WR Target Share and Impact (NFC South & West): 2019 Review

Not every team splits up the targets in the passing game in the same way, and that has a great impact on the fantasy points any given player can get every week. Knowing who is getting used the most and who is getting the most of his opportunities in each offense is the key to acquiring the best possible fantasy football players.

In this series, I will be covering each of the eight NFL divisions, two at a time, presenting the teams and how they used their wide receivers in 2019. To present those teams and players I use a set of easy-to-read charts: treemaps. The graphics will hold all of the players of each team, the size of each box corresponding with the number of targets (percentage among teammates) he received during the season and the color related to the fantasy points per game (PPR-format leagues) he finished with at the end of the year. Also, the width of the full graphic represents how many total targets (combining those of every receiver) were thrown to receivers by the team compared to the rest of the teams in the division (the empty space in blue to the right, the fewer passes were thrown by such team).

Just to make things as clear as possible, I will add a little personal blurb on each team and how they performed in terms of WR usage and impact during the 2019 season. Let's break things down, this time covering the NFC South and NFC West eight teams!

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NFC South: WR Target Share & Fantasy Impact

• New Orleans Saints
  • The Saints made the most of their receiving corps in 2019 and it wasn't even close. It shouldn't have been hard for them to figure out how to make things work, either. Michael Thomas was the clear No. 1 receiver of the team and the Saints made it clear giving him 66.7% of the targets to which he responded by rewarding his team with 68.6% of the FP generated by New Orleans' wide receivers.
  • The rest of the receivers were also used as expected, with Ted Ginn and Tre'Quan Smith slotting as the WR2 and WR3, respectively, and returning production in that order.
• Atlanta Falcons
  • Atlanta logged the most passes to WRs both among teams from this division and in the entire NFL with 365 (the Los Angeles Rams were second overall with 342) and finished second in FP scored by their wide receivers with a total of 644.6 (the Tampa Bay Buccaneers were first overall with 676.6).
  • Julio Jones was obviously the most-used and most-valuable player for the Falcons with a 35.1% share of targets and 36.1% of the total FP among the team WRs. Ridley didn't fall far from him, though, with a healthy 25.5% share of targets and a return of 30.6% FP.
  • In his half-season in Atlanta (before getting traded to New England), Mohamed Sanu wasn't bad and produced almost the same amount of FP as Russell Gage did, only in half the games. We'll see how Gage plays next season on a clear WR3 role without splitting reps.
• Tampa Bay Buccanneers
  • Chris Godwin and Mike Evans, Mike Evans and Chris Godwin. It came down to the flip of a coin for the Bucs in 2019, as Godwin finished with a 35.5% share and Evans with a virtually equal 35.2% mark. The return was a little bit different, though, as Godwin got 40.8% of the total FP while Evans fell to "just" 34.4% of them.
  • The Breshaud Perriman explosion came perhaps too late in the season, but even with that, he finished as the WR3 in both target share and FP share for Tampa.
• Carolina Panthers
  • All of D.J. Moore (45.7% target share), Curtis Samuel (33.7%), and Jarius Wright (16.5%) played 14 games with very clear roles of WR1, WR2, and WR3 respectively given their shares.
  • If you ask me, the difference between Moore and Samuel in targets, though, should have been a little higher considering that Moore provided almost five more FP per game.

NFC West: WR Target Share & Fantasy Impact

• San Francisco 49ers
  • The 49ers threw the fourth-fewest passes (210) to WRs in the whole league, only bested by Minnesota (188), Oakland (178), and Baltimore (162).
  • While Emmanuel Sanders is a free agent this summer, if he returns to the Niners we could expect him to be thrown the ball on a bulkier diet. He had virtually the same share as Kendrick Bourne (20%) of them but produced the most FP/G of the team WRs and finished with the second-highest percentage of FP overall (21.7%).
  • Deebo Samuel was quite a revelation, finishing the season with 34.3% of the total FP generated by the position-players of the team on just 13 games.
• Seattle Seahawks
  • There were times when Tyler Lockett looked completely out of rhythm for these Seahawks, but at the end of the year there he is: Leading Seattle in target share (35.7%) and also in FP share (39.1%) to prove right the decision of feeding him.
  • D.K. Metcalf was highly impressive himself, though, as he was heavily used for a rookie (32.3% of the total targets) yet he put up 12.4 FP/G and 31.4% of the total fantasy points scored by Seahawks WRs.
  • Seattle lacked a reliable WR3 and the usage of the rest of the corps shows it. Only David Moore broke the 10% mark with an 11.2% target share but his return wasn't much higher than that of Jaron Brown. Josh Gordon only played five games and was even worse than those two.
• Los Angeles Rams
  • Of the three-headed monster that lives in this LA team, Brandin Cooks was an afterthought getting just 17.8% of the targets and providing only 16.6% of the total FP of the Rams WRs.
  • While Cooper Kupp finished the season with two more FP per game than Robert Woods, those were all due to his 8-to-1 TD outing. The targets were very close (35.1% to 34.2%) but Kupp separated in production getting 40.2% of the FP to Woods' 32.9%.
• Arizona Cardinals
  • Rookie QB Kyler Murray got fixated on throwing everything toward Larry Fitzgerald but that didn't seem to be the best option. Fitz finished with a 29.1% target share over Christian Kirk's 28.4% while the latter was much more productive on a per-game basis.
  • Even playing just 11 games to Fitzgerald's 14, Kirk ended the year with 30% of the Cardinals total FP by WRs while Fitzgerald provided 30.5%.
  • Andy Isabella was completely forgotten in this offense (4% target share) but it'd be interesting to see who breaks through and becomes the de-facto WR3 next season: Keesean Johnson saw more targets than the non-WR1/2 receivers but he wasn't the most productive, and while Damiere Byrd only had a fourth-highest 11.3% target share he finished with the most FP of the rest (10% of the total).

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