Alpha Index for Incoming Rookie Wide Receivers

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Hey, everybody! You may remember me from the Dolittle score series that I put out over the last few months. If you need to catch up on that, there's a work-in-progress FAQ that you can access here that should be able to answer all of your questions. For a brief TLDR: the Dolittle score is essentially just a dominator score that discriminates for the level of competition. Breakout Score Methodology Using the same process of distinguishing stats by opponent SRS in the Dolittle score, I have also created a competition-adjusted breakout score. To achieve a "breakout", the player must earn a minimum Dolittle score of 20% with a minimum qualifying games played of 5. For the purposes of getting desired weights in the model, The baseline score is the breakout age of the player subtracted from 25. For example, if a player's breakout age is 20.0, then the baseline breakout score will be 5. Added on to the baseline score is an adjustment based on how dominant the breakout was. For every additional percentage point above 20% in the Dolittle score for the breakout season, 0.05 gets added to the final breakout score. For example, a breakout age of 20 scores a baseline of 5, but if the Dolittle score in the breakout season was 30%, then the total breakout score is 5.5. The adjustment helps add balance to a player who may take a year longer, but explodes with a truly dominant season as opposed to breaking out at an earlier age with much less notable production. With that in mind, let's take a look at the 5 best and 5 worst breakout scores (among players measured) in the 2026 class: Top 5 KC Concepcion - 8.32 Breakout Score - Age of 17.6 with a 38.40% Dolittle Jordyn Tyson - 7.78 Breakout Score - Age of 17.7 with a 29.64% Dolittle Antonio Williams - 7.22 Breakout Score - Age of 17.8 with a 20.33% Dolittle Elijah Sarratt - 6.12 Breakout Score - Age of 19.9 with a 40.29% Dolittle Chris Brazzell II - 5.85 Breakout Score - Age of 19.5 with a 26.89% Dolittle The top three in this metric all broke out during their freshman season, and the level of breakout is accounted for accordingly in those seasons. Elijah Sarratt ended up beating out several other teenage breakouts by virtue of his sophomore breakout being so dominant (albeit on the minimum sample of 5 qualifying games) at JMU despite being an older prospect for his class. It's also worth noting that none of these breakouts came in the Big 10 or SEC, the two toughest conferences to break out in. Bottom 5 Eric Rivers - 2.57 Breakout Score - Age 22.6 with a 23.33% Dolittle Omar Cooper Jr. - 3.70 Breakout Score - Age 21.4 with a 22.00% Dolittle Brenen Thompson - 3.99 Breakout Score - Age 21.8 with a 35.58% Dolittle Zachariah Branch - 4.23 Breakout Score - Age 21.1 with a 26.51% Dolittle Josh Cameron - 4.40 Breakout Score - Age 21.1 with a 29.9% Dolittle As it would track, these are all older players. Brenen Thompson had a top 5 Dolittle score this year, but the fact that he wasn't able to put it all together until his senior year is reflected in the lower breakout score. Alpha Index Courtesy of u/gobblegobblechumps, we have a name for the model input combining Dolittle (final season team dominance) plus Breakout Score (how early were they good). To account for the importance of age--and the fact that for some players, their breakout was their final season--Breakout Score is weighted against Dolittle by a ratio of 2 to 1. The Dolittle input is converted into a percentile score with the max range extending to…