Ranking NFL team WR TE RB talent for 2024 season: Top players.
It’s the peak of summer, which means one thing for me: It’s time to rank the NFL’s offensive playmakers. Every year, right around this time, I take stock of every move franchises have made to surround their various starting quarterbacks with talent as they hope to parlay a hot offseason into a Super Bowl victory.
On one hand, you could argue the 2023 season proved teams can win without great playmakers, as the Chiefs spent most of 2023 begging any of their wide receivers to catch the football. I’d also point out they got plenty out of future Hall of Fame tight end Travis Kelce, saw Isiah Pacheco blossom in a full season as the starter and got just enough out of Rashee Rice & Co. in the postseason to advance through the AFC bracket. The guys on the other side of the field in Super Bowl LVIII might have done enough to turn their quarterback into the league MVP with another great start or two down the stretch, too.
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If a team has Patrick Mahomes, it can probably survive without a great set of playmakers. What about one of the 31 teams trying to beat him in 2024? Well, it’d be nice to be close to the top of this list. Let’s run through the guys who catch and run with the football and how each team is positioned to take advantage of good quarterback play in 2024, going from worst to first.
Before you fire off that angry tweet, though, consider the ground rules I went through in compiling this piece:
This is just about running backs, wide receivers and tight ends. In other words, imagine if every set of offensive skill position players got a chance to play with the same average quarterback in an average scheme with average weather, average luck and at an average pace. Who would have the league’s best offense?
This is only about on-field performance during the 2024 season. While I talk a lot about contract value and long-term impacts in evaluating the league, all of that doesn’t matter once the games start. This is strictly considering what each player might do this season, not what will happen years down the line.
I’m using each player’s recent level of play and various advanced metrics to get the best sense of how they performed while attempting to adjust for the context around each of them. Aging curves matter here; we know players in their early-20s are more likely to improve than players in their 30s. When it comes to draft picks, I’m leaving my own feelings about each player out of the equation and relying more on historical performance for draftees in their respective ranges during their rookie seasons. In other words, to estimate what Chargers wideout Ladd McConkey will do in his rookie season, I’m looking at the typical performance by receivers chosen early in Round 2.
