When it comes to year-over-year predictability in projecting Fantasy results at the wide receiver position, three stats do the bulk of the work -- targets, air yards, and routes run, in that order.
If you can project those three stats, you are well on your way to projecting accurate reception and receiving yardage totals, and 81.4 percent of PPR points at the wide receiver position were scored as a result of a reception or receiving yard in 2021. Touchdowns -- the most-difficult stat to project for wide receivers on a year-over-year basis -- only accounted for 17.5 percent of PPR scoring at the wide receiver position (if you're wondering where the other 1.1 percent went, the answer is rushing stats) in 2021.
Accurately projecting targets, air yards, and routes run is no easy task. It starts with team-level metrics such as pace of play and dropback rate. From there, you can attempt to project a team's route run total for the season and make your best guesses as to what percentage of those routes each player on a depth chart will account for.
Understanding which players will be on the field and where they will line up from offers us some indication of how targets and air yards will be dispersed. This offseason, I have compiled and contextualized 2021 player-specific data in an attempt to better understand exactly how our favorite Fantasy receivers were used and how we might expect them to be used going forward. You'll find that research displayed below.
How target per route run data can identify impending breakouts
Identifying 2022 breakouts with target per route run data
Players to avoid using target per route run data
Using on/off per-route splits to evaluate new-look offenses
The importance of first down targets
The importance of aDOT, route depth, and air yardage data
As I prepared the article centered around air yardage shares, players such as Elijah Moore, A.J. Brown, and Kenny Golladay kept grabbing my attention. These players piled up massive air yardage totals in the games that they played, but their playing time was so sporadic that air yardage share could not capture them accurately.
Air yardage share simply represents the percentage of a team's total air yards that a player accounted for.
I believe that a far more accurate representation of a player's ability to demand targets or air yardage comes in the form of the percentage of those volume stats that they accounted for while on the field. I refer to this as a player's target hog rate and air yardage hog rate -- when on the field, how capable was a player of hogging the receiving volume?
As I dug into the target and air yardage hog rate data from the 2021 season, I became more and more convinced that there was insightful information to be collected within these subsets. I collected the data for 45 wide receivers and attempted to use it to create a formula with predictive capabilities for Fantasy purposes.
I created a metric that I refer to as 'Volume Hog Rate,' which attempts to place value on target and air yardage hog rates to produce a rate that can then be multiplied by a projected route run total to offer a predictive Fantasy point projection. VHR multiplies target hog rate and air yardage hog rate by the respective correlations of targets (0.928) and air yards (0.804) to PPR scoring and then adds the two numbers.
VHR = (Target hog rate * 0.928) + (Air yardage hog rate * 0.804)
Multiplying a player's VHR by their route run total gave me an expected PPR output. And the correlation between their expected PPR output and their actual PPR output was 0.772 in 2021.
That's a pretty dang strong correlation when you consider that VHR in no way accounts for touchdown scoring and touchdown scoring accounted for 17.5 percent of PPR output at the wide receiver position in 2021. In terms of frequently-used volume-based metrics, it correlates more strongly with PPR output than routes run (0.768) and nearly as strongly as target per route run rate (0.838).
I'm still early on in the process of developing this stat, I am not going to trust VHR as predictive or let it influence my 2022 Fantasy projections or rankings. VHR presents another perspective on the data that we have -- a new way of contextualizing a player's ability to draw the type of receiving volume that typically results in Fantasy production.
Next offseason, I plan to backtest the data from previous seasons and gain a better understanding of VHR's potential predictive ability. For now, I highlighted the players who stood out when examining the 2021 VHR data.
The most notable takeaway -- the only wide receiver with a higher VHR-Expected PPR output than Justin Jefferson in 2021 was D.J. Moore. Again, touchdowns are not input in VHR, so receivers on notably high or low-scoring offenses will tend to stand out as outliers. But still, it shocked me to see Moore's name so high -- a massive breakout could be coming while benefiting from the best QB play of his career to date in Year 5.
One more standout: no player outperformed their Expected PPR output more drastically than Deebo Samuel. There are so many reasons to worry about statistical regression for Samuel in 2022, and VHR is yet another metric telling a similar story.
So which players stand out as overvalued according to this new metric? And which Year 3 receiver appears poised to vault himself into the top-15 at his position in Fantasy? ... Join SportsLine here to see the complete data and which players Gibbs is focused on in 2022 drafts!
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