Week 8 Rest of Season Fantasy Football Wide Receiver Rankings: Still Cautious on Dez Bryant

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 receiver who have had their byes, as they have 10 games remaining in their regular seasons against everyone else's nine.
  
  
• 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.
  
  Dez Bryant will still have to field passes from Matt Cassel for a when he returns in Week 8, so his upside is who he is, but the floor is little different than what we saw from Antonio Brown with Michael Vick under center. With Ben Roelisberger back in Week 8, Brown is solid top-3 with #1 upside.
  
  
• 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.
  
  DeAndre Hopkins is WR1, simply because there is no WR we can trust to get the ball often more than him. Brian Hoyer looks for him every play, the Texans defense is not allowing them to abandon the pass, and Hopkins is running perfect routes. This is the 2015 version of what Hoyer did for Josh Gordon in 2013.
  
  
• 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.