Allow me to begin this article by immediately sharing with you one of my most prized pieces of knowledge that I have accumulated over my 15+ years of playing fantasy football:
“A football player cannot get a fantasy point unless they touch the ball.”
It’s correct. I dare you to try to disprove me.
You cannot rely on a fantasy player to score you points unless they are first given the opportunity to do so. While the fantasy community has gotten a lot better at studying opportunity along with results over the last several years, I don’t think we focus on it quite enough. In this post, I just wanted to take a detailed look at the opportunity metrics for different teams and players. It will be mainly me dumping a bunch of numbers on you, and letting you do what you will with them. Let us begin.
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Team Opportunity Analysis
Last year’s data can only take us so far, as personnel changes make a big difference in how teams operate. However, it is still useful to give us a baseline idea. Here is a visual breakdown of plays run; I separated out the pass attempts vs. rush attempts:
You can see there the extremes are Atlanta (655 pass attempts vs. 325 rush attempts) and San Francisco (467 pass attempts vs. 449 rush attempts). Here is that data in table format, with the total plays included (note: I counted only rush attempts by non-QB’s, and pass attempts that were targeted at a player for this chart):
Of course, this is not data that you should base your draft decision making off of, and in fact, most of the useful data here may already be cooked into the player’s ADP, but it’s useful to know what kind of team you’re dealing with when picking players.
If you could be confident that Washington would run less than 800 plays again next year (you can’t), it would seem like a pretty good idea to just steer clear of their players entirely. You can also things like the crazy proportion of passing plays the Falcons ran last year. You typically aren’t targeting guys that are the WR3 on their team, but with the Falcons that workload can easily match a WR2 from other teams given how much they like to throw the ball.
Target Shares
I’m doing my best to not tell you a bunch of stuff you already know in this post, but this next graphic probably doesn’t do that. Here are the top 10 wide receivers in target share last year (meaning what percentage of their team’s total targets were directed at them):
That isn’t super interesting. What we want to dig up are the guys that would make you go “golly gee! I didn’t know that guy had such a large share of his team’s targets last year!”
I took a look at target share percentiles compared to number of receptions percentiles and compared them to try to identify some players who just didn’t really capitalize on their opportunity. These will be players that got a lot of targets but just did not convert them into many receptions, here are the top 10:
The next 10 on that list are Eric Ebron, James Washington, KeeSean Johnson, Jarius Wright, A.J. Brown, Marquise Brown, T.J. Hockenson, Jack Doyle, JuJu Smith-Schuster, and John Ross.
What you have here is a mixture of downfield threats that you would not really expect to convert a high percentage of their targets, as well as some guys who played with less than accurate quarterbacks last year. However, there is definite upside for these guys to convert more of those targets and pay off for your fantasy team.
I did the same thing again, but this time I used fantasy points scored percentile instead of receptions:
Lots of tight ends and slot guys at the top of this list, which makes total sense because this analysis would lend itself to identifying the players whose targets came closest to the quarterback. However, these guys could be good adds to your fantasy team in a deep PPR league, as they saw a lot of the ball without being able to do a ton with it.
Air Yards
One of the newer statistics that is very useful for fantasy football analysis is air yards. This stat is simply reception yards minus yards after the catch. This will show you which receivers are seeing the deepest targets; these are the guys that can provide that big play that can make for a good fantasy day all by itself. Here are the leaders in air yards per game:
Next 10: Preston Williams, Curtis Samuel, D.J. Moore, Michael Gallup, Calvin Ridley, Tyreek Hill, Stefon Diggs, Keenan Allen, Michael Thomas, Chris Godwin
And here are your air yards per target leaders:
Next 10: John Brown, Robby Anderson, Darius Slayton, Will Fuller, Tajae Sharpe, Chris Conley, David Moore, Allen Lazard, Phillip Dorsett, DeVante Parker
Most of these guys are highly valued fantasy wide receivers that you aren’t going to get in the later rounds, but let’s take a look again at which players may have come up short on possible production because of bad luck. Here are the top 10 in air yards to reception yards differential, meaning these are the players that were the worst at turning the air yards opportunity into box score stats.
Next 10: Marquez Valdes-Scantling, Chris Conley, Breshad Perriman, Darius Slayton, Brandin Cooks, DeAndre Hopkins, Nelson Agholor, Marvin Jones, D.K. Metcalf, Preston Williams
There a few elite wide receivers on that list that could go even a step further in the 2020 season if they convert a few more of the big plays, and there are a couple mid to late-round guys that could really take a big step forward (Curtis Samuel, John Brown, Mike Williams, James Washington).
Linear Prediction Model
I ran a simple linear regression model to use these “opportunity” metrics to predict how many fantasy points each player should have scored last year, and then I checked to see which players most over and underperformed their predictions. The inputs on my model were team passing attempts, player targets, target share, air yards, and average depth of target. Here are the top receivers that most over and under-performed their prediction:
Next 10: Mike Evans, Mike Williams, John Ross, Mecole Hardman, Terry McLaurin, Tyrell Williams, Allen Lazard, Amari Cooper, Tajae Sharpe, Adam Thielen
Next 10: Geronimo Allison, Jarius Wright, Cole Beasley, DaeSean Hamilton, Christian Kirk, Jarvis Landry, KeeSean Johnson, Isaiah McKenzie, Robert Woods, Auden Tate
Note that touchdowns were not considered in any of this, and touchdowns are obviously a huge deal in fantasy. While it is much easier to predict receptions and yards than touchdowns, they are not entirely unpredictable and it is important to look at red zone usage as well when looking at the past. However, I wanted to keep the focus more on the most predictable elements of the game here.
The “over-performers” were guys that scored a lot of touchdowns and made a bunch of really big plays, while the “under-performers” are more small gain receivers that just maybe fell short of reaching their potential last year due to things out of their control.
That’s it and that’s all, happy drafting, everybody!
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Jon Anderson is a featured writer at FantasyPros. For more from Jon, check out his archive and follow him @JonPgh.