but they are not a relatively safe bet in any context. With fantasy football, it’s all about playing the percentages and putting your teams in the best position to score points and win games; but real NFL teams should be thinking that way too. It’s not that we hate players like Brandin Cooks for being short, it’s just that they have larger hurdles to climb to be a truly impactful NFL player. No one who weighs 195 pounds is going to be out there Gronkin’, plain and simple.

So what did we learn? Well, something that we already knew. Being tall helps score touchdowns, and if you aren’t tall, you better have an elite QB if you want to meet your peak fantasy value. DUH. I think the largest take away is this: in an argument, when someone points to Wes Welker or Reggie Wayne’s fantasy value as evidence that you don’t have to meet the height or weight threshold to produce fantasy numbers, what they are really doing is using an outlier as evidence for an un-true point.