Where do Drake London and Garrett Wilson fall in Shawn Siegele’s updated dynasty WR rankings after the first two weeks of the 2022 fantasy season?
The 2022 season has gotten off to an almost unparalleled start at WR as first-round superstars annihilate the competition. The five WRs with ADPs in the opening stanza have averaged 52.8 PPG through two weeks.
In Monday’s recap, I noted that only 11 WRs had scored 39-plus points in Week 2 this century but three more joined them on Sunday. Then Stefon Diggs went out and added to it on Monday night. Diggs and Cooper Kupp are off to the races with the fourth- and sixth-best starts of the last 22 years.
The veteran wide receivers are dominating, with Davante Adams notching 17 targets in Week 1 and Tyreek Hill putting up 40 points in Week 2.
But it hasn’t been just the veterans. Drake London and Garrett Wilson immediately lived up to their top-10-pick pedigrees with 35 and 39 points respectively. You have to go back to 2015 to find a time when the WR position was so promising from a dynasty perspective.
- Antonio Brown would score 390 points for the second consecutive year in 2015, and he’d go on to post 300-point campaigns in each of the next three years before his decline.
- Julio Jones was coming off a 1,500-yard season in 2014 when he jumped to 1,871 receiving yards the next year. Over the following four years he would average more than 1,450 receiving yards.
- Odell Beckham had just completed the greatest rookie fantasy season ever in 2014, and he backed that up with 319 points in his sophomore campaign. Although his career would be disappointing thereafter, he still held plenty of dynasty trade value for years.
- DeAndre Hopkins caught 111 passes in his third year, the first of what would be five seasons as WR5 or better, including back-to-back campaigns as the overall WR1.
- Keenan Allen struggled with injuries in 2016 but then embarked on a five-year run where he missed only two games and never scored fewer than 249 fantasy points.
- Injuries and poor QB play kept Allen Robinson from ever scaling these heights again, but he compensated his ardent fans with two more 1,100-yard seasons after moving to Chicago.
Mike Evans (22), Davante Adams (23), and Stefon Diggs (22) weren’t scoring at the levels they would later, but all lurked as impending superstars.
The only comparable WR scoring season occurred in 2018, but the culprits that year were older. They represented far worse dynasty outlooks and many collapsed almost immediately.
Young WRs and the Permanent Championship Window
Our Dynasty Workshop focuses heavily on the Permanent Championship Window. This approach emphasizes Perpetual Reloading to create rosters with an embarrassment of riches across the board and especially with WR youth. We also had a variety of lessons on startup drafts, including how to exploit the enthusiasm for 2023 rookie picks. By loading up on 2022 rookie WRs, we were able to get a jump start on building that juggernaut.
How high do those receivers rise after hot starts to the 2022 season? It’s time to dive into the rankings.
