Bjorn Yang-Vaernet reviews Rashod Bateman’s rookie season through the lens of comparable Year 1 wide receivers and shares a very-early 2022 outlook.
The 2021 WR draft class felt short. I mean, literally short. Rashod Bateman is listed at 6 feet 1 inch and he was tied for the tallest WR drafted in Round 1 of the NFL Draft. This set up an unusual dynamic where the top receivers in this draft were smaller than the prototypical alpha WRs.
But is this relevant? One way to look at this question is using the RotoViz Freak Score, which is a calculation that incorporates height, weight, and forty time in order to determine the TD-scoring potential of a prospect. The best way to use the metric is to focus on the tails, players who are extremely athletically gifted or not. For reference, Calvin Johnson has a Freak Score of 98 (out of 100), while someone like Tutu Atwell has a Freak Score of 23. Bateman has a Freak Score of 58, above average, but nothing to write home about.
The Freak Scores of the Day 1 and 2 WRs are below. DeVonta Smith and Jaylen Waddle are not included because they both did not run an official forty.
I like to think of this metric as something that works in favor of a prospect. Bateman does not have an elite score, which doesn’t mean he can’t be an excellent fantasy producer, but it probably does mean his combination of height, weight, and straight-line speed is not the reason he wins on the field.
For what it’s worth, Matt Spencer found that the average Freak Score for a Top 12 WR was 59.1. However, outliers skew averages and I’d bet that some of the WRs north of the 59.1 mark are well above that level, bringing up the average.
With this in mind, let’s recap Bateman’s 2021 season.
