Ranking NFL team WR, TE, RB talent for 2024: Top players

It’s the height of summer, which means one thing to me: It’s time to rank the NFL’s offensive playmakers. Every year, right around this time, I take stock of every move the franchise has made to surround their various starting quarterbacks with talent as they hope to translate a hot offseason into a Super Bowl victory.

On one hand, you could argue that the 2023 season proved that teams can win Without Great playmaker, as the Chiefs spent most of 2023 begging one of their wide receivers to catch the football. I’d also like to point out that they got a lot from future Hall of Fame tight end Travis Kelce, Isiah Pacheco who played great all season as the starter, and Rashee Rice and company in the postseason to advance through the AFC. Got a lot from. bracket. The guys on the other side of the field in Super Bowl LVIII may have done enough with one or two great starts to turn their quarterback into league MVP.

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If a team has Patrick Mahomes, it can probably survive without great players. How about one of the 31 teams trying to beat him in 2024? Well, it would be nice to be near the top of this list. Let’s take a look at the guys who catch the football and run with it and how each team is prepared to go from worst to first to take advantage of good quarterback play in 2024.

However, before you fire off that angry tweet, consider the basic rules I followed in compiling this piece:

It’s just about running backs, wide receivers and tight ends. In other words, imagine that players at each set of offensive skill positions get a chance to play with the same average quarterback in an average scheme with an average season, average luck, and average speed. Who will have the league’s best offense?

It is only about the performance on the field during the 2024 season. While I talk a lot about contract value and long-term impacts in evaluating the league, none of that matters once the games start. This is strictly considering what each player can do this season, not what will happen in the following years.

I’m using each player’s recent level of play and various advanced metrics to get the best idea of ​​their performance while trying to adjust to the context around each of them. The stages of aging matter here; We know that players in their early 20s are more likely to improve than players in their 30s. When it comes to draft picks, I’m keeping my feelings about each player out of the equation and relying more on the historical performance of draftees in their respective ranges during their rookie seasons. In other words, to predict what Chargers wideout Ladd McConkey will do in his rookie season, I’m looking at the typical performance of receivers selected early in Round 2.

Injury history and suspensions matter. Injuries are impossible to predict. (If you had Aaron Rodgers tear your Achilles on the first series of the season, I know some NFL teams who would want to hire you.) At the same time, a player’s injury history points us in a direction and toward relaxation. Some of their projected performance may be subject to the possibility of injury. Deebo Samuel has never played a full season as a professional; It looks like he will miss some games in 2024.

I am projecting players who are recovering from serious injuries, such as Tyler Higbee and TJ Hockenson, to be absent for meaningful portions of the regular season. Although we don’t have official word on his case for 2024, the expectation is that Rashee Rice will be suspended, which has me keeping him out of the lineup for a few games. On the other hand, I’m expecting CeeDee Lamb and other players who were “on hold” during training camp for new deals to be on the field in Week 1.

Wide receivers carry a greater load than running backs or tight ends. I’m just following the NFL’s lead here. Justin Jefferson makes $35 million per season. Christian McCaffrey is the only back to make more than $15 million per year. Twenty different wide receivers are making more than $20 million per season, a figure that no running back or tight end can match.

This is a league in which elite wide receivers are more valuable than ever. As a result, my rankings reflect that sentiment, treating wideouts as more valuable than players at other positions.

The focus is on specific players and the team’s top five contributors. Depth matters, but teams would probably prefer to have Jefferson and four other replacement-level receivers than five guys like Darnell Mooney or DJ Chark. Having a player who can beat any coverage is extremely valuable, and these rankings lean toward valuing teams that have game-changers at one position or another.

Since teams can play with five playmakers at any given time, I looked at each team’s five best players as their primary rationale for these rankings. I won’t mention every single player in every article, but players outside the top five were mostly used for tiebreakers between closely ranked teams, given how unlikely they are to make an impact in 2024.

Efficiency matters. I’ve done my best to try to normalize the difference between what players can do and how their team played, which is not always the same thing. Speed ​​is a major factor. Thanks to a stellar defense and moderate offense, the Browns played a league-high 1,187 games last season, 50 more than any other team. And on the other end, without a great defense, the Seahawks ran only 995 offensive snaps. That’s an extra 11 plays per game for the Browns, all of which added to their players’ cumulative statistics. This does not indicate better performance.

As a result, you’ll see a lot of metrics that use averages as opposed to cumulative performance. Two that come up often for receivers are yards per route and target share. The average number of yards per route is the average number of yards gained by a receiver when he runs an eligible route, regardless of whether he caught the ball or was targeted on the play. Target share is the percentage of time a pass-catcher was targeted when running a route. Neither statistic is perfect, but each will help us understand whether a receiver was able to create opportunities when he was on the field. I’ll also be using ESPN’s advanced receiver tracking metrics, which uses data from NFL Next Gen Stats to estimate his impact on a moment-by-moment basis.

With all that in mind, let’s start getting to know our teams. In 2022 and 2023, the Texans were the last-place team in these rankings. Spoiler: He’s not in 32nd place this time. Instead, one team that has consistently finished in the top 10 has dropped to the bottom of the playmaker chart:

Join a team:
ARI | ATL | hair | BUF | car | CHI | CIN
CLE | Dal | Dane | DET | GB | HOU IND
Jax | Casey | LAC | Saliva lv | Mia min
North East No | NYG | NYJ | PHI pits SF
sea ​​| TB Ten WSH

2023 Rank: 5 | 2022 Rank: 6

Fiction. Nearly every key player who kept the Chargers in the top five last season took a big step back, left town and was not replaced with a player of similar caliber. The most notable player is Quentin Johnston, who averaged 0.94 yards rushing per route as a rookie even after earning a place in the starting lineup following an injury to Mike Williams. The only wideouts of the first round since 2007 who were worse in their rookie campaigns were Nelson Agholor and Darrius Heyward-Bey.