Rookie Stock Report: Receiving Stats from Week 1 Could Suggest Big Fantasy Football Upside in 2019

The first Sunday of the 2019 season treated us to some massive fantasy football performances, and there were eight players who eclipsed 30 fantasy points on the Week 1 Sunday slate alone.

It can sometimes take rookies a while to find their footing in the NFL, but there were plenty of first-year players that got in on the fantasy goodness with huge receiving numbers to open the NFL's 100th season.

Early success like this, with four rookie pass-catchers racking up at least 100 yards, is a great sign for this class, but taking a deeper look at their numbers can help us figure out who is most likely to continue offering solid fantasy upside and who might not.

Marquise Brown, for example, had one of the highest scoring fantasy outputs in Week 1, but did so while playing only 14 snaps. There were four Baltimore Ravens wideouts that saw more snaps than Brown (including Myles Boykin), making Hollywood more of a speculative add than a sure thing until we see him get more consistent playing time.

Terry McLaurin, on the other hand, was one of only 22 wide receivers to play more than 90 percent of his team's snaps. He led Washington Redskins WRs in targets, and he makes for a higher-floor waiver wire addition for Week 2.

DK Metcalf played 77.4 percent of the Seattle Seahawks' snaps, which tied him for second most among the team's WRs (behind Tyler Lockett). He seems to already established some strong chemistry with Russell Wilson, as he was one of only two Seahawks to see more than two targets in the game, accounting for 30 percent of the team's target share.

A.J. Brown's production for the Tennessee Titans doesn't look nearly as sustainable. He did his damage on four targets while seeing a snap rate of only 42.6 percent.

Playing a tight end position that rarely sees rookies find much success, T.J. Hockeson's Week 1 performance may have been the most notable of the 2019 rookie class.

He ranked 13th at the TE position in snap rate (72.7 percent) and, even with the Detroit Lions rolling out a crowded WR corps that includes Kenny Golladay, Marvin Jones and Danny Amendola, still managed to finish tied for second on the team with nine targets (22 percent market share).

With a pass-heavy NFL, it wouldn't be too surprising to see these numbers happen a few more times for these rookies during the 2019 NFL season.

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Jason Schandl is not a FanDuel employee. In addition to providing DFS gameplay advice, Jason Schandl also participates in DFS contests on FanDuel using his personal account, username Jaymun. While the strategies and player selections recommended in his articles are his personal views, he may deploy different strategies and player selections when entering contests with his personal account. The views expressed in their articles are the author's alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of FanDuel.