Dez, Williams, Beasley, Dunbar, and Murray can do more with the ball after the catch, so if you spread those targets among them I'd think that it would be an improvement.
Appreciate the stats and research that you provide this site.
Thanks.
Part of what the research shows is that Beasley and Williams were high-risk targets in 2013. If you take away targets from Witten and give them to those two, you'd better hope that something has changed. Murray only moved the chains on 28% of his targets. Giving Murray more of Witten's targets means fewer first downs for the offense, unless something changes there. Dez got the right amount of targets--you don't want to approach A.J. Green levels because the defense starts sitting on those. Whether Dez's targets could have been
better is another story, but he got the right amount. Dunbar is an unknown quantity, but a promising one. I'd hope his targets would take away from Murray, not Witten.
Even if you spread the 40 or so targets around among the other guys, there's no reason to take away targets from someone who's giving you 8 TD/1 INT, and moving the chains 40% of the time, with a 111.1 rating on 109 targets. That's the main thing I'm trying to communicate, that those are outstanding numbers. You're hung up on one dimension of receiving (YAC) that assumes the catch was made in the first place. Look at the stats that win games. If a QB had a 111.1 rating, 8 TD/1 INT, on 109 attempts, with 40% of those passes resulting in a first down, he'd probably be 3-0 or 4-0 and nobody would care about how much YAC was involved.
Witten + more YAC would be great. Somebody who's good at YAC isn't necessarily that though.
