Second-Year Breakout WRs Are the Key to Fantasy Titles: Our System Will Help You Crush Your Draft
Image Credit: Jaylynn Nash/Icon Sportswire. Pictured: D.K. Metcalf.

Shawn Siegele shares the WR Breakout System that won him an NFFC Grand Prize and has been delivering league-winning seasons for RotoViz subscribers ever since.

The entire offseason has been leading up to this draft weekend, and my entire draft plan has been leading up to this article. The 2020 Draft Strategy Series has been predicated on two elements – selecting the right Zero RB candidates and selecting enough WRs. But we also want to select the right WRs, and that’s why the second-year breakout candidates are so important.

Second-year WRs are the key to winning fantasy titles, and if you’re missing out on this window, you’re giving away the biggest advantage in fantasy.

In recent years, I’ve released this in several parts, but for 2020 we’re going with the Breakout WR Mega-Article. In this edition, we’ll cover . . .

  • the history of second-year WR breakouts and why they’re key to your title run
  • the key metrics for locating breakouts, along with multiple breakout models to help you beat ADP
  • all of the 2020 candidates, including detailed breakdowns, advanced stats, and target/avoid recommendations

More Ammunition for the Second-Year Breakout Thesis

From 2001 to 2019, 38 second-year wide receivers hit 200 points for the first time. If you think a rate of two a year is impressive, consider this: Since 2010, 26 WRs have broken out during their second years, more than any other breakout class has managed during the entire 19-year window. While fantasy owners used to believe in the third-year WR breakout, savvy owners know to target receivers during that second-year jump.

Wide receiver breakouts follow different patterns and have different key ingredients depending on the player’s experience. That’s why we’ve broken down the individual classes in detail.

We’ve saved the best for last. My research runs parallel to the excellent work from Blair Andrews on WR age curvesbreakout rates, and bounceback seasons. While I’m looking at 200-point seasons,[1] Blair has found that Year 2 also finds the most breakouts to WR3 status.

With that in mind, let’s break down all 38 second-year breakouts and discuss the trends we see for breakout players at the position.

The History of Second-Year Breakouts – Everything You Need to Know

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Footnotes

Footnotes
1 Which roughly correspond with a WR2 finish

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Shawn Siegele

Author of the original Zero RB article and 2013 NFFC Primetime Grand Champion. 11-time main event league winner. 2015, 2017, 2018 titles in MFL10 of Death.

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Shawn Siegele provides his top-200 player rankings for 2025 redraft formats. Breaking the groups down into 11 tiers and providing ADP contrasts to select 41 priority targets, Shawn gets you ready to win $1 million in the Big Gorilla. This ended up as the biggest single-article project I’ve attempted in almost 15 years in writing about fantasy. This exercise will include blurbs on almost every…...

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