Fantasy Football Week 15 Wide Receiver Rankings: Jerry Jeudy, Mikes Evans offer tough playoff questions

The state of the wide receiver position for Fantasy entering Week 15

By Chris Towers

Dec 18, 2022 at 11:13 am ET • 3 min read

Heading into the Fantasy Football playoffs, some things are guaranteed. Amon-Ra St. Brown is a superstar, DK Metcalf and Tyler Lockett remain must-start WRs, and Christian Watson's upside is too high to consider sitting, for instance. But there are still plenty of questions out there. Before we get to my Week 15 rankings for wide receiver, here are my thoughts on three of the biggest questions facing the position this week:

Is Jerry Jeudy now a must-start WR?

Week 14 was an interesting one for Jeudy. Obviously, it was a massive game -- three touchdowns, 33.3 PPR points, and his third highest yardage total of the season. However, it was also just 73 yards on a 20.5% target share, in a game Courtland Sutton missed against a pretty good matchup. Don't let the three touchdowns convince you this was some paradigm-shifting performance -- and don't let Russell Wilson's struggles fool you into thinking his absence wouldn't be a downgrade. Jeudy is very much in the starting conversation, especially if Sutton's hamstring keeps him sidelined, but he's still more of a fringe WR2 than a must-start guy.

Is Mike Evans still worth my time?

Evans hasn't scored a touchdown since Week 4, a stunning drought for a guy who had 27 touchdowns in his first two seasons with Tom Brady. He hadn't had more than 59 yards in a game since Week 8, either, which means he really hasn't been very helpful for Fantasy for like two months. But I'm not going away from him. It seems like every week he's inches away from a big play -- in Week 14, it was a long touchdown nullified by a holding penalty plus a potential late touchdown thrown behind and below him in the end zone. Evans is a downfield-oriented playmaker, playing in an offense that is struggling to give its quarterback time, and he and Brady have just been a little bit off more often than not lately. That's frustrating, but the opportunities are still there -- 7.8 targets per game over the past five -- and he only needs to hit on one to be worth starting. The coin flip has come up tails a bunch of times in a row, but I still think heads have a pretty good chance of popping up here.

Can I trust Diontae Johnson?

Again, "trust" is the wrong word, but yeah, I think I'd be rolling with Johnson this week. He's mostly still garnering his typically strong target numbers, and in Week 14 he actually started turning them into production. Maybe it was just a fluke, or maybe he just has a bit of a better connection with Mitchell Trubisky than Kenny Pickett; he has a 61.4% catch rate and 6.1 Y/T from Trubisky, compared to 57.4% and 5.4 with Pickett. Johnson isn't a must-start WR by this point, but the volume remains strong enough for him to be in that WR2/3 range for me.

Here are my Week 15 rankings for WR: