Week 6 Rest of Season Fantasy Football Rankings: Wide Receivers

Nothing makes the NFL more fun than fantasy football and few things make fantasy sports more fun than rankings, rankings, and more rankings. WRs are ranked in this post with the ESPN and Yahoo! standard fractional scoring.

Notes:

• There is a special bump for the Patriots, Jets, Dolphins, Vikings, and Titans receivers, who have 12 games remaining in their regular seasons against everyone else's 11.
  
  
• As we go down the rankings, there is an increase in the weight of strength of schedule. And the better matchups sooner than later because there is sell-high value to come. These are not weekly rankings, but the idea of these rankings is to measure whom we should be owning now over whom. For example, an WR3 with a bad schedule until Week 12 is useless to our rosters compared a below average WR4 with two or three nice matchups in the coming weeks.
  
  
• There are a lot of injured players in these rankings. Their value combine my expectation of how many weeks they will play for how many points plus replacement level values of roughly eight points per week for the weeks they are expected to miss.
  
  The rankings assume Steve Smith, Sr. and Victor Cruz will miss Week 6. Both are top-35 if they play--Smith with top-15 upside and Cruz top-25. Dez Bryant will still have to field pass from Matt Cassel for a while if he returns in Week 7, so his upside is the bottom of the top-15, as he will have the same (if not a bigger) problem as Antonio Brown.
  
  
• Antonio Brown is the most noteworthy. Brown falling to WR12 is simply an indictment of Michael Vick, as I have him projected as a high-end WR3--producing only slightly above replacement with obvious upside--while Ben Roethlisberger is out. He will rise as Roethlisberger is closer to returning and will fall with any setbacks.
  
  
• Odell Beckham, Jr. is WR1 instead of WR2 because his schedule is amazing, while Julio Jones' is around the middle of the pack. Not an indictment of Jones at all, but a slightly greater expectation of monster weeks to come, and Jones' health is now into question.
  
  
• I have zero interest in WRs who don't get the ball enough to elevate above replacement level. I don't care how good they are IRL. Players who are not getting snaps but have upside greater than the Anquan Boldins of the NFL are more worthy of roster spots. If a guy will never enter our lineups, the bench spots are better utilized by stashing players with upside--especially at the WR position where boom potential is greatest.
  
  
• Do your research and use rankings cautiously, as they are always a work-in-progress. Rankings are a bad tools to tell us what to do. They are conversation starters, tier setters, value mirrors, and a combination of the scientific explanations of what has happened with the art of predicting what will happen. Feel free to supply contrary evidence to me on Twitter at @AlexSontySBN or in the comments. They will help me help you.