2019 Fantasy Football Breakout Candidate: James Washington

WR James Washington | Pittsburgh Steelers | 2nd Year

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2018 Stats: 16 receptions, 217 yards, 1 TD

The 2017 Biletnikoff Award winner during his final season at Oklahoma State, James Washington never really got on track as an NFL rookie. The No. 3 wide receiver on a team with two wide receivers who had more than 165 targets won’t have a lot of room to make an impact, and Washington had a couple notable yardage outputs and that was it.

According to John Paulsen at 4for4 Fantasy Football, the Steelers coming in with the fourth-highest volume of vacated targets from 2018 to 2019 (15.0 per game) along with a significant percentage of vacated targets (35.7 percent). Most of that comes with Antonio Brown‘s departure via trade to the Oakland Raiders, with 11.2 targets per game gone as well as 24.8 percent (168 of 676) of Pittsburgh’s passing game targets. Tight end Jessie James (39 targets in 2018) accounts for the largest chunk of the remaining vacated targets.

The Steelers signed wide receiver Donte Moncrief in free agency, while also drafting Diontae Johnson in the third round. But with JuJu Smith-Schuster replacing Brown as the No. 1 wide receiver, Washington is bumped to No. 2 in the pecking order.

As expected, via Football Outsiders, Brown (89.4 percent) and Smith-Schuster (86 percent) clearly led Steelers’ wide receivers in snap percentage last year. Washington came in at 47.1 percent. But Brown also controversially sat out Week 17 with a knee injury, otherwise his snap rate would have been higher.

On that note, let’s look closer at the Week 17 snap counts for Pittsburgh’s wide receivers.

Smith-Schuster: 63 snaps-93 percent
Washington: 49 snaps-72 percent
Eli Rogers: 43 snaps-63 percent
Ryan Switzer: 24 snaps-35 percent
Darrius Heyward-Bey: 17 snaps-25 percent

In that Week 17 contest against the Cincinnati Bengals, Washington caught all three of his targets for 64 yards. He topped 60 yards in two of the last three games, which qualifies as a nice finish under the circumstances (129 of his 217 yards for the season in those two games).

Washington’s early ADP is trending up (via Fantasy Football Calculator). But he’s still only WR49 (pick 11.03) in 12-team standard leagues and WR46 (pick 10.07) in 12-team PPR. There’s definite upside as a WR4/WR5, but a push into WR3 ADP would change that equation.

On the surface, Washington seems to be in line for a huge uptick in his second season. But he’s expected to compete most directly with Moncrief for playing time, and beyond Smith-Schuster it seems no one’s role in the Steelers’ receiving corp is especially locked in looking toward meaningful offseason work and training camp.

We may have to wait until his third season for a complete breakout from Washington. But he’s in a good situation, and there will be far worse ways to fill a WR4 spot in traditional scoring formats and those in best-ball leagues may have a good scoring piece quite often.

2019 Projection: 55 receptions for 710 yards, 4 TD

Breakout Confidence Level: 50%

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