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Examining 2024’s breakthrough fantasy football wide receiver: Terry McLaurin

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One of the best performances at the wide receiver position this past season was Commanders’ No. 1 wideout, Terry McLaurin. The Washington receiver enjoyed the best season of his career in his sixth year with the franchise.

Just to give a quick look at the expectations for him this season, McLaurin was drafted around WR30 in fantasy football — a rather forgettable range of players, just ahead of guys like Christian Kirk and Keenan Allen. No one was overly optimistic about the veteran receiver because there’s a general assumption in the football community that, after a large enough sample, guys just “are who they are.”

That misunderstanding is how a player like McLaurin can fall through the cracks.

McLaurin finished 2024 as the sixth-highest scoring receiver in fantasy with career-best marks in catch rate (70%), EPA per target (0.57) and, of course, touchdowns (13). That really tells the story of why McLaurin had the season he did. Nothing about him as a player changed; he simply saw more efficient targets than ever before in his career and played in the healthiest offensive environment by a long shot.

The reality is McLaurin had demonstrated for years he was capable of this type of statistical season that would place him among the NFL’s top wideouts.

Players who score that well in Reception Perception almost always find their way to the range of elite-to-superstar-level production at some point in their careers. We can now count McLaurin among that cohort.

As a long-time Terry McLaurin enthusiast, I will take my victory lap here in the final weeks of his breakthrough season. This was the type of dominant, All-Pro-level effort his early-career Reception Perception results always foretold was possible. However, I’ll fully admit that I wasn’t entirely confident we would get this season from McLaurin in 2024, despite being well ahead of consensus on his ability for years now.

For starters, I was concerned we might have missed the apex of McLaurin’s career; maybe call it scar tissue from seeing a similar type of cursed-quarterback wideout in Allen Robinson finally being paired with a high-end guy when the prime window of his playing days had just passed. I always say that predicting wide receiver age cliffs is the most impossible part of studying the position. But it was at least on my radar that McLaurin was a sneaky older player (29) despite being drafted in 2019 and coming off a down season where he was tracking for (I only charted six of the usual eight standard games) a 73% success rate vs. man and 75% success rate vs. press in Reception Perception. Those are still strong numbers but a decline from some of his fringe elite-level seasons from 2020 to 2022. My best guess is that a preseason turf toe injury made his 2023 film slightly shakier than usual at the start of the year and tainted the results.

He’s been everything you want out of an alpha receiver and more this season.

While Jayden Daniels was going to provide an upgrade in time over some of the dregs Washington rolled out under center during McLaurin’s career, he was still a rookie quarterback. At the very least, it’s a projection, if not an outright historical outlier, for a Year 1 passer to elevate a receiver to a career season. It turns out Daniels is special and was just the guy McLaurin fans had been waiting for.

Then there was Kliff Kingsbury. I was hesitant to buy into Kingsbury as an offensive architect, especially from a pass-game standpoint. His Arizona concepts left a lot to be desired, and when he essentially just left McLaurin on an island at the left outside receiver position early in the season, which was one of the more maddening things he did with DeAndre Hopkins in Arizona, I felt my worst fears were confirmed. As I’ve stated many times over the last few months, my assessment of Kingsbury’s potential as Washington’s offensive coordinator was incorrect and his unit turned out to be one of my favorites to watch on film.

Wrong, wrong and wrong.

McLaurin was as awesome as ever from an individual standpoint in his sixth season. Daniels was an immediate needle-moving franchise quarterback. Kingsbury’s offense was exceptionally well-designed and maintained its top-five rankings in EPA per play and success rate throughout the year.

The biggest reason McLaurin made the leap from a football perspective was Daniels’ connection with the veteran receiver on deep targets outside the numbers.

At LSU, Daniels absolutely demolished SEC defenses on these exact throws with Malik Nabers and Brian Thomas Jr. The second play in the above clip could be ripped right from the 2023 LSU film with Nabers in for the slot fade. That became McLaurin in the pros. Once he developed in college, Thomas was a lethal threat on the perimeter as a go-route threat. Daniels had eerily accurate ball placement to drop it into the bucket for the freakshow wideout as he ripped through secondaries on the boundary. No. 17 was a natural fit on the other end of those passes.

To bring it back to the route charts and the original point of this discussion, nothing with McLaurin changed. The evidence has been all over his film, proving that he not only gets open on go routes at the level of some of the elite receivers in the league, but he’s a pristine ball-winner in tight coverage. Every season I charted McLaurin for Reception Perception, he’s finished with a contested catch rate north of 75% and has been among the top-five finishers in multiple seasons.

Daniels’ willingness to let it rip on those vertical routes was just a gorgeous pairing with a receiver who brought Terry McLaurin’s strengths to the table.

McLaurin wasn’t just a wide receiver who escaped the quarterback wilderness. The passer who joined him on the journey out of it was a guy with a perfectly overlapping skill set. There are few things more beautiful in the sport than when two players who were just born to play together find their way to each other. Daniels found his in Washington while a high-end season was still waiting to be mined from the long-underrated McLaurin.

Almost every year, an undervalued veteran wide receiver goes overlooked by the public in the preseason. That player is almost always misunderstood and not adequately rated in the right tier because of the hyper-fixation on results-based stats that are influenced by surrounding variables. And when those previously hideous circumstances — whether it be a quarterback pairing, environment or both — change, that’s when the breakthrough season can occur.

This past season, that wideout was Terry McLaurin.

https://sports.yahoo.com/examining-2024s-breakthrough-fantasy-football-wide-receiver-terry-mclaurin-152133036.html

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