GWTTKB Research · Player Study

Should you draft Garrett Wilson in 2026?

What the expected-points record, the coverage data and the market say he is worth at 43.8 overall.

Garrett Wilson scored 251.9 fantasy points in 2024. The volume he earned was worth 271.1. That gap of 19.2 points is the single most important thing to understand before drafting him at 43.8 overall.

The week it changed

Rather than reading a season average, it is worth finding the point the season actually turned. Our shift detector flags in-season changes large enough to clear a statistical threshold, then asks what moved around them.

The largest single move was Week 5: receiving yards went down from 77.8 to 28, a 64% change, at 2.08 standard deviations. The cause was structural — the offense around him got worse at moving the ball.

Year over year the engine classifies 2024 as a stable year. That is the label to carry into the projection, because it separates a player who lost snaps from one who kept them and converted worse.

What actually happened in 2024

2025 was cut short. He played 7 games at 14.21 points per game, too few to read a season from. Everything below is built on 2024, his last full year, with the missed time treated as the risk it is rather than as a new baseline.

He finished 14.82 points per game on 153 targets — an 18.2% jump on his 2023 rate with NYJ. Every part of that is real and none of it is in dispute.

What is worth separating is how much of it he earned. Expected points strip out the finishing and ask a narrower question: given the targets he drew, where they came from on the field, and how far downfield they traveled, what was that usage worth? For 2024 the answer was 271.1 points — 15.9 per game. He scored 19.2 FEWER than that, a 7.1% shortfall.

The expected line underneath the season was 97.8 catches for 1,240 yards and 8.2 touchdowns — and he came in under it.

Where the season actually moved

Against the expected line, he finished 36 catches, 395 receiving yards, 4 touchdowns — against 97.8, 1,240, 8.2 expected.

49% of the entire shortfall came from receiving yards. He hit 32% of his expected receiving yards, against 37% of his expected catches and 49% of his expected touchdowns.

010203040501SF2TEN3NE4DEN5MIN6BUF7PIT8NE9HOU10ARI11IND13SEA14MIA15JAX16LA17BUF18MIA
ExpectedBeat itMissed it
Every week of 2024, what he was worth against what he scored. Expected points come from the volume he actually earned — targets, air yards, and where on the field they came. He cleared it in 7 of 17 games.

The season was two games

2 of his 17 games produced 25 or more points: Week 5 against MIN (29.1), Week 9 against HOU (30). Strip them and the remaining 15 games average 12.9.

Spike weeks win fantasy games and a player who produces them is more valuable than one who never does — he is a ceiling play with real weeks off. 5 games came in under 10 points, including Week 4 against DEN (7.1) and Week 10 against ARI (9.1).

The three largest overshoots — Week 9 (+12.3), Week 6 (+7), Week 15 (+4) — are the same games. The spikes were not extra volume. They were finishing.

This has happened before

051015202022NYJ · 147 tgt2023NYJ · 168 tgt2024NYJ · 153 tgt2025NYJ · 59 tgt
Expected /gActual — ran hotActual — in line
4 seasons, actual against expected. None came in meaningfully above what the volume justified.

Not one of his 4 seasons is flagged as running hot. 2 came in below what the usage justified: 2022 (-14.1%), 2023 (-26.2%). Across all 4 he has scored 131.5 points fewer than his usage was worth.

The reflexive read is regression. Finishing above expectation is unstable, and a player who does it repeatedly is usually one whose luck has not run out yet.

But an expected-points model has a specific blind spot, and it is worth naming: it converts usage at league-average rates. A target twenty yards downfield is worth what the average receiver does with a target twenty yards downfield. If a player is reliably better than average at winning a particular kind of target, he will beat the model every single year, and calling that luck is just mislabelling a skill.

So the question is not whether he beat the number. It is whether there is a mechanism.

What the coverage data says

COVER 1197 tgt+0.1177.02 y/tCOVER 3104 tgt+0.0257.54 y/tCOVER 272 tgt+0.066.64 y/t2 MAN44 tgt+0.0867.09 y/tCOVER 437 tgt+0.1657.32 y/tCOVER 625 tgt+0.4276.72 y/tCOVER 024 tgt+0.0484.67 y/tCOMBO15 tgt-0.0345.27 y/t
What he does against each coverage, 529 targets over four seasons. Cover 1 is single-high man — the look he sees most and punishes hardest. Cover 0 and Cover 6 are the two he cannot solve.

Across 529 targets and four seasons, he has been a fundamentally different receiver depending on what the defense played. Against man he has caught 57.7% for 6.82 yards per target and 0.106 expected points added per target. Against zone: 61.5%, 6.94 yards, 0.087 EPA.

That is a gap of 0.018 EPA per target on a sample of 265 man targets against 262 zone. The catch rate goes the other way — he catches more against zone — which is exactly what you would expect from a receiver whose value is in winning contested downfield throws rather than in finding soft spots underneath.

The shell detail sharpens it. Cover 1, single-high man is the look he has faced most: 197 targets, 7.02 yards per target, 0.117 EPA. His best is Cover 6 at 0.427 on 25 targets.

The weakness is specific. Against COMBO he has caught 66.7% for 5.27 yards a target and -0.034 EPA across 15 looks — a gap of 0.5 expected points a target between his best coverage and his worst.

This does not prove the overshoot repeats. It does mean the pattern has a stated cause rather than being a coin that keeps landing heads.

The market has him fairly priced

Across 48 graded prop lines, he has gone over 50.0% of the time. On receiving yards specifically the number is 45.8% across 24 lines, missing the posted number by an average of 3.7%.

That is close enough to a coin flip that the market has him fairly priced on his primary market. There is no edge to claim in either direction.

Touchdowns are the control. His anytime-TD market implied a 37.5% rate and he converted at 41.7% — a gap of 4.2 points, which is worth noting.

So the risk is not efficiency. It is targets.

Garrett Wilson22.9%Omar Cooper Jr16.3%Kenyon Sadiq14%Breece Hall10.8%Adonai Mitchell10.1%Mason Taylor9.3%Braelon Allen5.1%
Projected 2026 target share. Pale bar is the p10–p90 range. Built from comparable receivers at the same age, share and offensive continuity — not from a depth chart.

the Jets returns 3 of 6 continuity slots — wr1, rb1, hc — with Geno Smith at quarterback, Aaron Glenn as head coach and Frank Reich calling it. The offense projects to 32.77 pass attempts a game at low confidence.

The pie is stable. His slice is the question. Our share model has him at 22.9% against the 27.3% he ran, with a range of 20.3% to 25.8%. The biggest competing claim on that pie is Omar Cooper Jr at 16.3%, 6.6 points behind him.

That number is built from 29 comparable players — same age band, same prior share, same team, same coordinator — not from a depth chart. The closest three went Odell Beckham 28.2% to 18.2%, D.J. Moore 27.1% to 28.8%, Diontae Johnson 26.7% to 23.2%. One held, 2 did not.

The numbers that carry, and the ones that do not

Across 4,488 player-seasons we swept every stat for whether it predicts NEXT year's points, and kept only the ones that replicated in all five. target share (r 0.247), WOPR (r 0.218), air-yards share (r 0.142) carry. receiving EPA per game (r -0.127) and yards per target (r -0.114) and week-to-week volatility (r -0.075) run negative — a player who was hyper-efficient on low volume tends to come back down, so a gaudy per-touch number is a warning rather than a selling point.

So the figures worth weighing for him: a 35.4% target share, 56.3% of the air yards, a WOPR of 0.92, an 87% snap share. He averaged 2.17 yards of separation, with -1.17 YAC over expected.

The offense he plays in

Vegas sets an implied total for every team every week, and some offenses beat theirs systematically. Over 101 games, NYJ has come in -1.28 points against its own implied total, clearing it in 41% of weeks.

That is a structural drag. The market keeps expecting more from this offense than it delivers, and every skill player in it inherits that.

One related finding worth carrying: across 1,280 cases we measured what happens after a team's implied total slides, and the correlation is -0.37 — negative, meaning the market over-corrects. A falling team total is more often a buying window than a warning.

What we project for 2026

8.6 floor 13.6 ppg 22.4 ceiling bust 36% boom 64%
The 2026 range, not the point estimate. 13.6 is the middle. The spread from 8.6 to 22.4 is the actual bet.

Our board has him at 222.3 points, 13.6 per game across 16.4 expected games — 87.8 catches, 979 yards, 6.1 touchdowns. That is WR3, 43 overall, and 67 points of value over a replacement starter.

It is a step down from 2024, and the reason is volume rather than efficiency. The projection assumes he keeps doing what he does on slightly fewer looks.

What we have been saying about him

147+ targets in each of his first 3 seasons, dominant across the route tree by underlying metrics; the ceiling has always been QB play (his one truly great statistical year came with prime Aaron Rodgers, next to a genuinely elite WR1). This year brings his best QB since that Rodgers year plus better weapons — but the team's own market-implied scoring total is still tied for worst in the league, which tempers how much better it can realistically get.

BUY · medium conviction · 2026-08

Where to draft him

The books do not agree on him. Garrett Wilson is a board split: ESPN takes him ~36, Yahoo lets him slide to ~49 (12.2-pick gap). That 12.2-pick gap between ESPN and Yahoo is the practical thing to act on: in a Yahoo-priced room he is available later than his consensus number suggests.

He goes at 43.8 overall on consensus, and the books are far apart — 12.2 picks between cheapest and priciest, which is a real value window. He is latest on yahoo and earliest on espn: sleeper 43.3, espn 36.3, yahoo 48.5, underdog 39.8, cbs 46.9.

He goes at 43.8 and our board has him 43. Those agree, so there is no market disagreement to exploit here — the question is whether you want the WR3 profile, not whether it is mispriced.

The case for: 67 points of value over a replacement starter; a 64% boom rate; a 35.4% target share, and target share is the strongest forward predictor we have measured.

The case against: a 36% bust rate; an offense that has come in 1.28 points under its own implied total.

The call: fair value — draft him because you want this receiver, not because you are getting a deal.

Ask the Coach about Garrett Wilson Every number in this piece, plus your league's roster and scoring, in one answer.

Expected points are computed from realized usage — targets, air yards and field position — against league-average conversion, not from projections. Prop records cover 48 graded lines. Projections are anchored to consensus with our engine applied as a capped tilt; the raw engine figure is stated where it differs. Nothing here is betting advice.

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