2023 Fantasy Football breakouts: Ranking 10 breakout candidates who could be league-winners on Draft Day

You'll see the term "breakout" used plenty during Fantasy Football draft season. It's one of the key terms we deploy to help promote our excellent 2023 Fantasy Football cheat sheets from the SportsLine Projection Model. But assigning a specific definition to the term "breakout" can be a difficult to manage.

If you were able to poll every single Fantasy Football analyst in the world and ask them to define "breakout," it's unlikely you'd find one definition that represents even half of the entire industry. Even among the CBS Sports Fantasy Football staff, which include some of the best Fantasy minds in the country, we don't have a consensus definition for the word "breakout." But that's not going to stop me from setting some precise parameters for what constitutes a breakout so I can rank my favorites from the 2023 Fantasy Football draft season.

When talking about breakouts, we're generally trying to identify players who reach a new level of production and in turn pay off on their draft price by a wide margin. Unlike with sleepers, breakouts may come from a pool of relatively highly drafted players. Take the case of Jalen Hurts.

Last preseason, Hurts was a fourth-round pick in leagues, and no one would really consider him a sleeper at that price tag. But after averaging 22.9 Fantasy points per game in 2021, Hurts broke out to the tune of 28.1 FPPG in 2022, finishing third at the position to only Patrick Mahomes and Josh Allen. But Mahomes and Allen have had similar or better seasons in the past, while this was Hurts' introduction to the elite level of quarterbacks. Hurts also finished with the second-best winning percentage among the entire player pool in CBS Sports leagues behind Mahomes, per our Jamey Eisenberg.

So what happens if you focus solely on players who reach a new level of production than they ever have while logging a better winning percentage than average? That would have applied to the following players last year, excluding rookies:

Throw out Jefferson and Chase, two guys who were already Round 1 picks but meet our criteria of reaching a new level of production and appearing on a lot of winning teams. Also throw out Lamb who finally hit his breakout potential with a strong season as a Round 2 pick. And throw out Zay Jones, who had his best season but wasn't in the draft conversation at this time last year -- he'd obviously fall into the sleeper category.

Don't the remaining eight names look like a pretty good representation of last year's breakout stars? All but Fields were drafted between Rounds 4 and 8 and all were top-tier starters whose Fantasy teams won more often that not. That should be the type of player we're looking at as being breakout candidates for 2023. All we have to do is throw out anyone who's a top-25 pick in terms of ADP to eliminate the first two rounds of a standard draft, and be judicious with who we use outside the top 100.

I'm come up with a list of my favorite breakouts for 2023 Fantasy Football drafts who all meet those parameters, and below I've ranked them by how confident I am they'll achieve the goal of reaching new heights in Fantasy points per game while hopefully showing up on more winning rosters than not. Consider it a target list after you've made your first two picks but before you transition to our sleeper suggestions in Round 9.

So who gets the top spot as the best Fantasy breakout of 2023? And which running backs and receivers have the best chance to provide incredible value for their Fantasy teams? ... Join SportsLine here to see R.J. White's breakout rankings for 2023 Fantasy football leagues!