Don’t sleep on these fantasy football WRs before your 2026 draft
Fantasy football expert Jacob Camenker breaks down the WR sleepers you should target before your 2026 fantasy draft.
Once your fantasy football draft creeps into the double-digit rounds, you’re all just sort of playing a version of darts. You’ll pick your defense and kicker, then toss three wild cards at the board and see what sticks.
The reality is that if you get anything at all from the last three positional picks in your draft, it’s a win. These guys are the first to go when a star gets injured and you can grab his handcuff on waivers, but are also often young and need time to develop. This is especially true at wide receiver, a position more dependent on talent development than running backs, which tend to get opportunities as injury replacements.
So if you happen to catch lightning in a bottle and get, say, Puka Nacua in his rookie season, your odds of making the playoffs are pretty strong.
Here are five late-round wide receiver targets to target in your fantasy football drafts this year:
If you can get a 25-year-old wide receiver in the 10th round or later who caught 92 passes for 1,014 yards in a rotten New York Giants offense last season, you should do that. No. 4 overall pick Carnell Tate is going around five rounds earlier than Robinson even though Tennessee also invested in the latter as a free agent with a four year, $70 million contract.
The 5-foot-8 Robinson doesn’t score a lot of touchdowns but should be a PPR machine for second-year QB Cam Ward. That’s all we’re looking for late.
Miami has two exciting rookies in camp, Chris Bell and Caleb Douglas, who could end up being the starters at wide receiver when it’s all said and done. But if one of them plays like a rookie, third-year Malik Washington could end up leading the Dolphins in targets.
Washington led the NCAA in catches in 2023 at Virginia but doesn’t jump off the page athletically, which is the sort of profile that you can talk yourself into for a third-year breakout.
People are saying some wild things about Ja’Kobi Lane. The third-round pick from USC has drawn comparisons from coaches and teammates to DeAndre Hopkins and Michael Thomas, while longtime Ravens beat reporter Jamison Hensley wrote on X that, “In 27 years of covering the Ravens, I’m not sure I’ve seen a rookie have a training camp quite like wide receiver Ja’Kobi Lane.”
Baltimore’s WR2 has not been productive with Lamar Jackson and even that’s assuming Lane can beat out veteran mainstay Rashod Bateman. But this is also the Ravens first season without John Harbaugh at head coach in almost two decades. They have a 30-year-old offensive coordinator in Declan Doyle. Jackson’s contract situation could get murky soon. What if they just let it rip?
The 27-year-old Nailor had never topped 450 yards in his four seasons in Minnesota before signing a three-year, $35 million contract with the Raiders as a free agent. Outside of tight end Brock Bowers, there really isn’t much competition for targets in Vegas, which should once again have a bad defense that will lead to high-scoring games.
There’s probably a harder ceiling on Nailor’s season than some of the younger receivers on this list, but that also makes him a safer option late in your draft.
The rookie from Ole Miss is a big play waiting to happen in Kyle Shanahan’s offense. Stribling has reportedly had a great camp, but he would be a good late-round target even without any buzz. All he has to do is stay healthy and that alone could give him a leg up on the rest of an aging, injury-prone group of 49ers pass-catchers.
Fantasy football WR rankings
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