WR and TE Snap Alignment Breakdown

Antonio Losada looks at wide receiver and tight end data to see how they were used during the 2019 season. Who were the most dominant WR and TE leading up to the 2020 fantasy draft season?

If you have been following football for some time now, you know that different alignments yield different results. Receivers aligned on the outside part of the field tend to be used more often on deep routes. Slot-receivers can be used as possession targets. Tight ends...well, they align mostly at the tight end position. And then, to make things even weirder, there is the backfield which is sometimes used by pure WRs and TEs to launch their routes.

In a perfect world we'd like our receivers to be dominant no matter their alignment, but that's 1) hard to happen because different skill sets work better at certain spots on the field, and 2) almost every wide receiver has a defined role in the offense where he works best and that is where he is deployed most of the snaps.

With that in mind, today I'll be breaking down the data from the 2019 seasons to see who were the best WR and TE at each alignment on offense, and also I'll also be looking at the data from different angles to analyze how different players were used. Let's get to it!

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2019 Alignment Data - Most Versatile WR & TE

The first and most obvious thing I wanted to tackle was related to the versatility of players at both the wide receiver and tight end positions. In order to find that, I followed a simple process. First of all I only considered players with at least 150 snaps played in 2019. There were 952 of them. Then I calculated the percentage of snaps they took at each possible alignment (OUTside, SLot, TEnd, BAckfield as depicted in the chart). Finally, I calculated the standard deviation of those four percentages from each player: the lower the standard deviation, the more similar the percentages and thus the more used all around the field.

You Versatility Champion shouldn't be surprising: Cordarrelle Patterson led the league with the smallest deviation between the percentage of plays he aligned at each position, thanks mostly to his usage from the tight and backfield spots while being considered a WR. It is interesting to find players such as TE Seth DeValve ranking so high, although his usage from the backfield was mostly on blocking duties, like that of TE Ross Dwelley.

Among the "fantasy-relevant" players in the group (at least 100 PPR points via receiving stats alone), the most versatile of them were James Washington, Robert Woods, and Mecole Hardman. While Washington did the most damage from the tight spot (other than the slot and outside), both Woods and Hardman spread their snaps between tight end and the backfield a little more.

2019 Alignment Data - Least Versatile WR & TE

What's next? Well, kinda obvious: the opposite to the most versatile players, that is, the one-trick ponies. I have represented the WRs and TEs with the largest deviations in their percentage of usages from the different spots. Obviously, we all would have expected tight ends to clog this chart (as they are tight ends and they play mostly from the tight spot), and that was precisely the case.

Leaving those tight ends out of the equation, two other cases clearly catch one's eye: WR Randall Cobb and WR Hunter Renfrow. Both were almost entirely deployed from the slot during the whole season, with percentages over 90% in both cases. The highest percentage of snaps for Cobb at other spots was 4.7% from tight end and for Renfrow 2.5% on the outside.

Getting back to tight ends, and considering "fantasy-relevant" ones (100+ PPR points receiving), only Kyle Rudolph had a 37%+ deviation. The next tight ends in line were Tyler Higbee and Darren Fells, both at deviations of 33.7% as they were deployed at the slot on 11.9% and 12.7% of their snaps respectively (Higbee also logged a relatively nice 4.9% of snaps from an outside position).

2019 Alignment Data - Best PPR Scorers by Spot

As a last step in the analysis, I just wanted to find the best scorer at each spot, or in other words, those who racked up more of their receiving PPR points in 2019 from each alignment on the field.

Slot

Only one receiver in the entire NFL was able to rack up more than 200 PPR points while getting more than 88% of them from the slot: Tyler Lockett. The uber-efficient Seahawk beat Julian Edelman and Cooper Kupp while at it, with those two being the only other players used and performing best from that alignment. The jump from those three to No. 4 Tyler Boyd (73.6% of his PPR from the slot) is the same as that between Boyd and No. 11 Keenan Allen (60.4%). Mark Andrews was the only tight end to get more than 65% of his fantasy points from this alignment too, and only three tight ends went on to score 200+ PPR points and get the majority of them (50%+) from the slot instead of the tight alignment.

Tight End 

Speaking of tight ends, what better to describe them that their natural alignment? George Kittle was a freak at the spot, finishing 2019 with the highest percentage of points from a TE deployed at his natural spot on the field, and the only one getting most of his points from there. Only two other TEs surpassed the 30%-mark while WR Chris Godwin (who himself had a monster of a year in Tampa) led wideouts from this spot.

Outside

Three outside-threats finished 2019 with similar shares when it came to scoring PPR points from the outside, making that spot their true love through the year: Michael Gallup, D.J. Moore, and Amari Cooper, all of them with over 73% of their total receiving PPR points coming from snaps in which they played outside. It is interesting to see how both Gallup and Cooper played in the same offense, thus making them two similar weapons on opposite sides of the Cowboys attack. Among tight ends, the fact that Darren Waller turned into the only viable option on the passing offense for Oakland made him finish with 13.1% of his receiving points on outside-deployed snaps, turning him into a do-it-all tight end (no other TE even reached 9% of his total receiving PPR from there).

Backfield

The "least important" of alignments for both TEs and WRs, in the backfield, shows how versatile players can be and who truly are. Enter Robert Woods, who was this close to finishing the year with 10% of his PPR points while deployed in the backfield. The distance between him and Davante Adams is nearly two times Adams' percentage. Kittle fooled a bunch of defenses that thought he was going to block while instead went on to catch passes running from the backfield, same (although to a much lesser extent) as Mark Andrews in Baltimore.

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