Situational Superstars: Christian Watson's Volume Can Overcome Losing Aaron Rodgers

Is Christian Watson one of the next great NFL receivers? That’s a topic that’s very murky as he enters his second season, but despite losing one of the game’s all-time greatest players at QB, Watson still carries great promise into 2023. Why? Because he is a situational superstar.

Watson entered the NFL as a player most considered a bit of a project. He played against weaker competition than most second rounders at North Dakota State in an offense that wasn’t exactly NFL prep. He hadn’t ever topped 50 catches or 800 yards there, so at best he could be expected to be a contributor in some way toward the end of the season. Well, that’s pretty much how it played out, except Watson started putting up WR1 numbers.

From Weeks 10-18, Watson never saw fewer than six targets in a game, and averaged 3.9 receptions and 65.4 yards with eight total touchdowns. Despite averaging 1.7 receptions and 14.7 yards per game from Weeks 1-9, Watson ended the year inside PFF’s Top 24 receivers, and with the 21st-best WR DVOA (11.4%) per Football Outsiders. While the numbers were awesome, a lot of the high scoring was touchdown driven, which could be a tricky thing. Touchdown numbers fluctuate, and a rookie with a ton of touchdowns might improve as a player and still score fewer points. There are some issues with the profile of Watson after this rookie campaign, and they relate to some of the talking points on draft day. His athletic gifts are unimpeachable and showed on his 62.2% success rate on nine routes, which made up a 21.4% chunk of his total routes. He was also highly successful on post routes, another deep pattern and those made up the second-largest slice of his routes. Green Bay utilized Watson properly. But overall, Watson only ranked in the 33rd percentile vs. man coverage, and 37th vs. zone. He was not a consistent separator, so while his strong points made him efficient, and he found the end zone, he has yet to prove that he can add volume to the mix to make himself into a true fantasy WR1. That’s where his situational stardom enters the fray.

Allen Lazard (100), Robert Tonyan (67) and Randall Cobb are all gone from the receiver room, vacating 217 targets from this passing offense. The top option aside from Watson is fellow second-year player Romeo Doubs, who generated a lot of buzz in the preseason but only managed 425 yards and three touchdowns in 13 games and barely cracked PFF’s Top 85. Watson is now the clear-cut WR1, and even though he’s downgrading big time at QB from Aaron Rodgers to Jordan Love, he has an opportunity to gel with Love that it doesn’t appear Rodgers gave to any of the young pass-catchers. Watson also posted an 88.2% success rate on route to the flats, an area where he can devastate defenders with his speed, and where the Packers might try to find him more with an inexperienced QB running the show. Watson is absolutely going to be expected to soak up a ton of those 217 vacated targets, and will likely see one of the biggest leaps in target share in the entire league. With his physical ability, that makes him a real candidate for a massive leap, and also makes him a prime situational superstar.