In the 2025 fantasy football season, Arizona Cardinals wide receiver Michael Wilson broke out. He ended up as an elite option at wide receiver out of nowhere, and potentially won you some leagues if you were lucky enough to have him.
That said, what happens if the situation in Arizona changes a little bit? There is a new coaching staff. Could Wilson possibly make it back to the top level of wide receivers again?
Given his involvement in an article titled fantasy football regression candidates, the answer to that question could be redundant. The fourth-year wide receiver is a candidate to fall down the rankings for a few reasons. The first of which is, potentially, how he landed a top-12 spot in the first place
Why Michael Wilson is a regression candidate for Fantasy Football purposes
The Arizona Cardinals were the most injured team in the league during the 2025 campaign. It stands to reason that Wilson was a beneficiary of some of the players who missed time. As fate would have it, top wide receiver Marvin Harrison Jr. missed about half of the season.
With Harrison expected to be back at full strength in 2026, will Wilson have almost 130 targets again? Probably not. However, there might be another reason behind that.
Arizona selected running back Jeremiyah Love in the first round of the draft, likely putting a renewed focus on the Cardinals’ rushing attack. Much like the quarterback situation out there, the running back position has a lot of traffic, so who knows who the top dog is going to be. The lead back, however, does not matter per se.
The fact that the Cardinals went out and acquired runners during the offseason shows they want to be competent in that part of the offense.
The final reason he is a regression candidate relates back to where Wilson finished his 2025 campaign. The player who finishes at the 10th spot in fantasy football historically ends the season outside of the top wide receiver rankings, at a massive 80% probability.
While it is not a lock that the wide receiver drops out of the top level of pass catchers this year, there are a lot of cases that point in that direction. As such, Wilson is a regression candidate heading into the 2026 fantasy football season.
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