Andy Reid’s Rookie Wide Receivers

The latest newsletter from KCSN Sports Data Scientist, Joseph Hefner.

“Rookie wide receivers struggle their first year in Andy Reid’s system.” We’ve all heard this before, and most of us have probably said it ourselves. Let’s take a look at some numbers and figure out if this is true or not, and what it means for our WR room going into the 2023 NFL season.

I think we can pretty safely assume that the Chiefs are going to add to the wide receiver room in the draft. Even if we don’t, though, we still have a day 2 WR in Skyy Moore from last year. Moore didn’t have the most impressive rookie season out of the WRs drafted in round 2 of the 2022 draft. What does that mean for his career outlook?

To answer these questions, I pulled the stats on every single WR drafted onto an Andy Reid team. Andy Reid became the head coach of the Philadelphia Eagles in 1999. That’s very fortuitous, because most public NFL data also goes back to 1999, so we can look at his entire career as a head coach.

Between the Eagles and the Chiefs, there have been 22 total WR’s drafted onto an Andy Reid team (I’m ignoring Tremon Smith, who was drafted to be a DB, not a WR). Out of those 22 WRs, 7 of them had less than 30 receiving yards in their first 4 years in the league. All 7 of them were day 3 picks. I’ve filtered out those WRs for this analysis.