What's Behind the Surprising NFL Success of This Year's Rookie Receiver Class?

Three weeks into the 2016 NFL season, we're already seeing rookie wide receivers play huge roles all over the league. Will Fuller, drafted No. 21 out of Notre Dame, has helped the Houston Texans open up a vertical passing offense against teams not from New England. Sterling Shepard, drafted 40th overall out of Oklahoma, stepped in as an immediate No. 2 wideout for the New York Giants; he has caught 16 of his first 19 targets, for a 84 percent completion rate. Michael Thomas, the Saints' 47th pick out of Ohio State, has seamlessly replaced Marques Colston in New Orleans. Even lower-round picks like Tajae Sharpe, drafted 140th overall out of Massachusetts by the Tennessee Titans, have been instant depth-chart successes.

This is not an uncommon story over the past few years: Tyler Lockett, a third-round pick, was an immediate slot contributor to a dominant Seattle Seahawks passing attack in 2015. Keenan Allen fell to the third round in 2013 because of his injury history in college and yet was immediately a difference-maker in the pros.

But the 2016 receiver class was scrutinized pretty heavily heading into the draft. The top guy on a lot of open boards, Laquon Treadwell, was bagged on by anonymous scouts for his speed issues. Fuller was crushed by draft analysts for his poor hands, drawing unfavorable comparisons to Mike Wallace. There were first-round talents, but no no-brainer No. 1 receiver.

Compare the first three weeks of the 2016 draft class to the vaunted 2014 receiver class, though, and these rookies don't necessarily look out of place:

And the crazy thing is that, outside of Fuller, the first-round picks haven't even been contributing to these numbers. Corey Coleman (15th overall pick) has been sidelined with a broken hand in Cleveland. Josh Doctson (22nd overall) has been dealing with Achilles issues since training camp for Washington. Treadwell, who wound up getting drafted 23rd overall by the Minnesota Vikings, can't get off the bench. Any one of these guys could still pull an Odell Beckham Jr. and finish as the year's best rookie receiver despite a slow start to the season.

As The Ringer's Kevin Clark has noted, NFL rosters are getting younger, so there's more opportunity for rookies to help right away. But all this early success tells us less about the caliber of this class of wide receivers than you might think. Instead, it shows how difficult it has become to play good pass defense in the NFL.

In 2004, per Football Outsiders' down-by-down DVOA measurements, there were 11 teams creating negative value on pass attempts, and 17 teams creating negative value on rushing attempts. In other words, for every down and distance measurement, passing the ball had a slightly higher success rate than running it. By 2014, the numbers looked a little different. Only eight teams created negative value on pass attempts, while 23 teams were creating negative value rushing. Through three weeks of 2016, that trend is holding steady: eight negative passing teams, 22 negative rushing teams.

So what has changed?

Professional football teams steal a lot of their ideas from the college game. In the passing game, the biggest innovation of the past 20 years has been the adoption and proliferation of spread offense principles. There are designated pass-catching running backs, sets with three receivers on one side, sets where the receivers all line up outside the hashes. Not all of these translate well to the NFL, but a lot of them have. In fact, it has become very common over the past couple of years to draft a quarterback and include a significant portion of his college playbook, with the most famous example being the Shanaclan building Washington's offense around Baylor concepts for 2012 rookie quarterback Robert Griffin III. This year, you see Dallas simplifying the offense and including packaged plays to take advantage of Dak Prescott's strengths. Philadelphia is not necessarily asking Carson Wentz to do easy stuff, but they are giving him a spread offense and making it easier for him to diagnose the field before the snap, something he has excelled at.

NFL defenses haven't responded in kind. Think about it: When's the last time you heard of a defense-first college innovator fighting his way to the NFL? The early spread-offense counter-adaptors like TCU's Gary Patterson and Pitt's Pat Narduzzi aren't getting interviewed by teams. The major defensive coaching tree hires of the past few years have been from Seattle, and what we've learned from Gus Bradley and Dan Quinn is that basing out of Cover-3 sure works a hell of a lot better with the Legion Of Boom than it does with the Legion Of Who.

Instead, the best defensive coaches in the league—and that applies this year, too—are NFL lifers like Denver's Wade Phillips, Philly's Jim Schwartz, and Minnesota's Mike Zimmer. And it shows on the field. You still see plenty of defensive coaches try to cover superior passing game options with linebackers and safeties who have been trained to tackle first and cover second. Quarters coverage has caught on in the pros, but most defenses still play with two deep safeties and don't try to aggressively stack the box to take away the short passing game. And so rookie wide receivers come out of college and hit the professional ranks only to find they don't get jammed at the line of scrimmage as often. Or to find that the guy covering them isn't really prepared to do the task.

2016, Wks 1-3: 60 accepted DPI flags. 2015, Wks 1-3: 41 accepted DPI flags.

— Vincent Verhei (@FO_VVerhei)September 27, 2016

On top of that, league rules are being rewritten and enforced in ways that only make it easier for the offense. This really got started in 2009, when the NFL revised its rules about roughing the passer in response to the hit that ended Tom Brady's 2008 season. Since then, the league has "re-emphasized" things in favor of the offense on an almost-yearly basis. Illegal contact rules were strengthened in 2014, creating more bailout first downs. This year, there hasn't been an official rule change—but referees seem to have shifted on enforcing pass interference, with teams accepting almost 50 percent more defensive pass interference calls than they did in 2015.

These things have combined to make it easier than ever before for a rookie wide receiver to make a positive impact, even if he isn't a top-tier talent right out of college.

After all, most of the pre-draft criticisms of this class were spot on, and have been borne out in the regular season. Fuller does have poor hands, and he does sometimes play weakly at the point of attack. But in the current passing environment, he's already a positive-value player (3.1% DVOA through Week 3), and he hasn't even drawn pass interference on a single one of his many deep balls yet.

Shepard, who most scouts viewed as a pure slot receiver, is No. 1 in receiving DVOA through Week 3 because none of his opponents so far have had a prayer of covering him. NFL scouts still apply a discount on slot receivers like they're going out of style, and you only have two outside receivers until it's third-and-long, but if you find a quick receiver who runs his routes expertly—like Shepard does—and line him up inside, defenses will have a hard time keeping up. The Giants have done just that, and now Shepard, along with New Orleans' Thomas, is well on his way to being a permanent mismatch on the field.

The Platonic ideal for an outside receiver has long been a player like Dez Bryant or Calvin Johnson: six-foot-four and chiseled, with freakish speed and the ability to outmuscle everybody for the ball. But those are no longer prerequisites to win on offense overall. The playing field has never been easier to take advantage of: all a receiver needs to do is be able to win in one area of the field. The rest is scheme and smart coaching. And nothing says that louder than a much-maligned rookie wideout class instantly producing results before the first-round picks have even had much to say about it.

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