Welcome to The Week 9 Everything Report — where we break down everything you need to know from Week 8’s games, heading into Week 9 and beyond.
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2 Key Takeaways
1. How To Buy Rookies For The 2nd Half Of The Season, The Right Way
It’s a well-known and often-repeated truism that rookies tend to perform better in the second half of the NFL season than in the first half. That suggests we should be buying them around this time of the year, before some of them inevitably break out. But which rookies should we target? That answer has meaningfully changed in recent times.
Among rookie WRs over the past 15 years, we typically see a +45% production increase from the first to the second half. But that’s actually a little misleading; over the past four seasons, that number is more like +26%, as teams have increasingly played their rookies in full-time roles from the jump.
So, a little surprisingly, the 7 biggest leaps in production over the past four years have all come from WRs drafted on Day 2 or Day 3.
Here's every rookie WR over the past four years to average 12.0+ FPG in the second half of the year
— Ryan Heath (@RyanJ_Heath) October 27, 2025
You'll notice most of the guys with the largest boosts were the Day 2-3 picks who weren't immediately in full-time roles
Most Day 1 guys play immediately for a decent baseline pic.twitter.com/56JiOHLiKf
This isn’t to say I’m low on Tetairoa McMillan or Travis Hunter. Even recent Round 1 WRs like Jaylen Waddle and Brian Thomas have made late-season jumps from the FLEX/WR2 range to scoring as bonafide WR1s, and that is certainly within both their ranges of outcomes. I wrote an extended bull case for Hunter in last week’s article, and I stand by it. He even fits the playing time thesis from the tweet above; he’s averaging 14.8 FPG on a 22.2% target share in his two games above an 80% route participation rate, and we’ve only gotten more reasons to believe that increased playing time will stick going forward. I’d love to buy him for a low-end RB2 or FLEX-level asset.
But again, based on recent history, the highest-impact buys you can likely make right now are Day 2 or Day 3 picks who have been part-time players to this point, but who could make the leap to a full-time role over the second half of the year. We should award bonus points for strong offenses and believable paths to playing time. With that in mind, here’s a rough ranking of the rookie WRs I’d most like to acquire and stash in exchange for bench-level assets right now:
1. Tez Johnson has scored 11.5, 15.8, and 9.3 PPR fantasy points over his last three games (the only ones in which he’s been above a 50% route participation rate). He just hit season-highs in route share (92.6%, the same as Emeka Egbuka last week) and target share (25.0%). Johnson was an analytically interesting prospect (small, but ranking behind only Malik Nabers in YPRR in 2023) who could well play in a full-time role for the rest of the year in a Baker Mayfield-led offense. Johnson’s 1.74 YPRR is much higher than both Jalen McMillan’s (0.74) and Xavier Worthy’s (1.30) over the first eight weeks of last season. McMillan went on to average 14.5 FPG from Weeks 9-17 in a similar offense.
