One of the most fun things about Week 1 is seeing where coachspeak and beat writer reports look accurate, and where they led us astray. That's not to say that Week 1 will be definitive, but for a few days next week, it is all the real football we have. And we'll use that real football to either say "see, the writing was on the wall," or "LOL, can you believe we fell for that?" The two prime candidates for those discussions are Luther Burden III and Parker Washington.
Both Burden and Washington finished 2026 stronger than they started it. Both have been the constant focus of both their coach's praise and their beat writer's amazement. Both had preseason injuries that we do not expect to affect their Week 1 production.
So you may be wondering why I have Burden ranked as W18 in Week 1 and Washington as WR30. Some of it is my own bias regarding which one I think is a better wide receiver. Well, not really my bias.
Burden is a former five-star recruit and a Round 2 pick from last year. Washington is a former sixth-round pick who averaged 24.2 receiving yards per game in his first 36 career NFL games. I think we would have had near-universal agreement on Thanksgiving of last year that Burden was the better talent.
Should the best two months of Washington's life change that? The other part of the equation is that when I do my projections, I try to make player projections fit within the offensive environment they exist in. Burden, Colston Loveland, and Rome Odunze are the only players I have projected on the Bears for larger than a 12% target share.
In Jacksonville, Parker Washington, Brian Thomas Jr., Jakobi Meyers and Brenton Strange should all clear that mark with ease. One way or another we're going to have takes about these two players after Week 1. I would start both in a three-wide-receiver league and project them to have career years.
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