Fantasy Football Week 6 Wide Receiver rankings: Are DJ Moore, Adam Thielen really must-start options?

USATSI

Before we get to my wide receiver rankings for Week 6 of the Fantasy Football season, let's get some thoughts on some of the biggest questions at the position, including DJ Moore, Adam Thielen, and more:

Can DJ Moore keep this up?

No. I mean, obviously, no. He's averaging 15.6 yards per target right now, something no player has ever done on more than 26 targets in a season. His current level of performance is wholly unsustainable, even for a very, very good play, like Moore.

The question is, what will it look like when he inevitably regresses? We've seen Moore put up very strong efficiency numbers in the past before, specifically in 2020, when he averaged 10.1 yards per target on 118 targets, and that might actually be an instructive comparison. That season, Moore was a low-volume receiver, primarily used as a deep threat, with a 13.2 average depth of target that still stands as the highest mark of his career – just ahead of this year's 13.1 ADoT – while seeing 7.9 targets per game; this season, he's at 6.8.

The key difference is that he was catching 55.9% of his targets in 2020, a better-than-you-think number for an ADoT that high. There have been 214 seasons over the past decade with at least 50 targets and an ADoT of 13 or higher, and Moore's catch rate that season ranked 93rd. Those 214 players caught 55.3% of their targets in those seasons.

Moore's catch rate right now? 79.4%. Only Tyler Lockett in 2018 has ever bested that with an ADoT of 13.0 or higher, and only he and Rashard Higgins have ever had a catch rate over 70% on at least 50 targets with an ADoT that high. Lockett has three of the top six catch rates in this sample because the pairing of him and Russell Wilson at the height of their respective powers was kind of an outlier moment for the NFL.

Maybe Justin Fields and Moore can be the next version of it. I'm not saying it's impossible, though even if they were the next version of that pairing, Lockett never managed this kind of efficiency for a full season – 15.6 yards per target is just a bonkers number, as previously established. We'd expect regression from even Lockett and Wilson's peak on Moore's current production, let alone whatever the Moore-Fields pairing's true talent level is.

Which is all a long-winded way of saying, Moore is probably one of the more obvious sell-high candidates in the league right now. That should go without saying coming off a 49-point performance in PPR scoring, but I'm still going to point it out. He's a WR2 for me, someone I think will be capable of huge weeks because he's an incredibly talented player, but someone who I think will have plenty of frustrating weeks due to his QB and the offense he plays in. If I can't get a WR1-type return for him, I'll be aggressively looking to trade him this week; if not, I'm happy to hold on to him for the high-end weeks he'll return moving forward.

I just won't be too surprised come those weeks when he flops.

How high is too high to rank Adam Thielen this week?

I have a projections process that informs, but is separate from, my rankings process, and offers a peak behind the curtain: Adam Thielen was my projected WR8 this week. Ahead of, among other, CeeDee Lamb, DeVonta Smith, Chris Olave, and, obviously, a whole lot more.

And the thing is, it's hard to come up with a good argument against it. He's eighth in the NFL in targets right now, which actually undersells him a bit because he was targeted just twice in Week 1; only Ja'Marr Chase and Puka Nacua have more targets than Thielen's 44 since Week 2.

Thielen is catching 82.6% of his targets this season, which is probably unsustainable, though less than with his 7.4 ADoT than with Moore's. And he's thrived with multiple different quarterbacks in the lineup, now having put together four straight games of at least 14.6 PPR points. He's been tremendous, and he's the clear top receiving option in Carolina's offense, and he seems to be served very well by playing two-thirds of his snaps out of the slot, after being in the slot just 29% of the time last season.

Thielen is having a significant bounceback campaign at 33, which is a good reason to expect significant regression moving forward. But my bigger concern right now is more about his ability to stay healthy, as he's missed a lot of time over the past few seasons with injuries (though he did manage to play 17 games last season). The other concern here would be that the Panthers might have someone younger who will eventually be ready to take on a larger role, though I'm not much of a believer in Jonathan Mingo, so that might not happen. There's an element of Diontae Johnson's role in the late Ben Roethlisberger era for the Steelers, where his volume might be a product of the inability to do much down the field, but I don't see much reason to think that's going to change in the near term.

Which is all to say … I can't give you any exceptionally good reason why Thielen shouldn't be ranked higher than someone like, say, CeeDee Lamb for this week. All I can do is repeat their names at increasingly higher volumes until you stop asking me about it. I'm ranking Lamb about Thielen. But I feel so much less confident in it than I ever thought I would.

Can you trust KJ Osborn if Justin Jefferson is out?

Adam Aizer, host of the Fantasy Football Today podcast, had a good note about Osborn yesterday after Jefferson's injury. He noted that Osborn has scored at least 14.6 PPR points in eight of 11 games with at least seven targets, averaging 16.1 points per game in those 11 games. That's a pretty tremendous performance!

But I do want to quibble with that stat a bit. Part of the problem for Osborn is the earning targets part, and just because Jefferson might be out this week doesn't automatically mean Osborn is going to be locked into seven targets. He's only done that 11 times in 48 tries in the NFL. Yes, he's played most of those games alongside high-end receivers like Adam Thielen and Justin Jefferson, but he also averaged 11.4 points on 5.5 targets per game in four with Thielen inactive prior to this season. That's not bad, but it's not must-start territory, necessarily, especially with only 43.8 yards per game to go along with it.

I'll definitely move Osborn up in my rankings if Jefferson is out, but he's definitely not going to be a must-start WR for me. He's WR37, a viable starter, but I would feel a lot better about my team if he were my fourth WR this week than my second, obviously.