Finding 2022’s Fantasy Football Breakout Wide Receiver: Donovan Peoples-Jones, Cleveland Browns

In this series of articles, we're looking at breakout potential for second- and third-year wide receivers in fantasy football for 2022. This analysis focuses on the Cleveland Browns’ Donovan Peoples-Jones. You can find articles for other wide receivers from the 2021 and 2020 NFL Draft classes, here.

One of the best ways to determine the range of outcomes and the probability of success for fantasy players is by comparing them to similar historical players. In this analysis, I’ll compare Peoples-Jones to hundreds of receivers drafted since 2006 and project the likelihood of his breakout based on those who had the most similar size, draft position and second-year NFL metrics.

METHODOLOGY

The matching methodology for this set of articles is similar to that for focusing on 2022 wide receiver and running back prospect comps, where I found the closest statistically comparable players using principal component analysis (PCA) and the Euclidean distance between the players' components, and then gave each a “similarity” score based on percentile of distance. 

The metrics for PCA are draft position, weight and a number of second-year stats: yards per route run (Yards Per), average depth of target (Avg Depth), PPR fantasy points per game (PPR Per Gm) and top-24 fantasy weeks (Top-24 Wks).

DONOVAN PEOPLES-JONES COMPS