Decile 2 Rookies, Five Years Later

Decile 2 DMX rookies, 2001–2021, against decile 1 · November 3, 2026

Last week I did an analysis on decile 1 DMX rookies to see how they performed over time and what we could glean from their experience. Here’s the original post if you want to read that through. This week I wanted to extend the analysis to decile 2 prospects and how their experience differs from decile 1. If you want to learn more about deciles or DMX, read here. But to quickly summarize, DMX is a prospect score that I built using draft capital, athletic testing and age-adjusted college production.

The sample is 247 drafted decile 2 players with five full seasons (rookie years 2001 to 2021). I used the same exact methodology as last time, to be sure the results are consistent. I count as a “hit” at least one season in the first five years that is starter quality, top 12 for QB and TE, top 30 for RB and WR. So, I’ll use the same example I did last time too. Davante Adams was WR73 as a rookie, WR67 his sophomore year and WR9 his third year. True third year breakout, that’s the hit we are looking for, and he hit again the fourth and fifth years as WR14 and WR3. Using PPR scoring. With all of that out of the way, let’s look at the results for decile 2 players.

The headline numbers

Here are some immediate takeaways:

1. TEs fall off a cliff. 73% of decile 1 TEs hit within 5 years, but only 29% of decile 2 TEs did. Of decile 2 TEs with no hit by year 3, only 1 of 36 hit later, against 7 of 20 from decile 1. So, the takeaway is that you can be patient with decile 1 TEs that have elite DMX scores, but not decile 2.
2. A quiet rookie year means something very different in decile 2. A decile 2 RB who finished outside the top 60 as a rookie hit later only 32% of the time, against 70% in decile 1. When I said in my last article, “for RBs a quiet rookie year means much less,” that doesn’t hold true for decile 2 backs. Interestingly, for WRs the pattern matches decile 1: a top-36 rookie finish led to a later hit 89% of the time, and outside the top 60 only 24%.
3. In the last article I explored role, health and offensive quality a bit. Here are some tidbits related to decile 2 along the same lines.
   1. Players in the top third for share of their team’s touches or targets as rookies hit 73% of the time; the bottom third hit 16%.
   2. WRs who spent 9 or more weeks on IR in years 1–3 hit 10% of the time. Yuck.
   3. Players on a top-third passing offense hit 54% of the time, against 34% for everyone else. So, it’s not a killer, but it helps to be on a good offense, kind of a no-brainer, really. But interesting to confirm.
4. QBs barely changed between deciles in hitting at least once (52% vs 49%), so a decile 2 QB is a reasonable fallback if you didn’t get your hands on a decile 1 QB. Just know they take longer and don’t last as long: only 14% put up three or more QB1 seasons, against 31% in decile 1.

I hope some of these statistics help you think about dynasty roster development. Happy hunting!