Biggest Surprises of 2020 - Wide Receiver

The 2020 NFL season is in the rearview mirror, but before we look ahead to 2021, let's take some time to look back.

Every year, there are big surprises in the league. Someone comes out of nowhere to have a huge year. Someone we thought was about to regress due to age has a much better season than expected. Things we thought would happen don't happen.

Today, let's look at the wide receivers who were the most surprising this season.

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Stefon Diggs - Buffalo Bills

It's not like we didn't know Stefon Diggs was good. He was WR17 in 2019 with the Vikings and WR12 back in 2018. But his offseason move to Buffalo was one that was met with some puzzlement from those of us in the fantasy football world: how were we going to rank Diggs when we had a clearer grip on the lead receiver role but he was also going to be playing with a wildly inconsistent quarterback?

Diggs ended up being drafted as a high-end WR3 this year because of Josh Allen, but he wound up as the overall WR3 because, well...Josh Allen.

There's not a lot to talk about with Diggs. He's a talented receiver who had the chance to shine on a team of his own instead of sharing targets with Adam Thielen in Minnesota's offense, and he responded by showing that he's a top receiver in the NFL. Again, like 95 percent of my questions about Diggs this year revolved around the quarterback position, with the other five percent being some wildly-unfounded concerns that without Thielen on the other side, defenses might be able to gameplan him out of things.

Well, they didn't, and Josh Allen made an unprecedented leap as a passer. Allen was fourth in clean pocket completion percentage, ninth in deep-ball completion percentage, and 17th in accuracy rating. In 2019, he was 34th in clean completion percentage, 33rd on the deep ball, and 35th in accuracy rating. Allen figured out how to get the ball where it needed to be, and then he had the added benefit of having Stefon Diggs there to do the rest.

Unless you really think Allen is going to regress next season, you should consider Diggs to be a solid WR1 option in 2021 fantasy drafts.

Justin Jefferson - Minnesota Vikings

With Diggs gone, the Vikings used the first-round pick they got in that trade to take LSU wide receiver Justin Jefferson at pick 22. And while rookie wide receivers seem to be notoriously slow to get going in recent seasons, Jefferson bucked that trend completely, setting the record for rookie receiving yards with 1,400.

In one sense, it shouldn't be a surprise that Jefferson had a good season. The way this Vikings offense has worked in recent years has been that the top-two receivers -- Adam Thielen and Stefon Diggs -- had significantly larger roles than any of the tertiary receivers on the roster. Moving on from Diggs didn't mean the team was suddenly going to shift how the offense worked. Whoever earned that No. 2 role behind Thielen would see significant work.

But even with that in mind, I think we would have expected Jefferson to top out as maybe a low-end WR2 in this offense. Instead, he was the half-PPR WR7 after Week 16 and rises to WR6 if we include Week 17.

The Vikings wound up using Jefferson in the slot 86.4 percent of the time, where they could take advantage of his speed. Per Player Profiler, here are his workout metrics:

MISMATCHES.

Add in that Jefferson had just two drops and that he was 13th among wide receivers in target quality -- say it with me: Kirk Cousins is underrated -- and you get a monster first season. I see no reason to expect that to change in 2021. Draft Jefferson as a low-end WR1 with upside.

Diontae Johnson - Pittsburgh Steelers

Did you know that three Steelers wide receivers finished as WR2s this season? But one of them, Diontae Johnson, did it in one less game than the other two, averaging 11.9 half-PPR points per contest.

I wrote a little about Johnson early in the season, at a point when he was really dominating the target share in Pittsburgh. Things inched closer as the season came to a close, with Johnson ending with a 22.89 target share, JuJu Smith-Schuster at 19.63, and Chase Claypool at 16.72.

Johnson was the headliner here, but really having three Steelers receivers do this well is the big story. How did that happen?

Well, having Ben Roethlisberger for a full season helped. Even though he struggled some down the stretch, the 2020 Steelers threw a league-high 656 passes this season. In 2019, they threw 510 passes. So, there's your big takeaway: a lot more passes were available because they had consistency under center. The run game struggled too, leading to even more reliance on the passing game.

The problem moving forward? We don't know who the 2021 quarterback is in Pittsburgh, and even if it is Roethlisberger, his issues at the end of the season mean we can't trust that he'd sustain this level of production.

So while Johnson (and Claypool) were big surprises in 2020, I'm not sure I'll be comfortable drafting them if their 2021 ADP winds up with both guys being drafted around where they finished in 2020.

Robby Anderson - Carolina Panthers

Robby Anderson was the WR17 in half-PPR, which seems...not possible? Like, how did Anderson just quietly produce a WR2 season this year?

Maybe it was because we all just forgot about the Panthers, who weren't nearly as fun to watch with Christian McCaffrey out most of the season.

D.J. Moore played 15 games this year but didn't have the breakout season some anticipated. While he had 1,193 yards, he also saw his receptions drop from 87 to 66.

In 2019, he saw 24.5 percent of the targets in Carolina. Last year, he saw 24.23, which is around the same number. The problem? The additional targets that might have gone to McCaffrey didn't go to Moore, and it was Robby Anderson whose 136 targets led the team. Anderson was 25.86 percent of the targets in Carolina. He showed that he wasn't just a deep threat, actually finishing below Moore in air yards.

Anderson topped 1,000 yards for the first time, catching three touchdowns. His yards per reception were down, but he caught a career-high 95 passes.

It looks like the Matt Rhule-led Panthers might be able to support two fantasy-relevant wide receivers, though that could change depending on how much McCaffrey is used next year.

Anderson has one-year left under contract with the Panthers but also has a $12 million cap hit in 2021. So...we'll see if he's actually on this team, as they could save $8 million by cutting him. But if he winds up in the starting lineup for Carolina next year, he's a guy who'll likely get drafted a couple of rounds later than he should, so go ahead and target him barring some pre-draft hype train that ends up with Anderson being overvalued.

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