Fantasy Football Week 12 wide receiver rankings: Making the best of a suddenly-bad situation

Wide receiver is all of the sudden not as deep as we've grown accustomed to

By Chris Towers

Nov 28, 2021 at 11:27 am ET • 2 min read

All that issues at the QB position of late? It should come as no surprise that they've also harmed the wide receiver position. I saw someone tweet Monday that Tre'Quan Smith was WR18 from Weeks 8 through 11, and while I knew he had played four games while many other WR had played just three in that span, I still expected to see Smith had put up surprisingly good numbers. That wasn't the case -- 48.5 yards per game on 3.8 catches, with two touchdowns. That's aggressively mediocre, and yet it was still good for WR30 in points per game, too!

And it's really the middle class at wide receiver that has been affected. There are 17 wide receivers averaging at least 15 PPR points over the past four weeks, compared to 20 who did that during the 2020 season; not one for one, but not far off. However, there are just 28 who have averaged at least 12, compared to 41 in 2020. That is a pretty massive difference.

I'm not sure what the explanation is. Injuries are part of it, but not enough to explain that big of a difference. The drop in overall passing production is obviously a big part of it, but it's curious that it hasn't hit the elite tier at the position quite as hard.

Whatever the explanation, it's created a Fantasy landscape where I really don't feel great about the WR3 range, which is surprising since this was supposed to be the deepest position in Fantasy.

Here are my top 40 wide receivers for Week 12. To see the rankings from Jamey Eisenberg, Dave Richard and Heath Cummings, make sure you head here.