2013 Targets and Catches

Yesterday was Rushing Stats day. Today, it's receiving. Here is a spreadsheet (too big for Google Docs) with all sorts of goodies in it:

Targets, Catches, Receiving yards. Here's your reminder that targets are catches plus the "incomplete to ____" data you find in the official play-by-play.

Catch Rate. Catches divided by tarets.

Yards per Target and Yards per Catch. Self-explanatory.

Target Rate. This is the percent of the team's overall targets accounted for by the player in question.

%SD. This is the percentage of a players targets that took place on standard downs as opposed to passing downs. (NOTE: This year, all Standard and Passing Downs data have garbage time filtered out. In the spreadsheet above, you can see all sorts of data filtered by Standard and Passing Downs. But if you add those numbers together, it might not match the overall totals because of garbage time.)

Net Expected Yards (NEY). This is something I've been tinkering with. It's based around this premise: Let's pretend for a moment that a player's catch rate is mostly on the quarterback. The quarterback's job is to get the ball to the player, and the player's job is to gain yards. Simplistic? Absolutely. But we can make an estimate of a player's likely yards per catch based on the catch rate: higher catch rate, lower yards per catch (because of easier passes). With this figure, we determine a player's likely yards per catch, then compare it to the player's actual rate.

Net Expected Yards = Actual Receiving Yards - (Projected Yards Per Catch * Targets)

A positive NEY means the player gained more yards than projected. (The NEY/Target number, then, looks at the rate at which a player exceeds his projections.)

Real Yards Per Target. As a whole, players with a higher rate of Standard Downs targets can expect to average greater yards per target because it's easier to pass on Standard Downs. Real Yards Per Target looks at what players' averages would be if they were all targeted the same frequency on Standard and Passing Downs.

RYPR. Defined here. "Below, you will find a measure that attempts to answer the following questions about a given pass-catcher: 1) How much do you produce? 2) How important are you to your team's passing game? 3) How good is the passing game to which you are important? 4) And how much is the forward pass featured in your team's offense?"

There are a lot of ways to evaluate receivers here, and since I don't have a feel for which one is better than another, I'm just including them all.

Below are the top 100 FBS receivers in 2013, ranked according to total Net Expected Yards. Some quick conclusions:

1. Just imagine what Mike Evans' numbers must have looked like before his awful performances against LSU and Missouri (and his combustion against Duke).

2. Allen Hurns was the most underrated receiver in the country in 2013.

3. Fun with small sample sizes: Kansas State totally should have thrown to Glenn Gronkowski about 10 times per game!