It's Too Soon To Anoint CeeDee Lamb The Next Great Dynasty Wide Receiver

Ever since CeeDee Lamb’s explosive five-game start to his rookie season, he’s been rocketing up DLF ADP. After starting as WR15 in May 2020, he reached a high of WR4 in November, and currently sits at WR7 as of June 2021. It’s not hard to understand what dynasty managers see – he’s a dynamic talent with a sterling prospect profile and a productive rookie season. If only he could have had a full season with Dak Prescott, we surely would have seen a rookie season to remember.

As with most things, though, there’s more to the story than the top-line numbers. While Lamb is certainly talented, a look at the circumstances surrounding his early-season production quickly demonstrates it was unsustainable. And considering his full season stats relative to some of his fellow WRs, he’s currently being overvalued in dynasty leagues.

About Those Five Games

Let’s start with Lamb’s raw stats during weeks one through five (I am including week five because Prescott played two thirds of the snaps in that game):

	Tgts	Recs	Yds	Y/R	TDs	Ctch%	Y/Tgt	PPG
Weeks 1-5	40	29	433	14.93	2	73%	10.83	16.86

As you’ve no doubt heard, this stretch put him at WR11 overall in PPR. That’s pretty good for a rookie! But there’s a bit more to it than meets the eye. Let’s take a peek at some of my favorite underlying stats – target share, air yard share, and WOPR (weighted opportunity rating):

(Before we interpret this let’s do a quick aside on WOPR: the further downfield you are, the harder it gets to earn targets. This can make comparing target share between players with distinctly different usage difficult, so we can also look WOPR which balances target share with air yards share to try and account for that usage).

Okay let’s start with the good – by both target share and WOPR, Lamb was the WR2 for the Cowboys over this stretch. That’s great for a rookie, especially one on an offense so stacked with talent. Now let’s also be realistic – a 17% target share rarely leads to a WR11 season. Since 2009, here are the finishes of the 88 WRs with a per-game target share of 16.5-17.5% (minimum ten games played):

That outlier is 2011 Jordy Nelson with 15 receiving TDs and the second-lowest PPG of WR4s in that time frame. Now the reality with Lamb is probably somewhere between WR11 and a distribution that averages WR49, but we can’t just ignore what that target share implies (for the attentive readers now thinking “you just said not all target shares are the same”, Lamb’s aDOT of 9.9 over the timeframe is normal so I’m comfortable taking it at face value).

If Dallas Keeps Throwing Like This, Target Share Won’t Matter

Simple math will tell you there are two ways for WRs to receive more targets – grabbing a larger piece of the pie (target share) or seeing a bigger pie altogether (total pass attempts). In weeks one through five, Lamb was benefitting primarily from the size of the pie, rather than his slice of it. That’s actually perfectly fine, as long as the pie stays that size. But will it?

There are a number of ways to tackle this question (and we’ll address them all) but the simplest is just to look at what the Cowboys did across the whole season. Weeks one through five they paced for 755 pass attempts, which would have been an NFL record by 15 attempts (the 2012 Lions were quite a team). They finished with 639, so in that sense, the pie obviously didn’t stay the same size. But it’s fair to argue that maybe they slowed down because of Dak’s injury. Obviously, the 2012 Lions are an example of a team that has maintained that pace for a full year – let’s see if that’s common.

The Cowboys’ weeks one through five stretch ranks tied for 15th since 1999 amongst all individual five-game streaks by all teams in terms of pass attempts per game, with an average of 47.2. The five teams on either side of that stretch (so ten total) saw their full-season average fall short of their high-volume streaks by an average of just over six attempts per game:

Just one of those teams saw a full season dip of fewer than 4.5 attempts/game (hello again, Lions), and a full 50% regressed by 6.5+ attempts/game. Dallas’s regression was on the higher end of this sample (7.25 fewer attempts), so it does seem reasonable that the loss of Prescott is playing a role in the magnitude of that dip.

A likely explanation for the regression that we see from nearly all of these teams is that it takes real outlier game conditions to cause a team to need to pass 47 times a game. In the case of the Cowboys, they allowed an average of 36 points per game over that stretch, which would have topped the 2020 Lions for worst in the NFL across a full season. One way around this is to look at neutral game script pass rate, or how often a team passes when situation isn’t forcing them to. rbsdm.com is a great resource for digging into this, and it gives a better sense of what the Cowboys wanted to do over that five-week span:

They’re hiding behind the Pittsburgh logo at 14th, indicating they wanted to pass at around a league-average rate, but game state made that impossible. It’s possible in 2021 that their defense is as bad as it was for that stretch, but by the second half of the season they were already performing at basically a league-average level:

like these are thoroughly passable defensive results if the offense had been healthier pic.twitter.com/z55JaIzhZz

— Cowboys Stats & Graphics (@CowboysStats) April 3, 2021

All of this is to say it’s almost a certainty that the pie is getting smaller relative to that five-game stretch, and there are reasons to believe it’s getting significantly smaller. So the next question is whether we can confidently predict Lamb will claim a large enough portion of the pie to offset that drop.

Lamb’s Rookie Season Was Good

Lamb’s rookie season was good! He was second on the team in target share and third in WOPR, competing with an extremely talented group of WRs, and he finished 31st in PPR points per game (minimum ten games played). It’s perfectly fair to ask whether playing in a less crowded offense would have lent itself to more impressive underlying metrics and potentially more impressive scoring as well.

There are also a few spots we should probably expect improvement – per the DLF Snap Count App, you can see his snap rate trended downward after the first weeks, then tended to bounce between 50 and 70%:

This exaggerates the effect on his production a bit – per Player Profiler, he had 80% route participation despite a 69% average snap share, suggesting he was disproportionately coming off the field for running plays. Nonetheless, this compares to 95% for Cooper and 98% for Gallup, so there’s room for improvement there if Lamb moves ahead of either of them into two-receiver sets.

It’s also likely Lamb sees some sort of improved efficiency with the return of Dak. While the importance of QB play is often exaggerated for WRs, it’s clear that a more prolific offense lends itself to more scoring opportunities for receivers, and potentially more accurate passes. Again per rbsdm.com, in 2020 Prescott ranked 14th in EPA/play and 24th in completion percentage over expected, while Andy Dalton ranked 31st and 27th in those metrics. There’s no doubt Dak is a significant upgrade.

But there were also obviously benefits to playing within this system with this supporting cast – Lamb’s role being one of them. Again per Player Profiler, Lamb was second in the league in slot snaps with 621. This usage was particularly fantasy-friendly, with 34% of his targets coming in the middle of the field, good for fifth in the NFL (min. 90 targets). Hayden Winks has previously shown that targets to the middle of the field are more valuable for fantasy at all depths:

Here is the 2020 data: https://t.co/9Ew4CWS8oz pic.twitter.com/kv1aoqH0wi

— Hayden Winks (@HaydenWinks) March 13, 2021

This isn’t a ding on Lamb’s skill – the WRs joining him in that top five were Tyler Boyd, Chris Godwin, JuJu Smith-Schuster, and Marquise Brown – but underlines that he benefitted from that crowded offense in some ways too.

So let’s take his rookie year at face value and take a look at the comps – here are rookie seasons for round one WRs since 2009 with a per-game target share of 15-19% and yards per team pass attempts greater than 1.3 (minimum ten games played):

That’s a very solid group of WRs to be in! But it isn’t quite a list of locked and loaded fantasy superstars. That certainly doesn’t mean Lamb can’t be a superstar, but it also doesn’t suggest it’s a foregone conclusion. Amongst the members of this group that we have June of year two ADP for (which excludes Percy Harvin, Hakeem Nicks, and Kenny Britt), Lamb is far and away the highest valued at WR7, with Brandin Cooks showing up next at WR15.

Let’s Talk Value

When I started writing this article, Lamb was sitting at WR4 in DLF May ADP, which I considered clearly too early. June ADP has since come out with him falling three spots to WR7, which is closer to fair value:

I would have him firmly behind Calvin Ridley, DeAndre Hopkins, and Michael Thomas (respect this man!), and in the neighborhood of Ja’Marr Chase, Terry McLaurin, and DJ Moore.

The DLF Trade Analyzer suggests you could trade Lamb for Stefon Diggs, Cam Akers, or D’Andre Swift, all trades I would make:

It also indicates you could go from Lamb to Justin Jefferson with the addition of just an early ’21 second (in 1QB leagues), which I would do in a heartbeat:

I’m sure this article will come across as anti-Lamb, so I want to lay out my stance plainly: he looks like a very talented player and can be an impactful WR for years to come. But the difference between “can” and “will” matters, and his current price implies more confidence in “will” than the underlying numbers bear out.

As always, you can tell me why I’m wrong on Twitter at @Cooper_DFF.