Photo: USA Today Sports

There are some fantasy football players that believe that the lineup you pick can lose you a game just as much as it can win a contest. Having a player give you a consistent performance week after week can be considered more valuable than a player who goes off every third week and then takes two weeks off between those fantastic performances. Consistency has a value, and it does not take much of a leap to understand that players that you can rely on for solid games when you need them (such as in your postseason) are a huge advantage.

Baseball has a term called "Quality Starts" for pitchers, which is a statistic that represents how often a starting pitcher will put up a good (not great, just good) performance in a given game. The bar is set neither high nor low (six innings pitched, three earned runs or fewer) so as to gauge a decent performance. The theory behind it is that if your pitcher gives you a Quality Start, your team has a fighting chance to win a given game.

So now we need to translate this to football. What is "quality" for each position? How do we define a "Quality Start" for quarterbacks or running backs or any other position? Looking back at the 2017 season, I decided to take the #24 WR for the year based on a points per game ranking, rather than based on total points as I had done in some previous years. The reason is simple - when stud wide receivers are available (like Odell Beckham), you play them - but when they are hurt, you don't. So rather than exclude studs who get hurt for several games from the analysis, elite receivers with high averages are now included even though he missed time. That changes our outlook just slightly, as now our WR24 is Chris Hogan (76.6 fantasy points, or 8.5 over 9 games) instead of Kenny Stills (119.7 points or 7.5 per game). It is a subtle change, but I think a better one, so I will use that for receivers going forwards. Also, taking WR24 seems a bit arbitrary, but if you are looking for a bare minimum of quality, the 24th WR should be the "worst starter" in your fantasy league as a WR2 and a great WR3.

So now we move on to the next question - one of quantifying the quality. At what point do we decide whether or not a wide receiver has given us a quality performance? Here is where it gets a bit murky, but looking at the distribution of WR performances by starters over the season and it becomes evident that the using the 24th WR average and adding or subtracting a percentage gives us a good range for a WR Quality Start.

Using the WR Quality Start range, we can also define a bad performance or an excellent performance as either falling below or exceeding the Quality Start range. Table 1 gives us the fantasy points that it takes to fall in each of the three areas:

Table 1: 2017 WR Quality Start and Fantasy Point Ranges - Standard Scoring

Table 2 shows us the breakdown of all the Top 75 WRs from 2017 and how many of each type of start resulted for each:

Table 2: 2017 WR Start Types Sorted By Top 75 WRs - Standard Scoring

That's a lot of info to digest, so let me help. First, we see that there are far more Excellent Starts (289) than Quality Starts (229), a difference of 60 starts. That difference is comparable to the last two seasons (60 in 2016, 64 in 2015) and the threshold for excellence is comparable to prior years. The line for Excellent Starts has been reasonably consistent for the past several years, as shown in Table 3 below:

Table 3: Excellent and Quality Starts - 2009 to 2017 - Standard Scoring

Now, to dig deeper, let's look at the numbers distributed in two different ways. First, I need to define a valuable starting wide receiver in this system. We want a WR that will win more fantasy games than lose them, so we want either "Quality" or "Excellent" starts. Using a simple formula of scoring each type of start, we can define the value of a given NFL wide receiver. Here is the formula:

STARTING FANTASY WR VALUE = EXCELLENT STARTS - BAD STARTS

We neglect to look at Quality Starts because they neither win games nor lose them on average - they are just average WR performances. We only really care about how often he helps our team vs. how often he hurts it. Giving a "-1" value to bad starts and "+1" to excellent ones does this for us.

On with the results, sorted by value:

Table 4: 2017 WR Start Types Sorted By Value - PPR Scoring

This is a lot of information once again, but some names leap out at us. The first observation is that there was just one receiver on the entire list with just zero bad starts (DeAndre Hopkins) and only one with one Bad Start (Odell Beckham) - and he missed most of the year. Hopkins dominated the Net Value at +11, more than double the next elite receiver in Antonio Brown (+5). Only three other receivers (Tyreek Hill, Davante Adams and Michael Thomas) had +3 or +4 Net Values. Further, only 15 receivers had a positive Net Value last year, and even if you had a fantasy roster completely comprised of this short and elite list, your wide receivers would still underperform roughly 25% of the time. That shows how difficult it was to find reliable, quality receivers once again last season. It is decidedly clear that getting 2-4 top notch receivers on your fantasy team is critical to success in today's pass-happy NFL.

Lastly I will sift through it for you and get right to the heart of the matter with our final table. Here we have the results sorted by value for the Top 48 WRs on the 2018 ADP list.