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Is Dez Bryant of the Dallas Cowboys the best red zone wide receiver in the NFL?
By Marcus Mosher
December 30, 2014 1:35 pm CST
http://cover32.com/cowboys/2014/12/...s-the-best-red-zone-wide-receiver-in-the-nfl/
There’s been a lot of debate this year about who the best receiver in football is and who had the best year. And many times, people go right to the end of the year stats to make their cases and arguments. But here’s the problem with that. Not all stats are created equal. Does someone who gets targeted 80 more times and produces the same amount of catches and touchdowns be regarded the same way with fewer targets? I like to use this comparison. If Kobe Bryant scores 30 points in a game, but takes 22 shots to do so, is that more impressive than a player who scores 26 points on 12 shots?
Does efficiency and/or volume matter when it comes to an NFL receiver? How much better is a Julio Jones over a replacement level wide receiver? How often should a player score in the red zone based off targets and expected touchdowns? These are all questions that we are going to look at in the upcoming week.
Before we get started and for the sake of consistency, I compiled all of the stats from Pro Football Reference and I gathered the snap counts of via Pro Football Focus. There are slight changes between a few sites, but I have found that over the years PFR is the most complete and accurate site in terms of targets, red zone targets, etc.
First and foremost, let me set a few things up for you. I gathered data from each team’s number one wide receiver (32 total). In some cases, the decision between which receiver was a team’s number one or two was close, so I decided to take the player who had more snaps/targets or just use common sense. Here is a list of all the NFL’s #1 wide receivers in 2014:
If you are curious to see how the averages change with another receiver or want to see a receiver replaced on the above list, feel free to contact me on Twitter and I can give you an updated chart. Now that we have the list of the 32 receivers we are going to evaluate, I wanted to see what was the average number one receivers’ stats were in 2014. I took all these receivers stats from 2014 and here’s what I came up with:
As you can see, the average number one season included missing one game (number one receivers stayed fairly healthy in 2014.) For reference sake, we will be calling that average season (red chart) Player X’s season. We will be using that here again shortly. And for your convenience, I also prorated the average’s number one receiver over 16 games and that is what you see in the green chart. In the next part of this article later this week, we will look at who was the league’s average number one receiver and who finished better and worse than those stats.
But today, we are going to look at the red zone effectiveness of some of the number one receivers in the NFL. It’s been my opinion for years that if a receiver truly wants to be considered great, they need to be able to dominate inside the 20s by converting a high percentage of red zone targets to touchdowns. There’s been multiple studies about which type of player (taller, heavier, etc.) is the most successful in the red zone, but all we are going to look at is the raw data from the 2014 season. Here’s a small list of players from the 2014 season that show their efficiency inside the opponents 20 yard line:
The list above shows the top three most targeted receivers in the red zone (Thomas, Brown, Beckham Jr.,) the three players with the most red zone scores in the NFL (Brown, Bryant, Wallace) and the receiver with the worst touchdowns percentage on the most targets (Fitzgerald).
The most important things on this chart are a receivers red zone TDs vs the expected amount of red zone TDs and his percentage of red zone scores based on the amount of targets. As we can see using Player X, (NFL’s average one wide receiver in 2014) a player should score about 3.7 touchdowns per 16 targets. Antonio Brown had 34 targets and caught 8 touchdowns, so he was slightly better than the expected touchdown total of 7.83. Demaryius Thomas led the league in red zone targets, but under-performed there based on expected red zone scores.
Dez Bryant’s 15 red zone targets should’ve produced 3.46 touchdowns according to Player X, but instead, Bryant racked up 8 red zone scores and a ridiculous touchdown percentage for the third straight year.
Using Dez Bryant as the example, Dallas could expect to lose about 5 touchdowns per season if Bryant was replaced with the average number one receiver in the NFL. And in terms of just the Cowboys, Dallas needed Bryant to be an effective red zone receiver based on the fact that they finished middle of the pack in red zone trips per game (3.2). But because Dallas was so successful there (mostly because of Bryant), they finished second in the league in Red Zone TD percentage, scoring touchdowns on 64% of their drives. This helped Dallas tie for fourth in terms of points per game, a big reason why they finished 12-4 in the regular season.
This was just a short summary of the league’s red zone effectiveness. Again, feel free to contact me and I can share with you all of the red zone stats I compiled for all 32 of those number one receivers. In the next article, we are going to look at expected touchdown rates in general and how replaceable yards were in 2014...
By Marcus Mosher
December 30, 2014 1:35 pm CST
http://cover32.com/cowboys/2014/12/...s-the-best-red-zone-wide-receiver-in-the-nfl/
There’s been a lot of debate this year about who the best receiver in football is and who had the best year. And many times, people go right to the end of the year stats to make their cases and arguments. But here’s the problem with that. Not all stats are created equal. Does someone who gets targeted 80 more times and produces the same amount of catches and touchdowns be regarded the same way with fewer targets? I like to use this comparison. If Kobe Bryant scores 30 points in a game, but takes 22 shots to do so, is that more impressive than a player who scores 26 points on 12 shots?
Does efficiency and/or volume matter when it comes to an NFL receiver? How much better is a Julio Jones over a replacement level wide receiver? How often should a player score in the red zone based off targets and expected touchdowns? These are all questions that we are going to look at in the upcoming week.
Before we get started and for the sake of consistency, I compiled all of the stats from Pro Football Reference and I gathered the snap counts of via Pro Football Focus. There are slight changes between a few sites, but I have found that over the years PFR is the most complete and accurate site in terms of targets, red zone targets, etc.
First and foremost, let me set a few things up for you. I gathered data from each team’s number one wide receiver (32 total). In some cases, the decision between which receiver was a team’s number one or two was close, so I decided to take the player who had more snaps/targets or just use common sense. Here is a list of all the NFL’s #1 wide receivers in 2014:
If you are curious to see how the averages change with another receiver or want to see a receiver replaced on the above list, feel free to contact me on Twitter and I can give you an updated chart. Now that we have the list of the 32 receivers we are going to evaluate, I wanted to see what was the average number one receivers’ stats were in 2014. I took all these receivers stats from 2014 and here’s what I came up with:
As you can see, the average number one season included missing one game (number one receivers stayed fairly healthy in 2014.) For reference sake, we will be calling that average season (red chart) Player X’s season. We will be using that here again shortly. And for your convenience, I also prorated the average’s number one receiver over 16 games and that is what you see in the green chart. In the next part of this article later this week, we will look at who was the league’s average number one receiver and who finished better and worse than those stats.
But today, we are going to look at the red zone effectiveness of some of the number one receivers in the NFL. It’s been my opinion for years that if a receiver truly wants to be considered great, they need to be able to dominate inside the 20s by converting a high percentage of red zone targets to touchdowns. There’s been multiple studies about which type of player (taller, heavier, etc.) is the most successful in the red zone, but all we are going to look at is the raw data from the 2014 season. Here’s a small list of players from the 2014 season that show their efficiency inside the opponents 20 yard line:
The list above shows the top three most targeted receivers in the red zone (Thomas, Brown, Beckham Jr.,) the three players with the most red zone scores in the NFL (Brown, Bryant, Wallace) and the receiver with the worst touchdowns percentage on the most targets (Fitzgerald).
The most important things on this chart are a receivers red zone TDs vs the expected amount of red zone TDs and his percentage of red zone scores based on the amount of targets. As we can see using Player X, (NFL’s average one wide receiver in 2014) a player should score about 3.7 touchdowns per 16 targets. Antonio Brown had 34 targets and caught 8 touchdowns, so he was slightly better than the expected touchdown total of 7.83. Demaryius Thomas led the league in red zone targets, but under-performed there based on expected red zone scores.
Dez Bryant’s 15 red zone targets should’ve produced 3.46 touchdowns according to Player X, but instead, Bryant racked up 8 red zone scores and a ridiculous touchdown percentage for the third straight year.
Using Dez Bryant as the example, Dallas could expect to lose about 5 touchdowns per season if Bryant was replaced with the average number one receiver in the NFL. And in terms of just the Cowboys, Dallas needed Bryant to be an effective red zone receiver based on the fact that they finished middle of the pack in red zone trips per game (3.2). But because Dallas was so successful there (mostly because of Bryant), they finished second in the league in Red Zone TD percentage, scoring touchdowns on 64% of their drives. This helped Dallas tie for fourth in terms of points per game, a big reason why they finished 12-4 in the regular season.
This was just a short summary of the league’s red zone effectiveness. Again, feel free to contact me and I can share with you all of the red zone stats I compiled for all 32 of those number one receivers. In the next article, we are going to look at expected touchdown rates in general and how replaceable yards were in 2014...
