5 Wide Receivers With Major Touchdown Upside for 2018

Doug Baldwin, Seattle Seahawks

The highest I'm going as far as average draft position (ADP; courtesy of FantasyFootballCalculator.com) in this article is Doug Baldwin, who is going off the board as the 13th wide receiver, on average.

Paying up this high, we're obviously expecting at least solid touchdown production to be baked into Baldwin's cost. He has the potential to surpass solid, though, and to finish this season with a massive touchdown total, especially as he has recently "ramped up" his workload as he works to return from a preseason knee injury.

As a team, the Seattle Seahawks recorded 71 red zone targets in 2017. They only had two players see more than eight of those, and both of those players are gone. Paul Richardson's 11 targets accounted for 15.5% of the team's total, and Jimmy Graham's 26 were not only the most in the NFL, but so was his 36.6% share of his team's looks. He was even one of only two non-running backs to account for more than 20% of their team's red zone opportunities (carries + targets). Overall, 54.9% of their red zone targets from 2017 are unaccounted for.

It's not just 2017's numbers that suggest a big void for 2018 either, as Graham also saw a team-high 20 red zone targets in 2016.

Baldwin ranked third among Seahawks players with 8 red zone targets in 2017, and in 2016 he saw a very respectable 16, which was good for 21.1% of the team's total. If we go back one more season, to Graham's first year in Seattle, Baldwin's 17 red zone targets were good for a team-high 28.8% market share.

He is no stranger to commanding targets in scoring range, and 2017's low total looks to be more an exception than the rule.

Baldwin has no fewer than 7 touchdowns in each of the last three seasons (averaging 9.7 per), and after accounting for 25% of the red zone targets that belong to returning Seahawks players from last year, we can expect him to once again dominate the team's red zone looks in the passing game.