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The Carolina Panthers drafted South Carolina wide receiver Xavier Legette at the end of the first round of the 2024 NFL Draft, pairing him with second-year quarterback Bryce Young in hopes of creating a dynamic offense in Carolina.
Heading into his rookie campaign, is Legette a fantasy sleeper, or is he someone that fantasy managers should be avoiding for the 2024 NFL season?
Below, you'll find our fantasy football rookie profile for Carolina Panthers wide receiver Xavier Legette.
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Xavier Legette's Path to the NFL
Xavier Legette's path to becoming a first-round NFL Draft pick might be my favorite story of the year because it's so unlikely in this new era of college football, a world where the transfer portal has made it so a lot of players won't display the patience that Legette did.
Back in 2019, Legette showed up in Columbia and appeared in 11 games. He caught nine passes for 80 yards, which was really how his first four seasons went. 2020 saw him grab seven balls. In 2021, that number jumped to eight. By 2022, though, he has a little more of a role, catching 18 passes and three touchdowns.
But two of those touchdowns and seven of those receptions came in the Gator Bowl against Notre Dame. Production in a meaningless bowl game doesn't necessarily suggest a player is on the precipice of a breakout.
Except this time, it did mean that. Legette came back in 2023 for a fifth season at South Carolina and suddenly looked like a star. In that final season, Legette caught 71 passes for 1,255 yards and seven touchdowns. He was second in the SEC in receiving yards and third in receptions.
What Xavier Legette Brings to the Panthers
For the purposes of this section, we're ignoring the glaring issue with Legette, which is his extremely late breakout age and lack of production before 2023. We'll get to that a bit later, but for now, I want to focus on the positive things with the former South Carolina receiver. What's Carolina getting if it gets the best version of Legette?
One of the names you hear the most when it comes to Legette is Philadelphia Eagles wide receiver A.J. Brown, which makes sense. Legette is a large receiver who plays really strong. He's someone who can make contested catches and impact the game down the field.
Xavier Legette is a 6-1, 220-lb WR with some incredible catches on his 2023 film. In his only "productive" season at SC, Legette did average nearly 15 ypc and score 15 TD's in his career.
What follows is a compilation of his routes against Georgia, Florida, & Clemson from '23.… pic.twitter.com/ThruM7i4sB— All 22 Films (@All_22_NFL_Cuts) April 18, 2024
Legette isn't someone who's necessarily going to run past defenders, especially with the speed of the game increasing at the NFL level, but his size makes him a threat in the vertical game anyway because he can bully opposing defenders on jump balls. He still needs to work on playing at a smoother level, but overall, Legette has a lot of positive tools based on his 2023 college production.
Path to Playing Time
While Legette has the build to be an A.J. Brown-type receiver, and he was impressive last season, I can't help but worry about almost all of his college production coming at once. A 23-year-old receiver with one year of college productivity is a huge risk in the first round, no matter how productive he was. Sure, taking him there suggests that the Panthers will want him on the field, but I just don't know how much we can actually expect Legette to produce.
I want Legette to be successful in the NFL, but we also have to consider reality here. This is a guy whose best season coming into 2023 was an 18-catch, 167-yard season in 2022. His 22.6 breakout age is in just the eighth percentile per PlayerProfiler.
Simply put, guys like Legette don't really exist, and it makes drafting him a risky proposition. The only other first-round receiver with a breakout age over 22 in the past decade was Kelvin Benjamin:
Legette now +160 to go R1 on DK.
He'd tie Big Benji for latest breakout age* of any R1 WR over the last decade. https://t.co/cfW1RVaeED pic.twitter.com/F1Uvxu2lrY
— Kyle Borgognoni (@kyle_borg) April 23, 2024
Anyway, I got a little sidetracked. As far as Legette's path to snaps, things are pretty wide open. The Panthers have Diontae Johnson and Adam Thielen, but those two are very different kinds of receivers than Legette. He should get the first crack at being the down-field option for quarterback Bryce Young. The roster behind Thielen/Johnson/Legette is relatively unproven, and the other young receiver, Jonathan Mingo, is coming off a pretty rough rookie campaign. Expect Legette on the field early and often. The question is really how many targets he'll see.
The answer? Playing with two players who are at their best when they get a ton of targets in Johnson and Thielen likely alters Legette's upside by a good bit. How often will Young actually go looking down the field, especially with two talented short-yardage receivers there? There's probably a fairly low cap on his upside.
2024 Fantasy Football Outlook
As I mentioned above, Legette's in a weird situation. He's the most athletic receiver on this roster and is best suited to make an impact in the deep and medium passing games, but he's playing with a quarterback who ranked 20th in air yards per attempt last year and who just added a weapon in Johnson who in 2022 ranked sixth among wide receivers in total targets while ranking 19th in deep targets and 53rd in aDOT.
Xavier Legette UP pic.twitter.com/gNUgnRp6p7
— 32BeatWriters (@32BeatWriters) May 21, 2024
Essentially, I expect the goal of this Panthers offense to be to get the ball out as fast as possible, emphasizing Johnson and Thielen, which would be at the expense of targets going toward their rookie receiver.
Legette should be viewed as a WR6 or WR7 play, though he does possess upside if anything happens to Thielen or Johnson and the Panthers are forced to change some things up on offense. He could also have a few boom weeks that are influenced by the game script and the Panthers having a lot of garbage time snaps. While I won't be drafting him in most formats, I view him as particularly interesting in best ball, where you won't have to worry about the decision to start him or sit him.
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