Next Gen Stats Season Review: Wide Receivers and Tight Ends

January 25, 2021

Antonio Losada provides key fantasy football updates for wide receivers and tight ends, using Next Gen data to help fantasy owners make the best lineup and waiver wire decisions.

Time's up! The 2020 fantasy season is done and gone for good. Whether you play in a redraft league or are part of a dynasty format, the days of sitting at the edge of your couch and biting your nails are over. We have a tough eight-month desert to walk through ahead of us, but hey, the real NFL players are this close to kick-off and we will still enjoy football for another month and change, so you better get to it while it lasts! With the numbers in place and the games finished, it's time to wrap up the series and take a final look at who was who during this 2020 season.

To gain the biggest edge in your fantasy football league, it's necessary to understand how to apply the advanced statistics being used in sports nowadays. Back in the day, it was all about wins and losses, passing yards, and touchdowns scored. It's not that those stats are now worthless, they just don't offer enough information to savvy analysts. While football is still in its infancy compared to baseball in terms of analytics, the evolution the sport has seen lately in those terms is notable.

Each week, I'll be tackling NFL's Next Gen Stats, bringing you data from the previous week's games with notable takeaways you should consider when assessing fantasy players for the upcoming week. In case you're new to the series, or Next Gen Stats altogether, I recommend you read our preseason primer. Now, let's get to the data!

2020 Best and Worst Receivers - Next Gen Stats

The season, at least for us fantasy nuts is finally over. That is nothing good for our enjoyment of the fantasy game, but it is a time of calm and peace to enjoy the real NFL playoffs that we're also invested in. With all of the regular season numbers now in place, it is time to wrap up the Next Gen Stats series position by position.

This week I will go through the receiving positions, covering both wide receivers and tight ends. Today I'll provide a final update on how the league's WR/TEs have done in the different metrics we've already tackled during the season. I will only show a small number of names for each category, present the correlation with the fantasy points averaged by the player, skip the gory-details, and instead provide a new "combined" leaderboard at the end of the column.

So let's dive in. Note: The cutoff is set at 43 targets for both WR and TE.

Cushion / Separation

Correlation with Fantasy Points: negative-14% / negative-13%

Leaders and Trailers:

Targeted Air Yards / % Share of Team's Air Yards

Correlation with Fantasy Points: 5% / 64%

Leaders and Trailers:

Receptions / Targets / Catch% / Touchdowns

Correlation with Fantasy Points: 85% / 81% / 35% / 71%

Leaders and Trailers:

"Total" Yards (Air Yds + YAC) / "Air" Yards

Correlation with Fantasy Points: 89% / 81%

Leaders and Trailers:

Yards After Catch / Expected YAC / YAC Above Expectation

Correlation with Fantasy Points: 2% / negative-5% / 10%

Leaders and Trailers: 

Combined Next Gen Stats Leaderboard

To build this leaderboard I used every metric that is part of the NGS site and put everything together in a combined score I labeled "NGS" in the following table. The calculation of each player's NGS score is simple. I calculated where each player ranked for each metric and then multiplied that rank for the correlation between that metric and my FP/G metric. Players ranked higher (closer to one) in each category will have lower scores for those categories. In the end, I added up each player's scores from all of the categories getting a single NGS score.

The lower the NGS, the better the player for fantasy as each category was already weighted given its correlation with the FP/G metric. Here are the results:

NGS Leaderboard Notes:

• Although Adams and Diggs finished super-close at the top of the leaderboard, Adams' 18 TDs proved critical to snatching the NGS title from Diggs' hands.
• Adams was a better all-around player than Diggs as he finished as a top-5 player in five NGS cats compared to Diggs' four top-5 finishes.
• That being said, though, Diggs was top-2 in all four of those cats compared to Adams ranking as a top-2 player in only two categories.

• Cook ranked as a top-5 player in five NGS cats compared to Henry's seven top-5 finishes. The problem for Henry is that he led in cats not so relevant for fantasy purposes, thus not entirely edging Cook.
• The main cats killing Henry's chances at getting the no. 1 spot were his low ranks in EFF, 8+D%, and TLOS, all at-or-above 12th.

• The correlation between FP/G and NGS scores is at a near-perfect hundred-percent, sitting at an actual 90% for the 2020 season.
• That 10-percentage-point gap explains the small differences in both ranks:
  • Top-5 NGS players: Adams, Diggs, Hopkins, Kelce, Hill
  • Top-5 FP/G players: Adams, Diggs, Hill, Kelce, Ridley
  • Bottom-5 NGS players: Ford, Hamilton, Kmet, Knox, Reed
  • Bottom-5 FP/G players: Kmet, Hamilton, Herndon, Sample, Firkser

• None of the top-23 NGS pass-catchers ranked bottom-5 in any category. No. 24 JuJu Smith-Schuster was the first to do so with a 129th finish in TAY.
• The only other top-40 player with a single bottom-5 rank in his log is No. 33 Marquise Brown: he finished 130th in CUSH.

• All of No. 109 Deebo Samuel, No. 122 Drew Sample,  and No. 130 Cole Kmet trailed all pass-catchers with five bottom-5 ranks through the season in different NGS cats.
• No. 129 Dawson Knox was able to still rank as a top-5 NGS pass-catcher in two categories--CUSH and YAC/R--although those didn't do a lot to help his overall numbers.
• Although he finished No. 117 overall, Irv Smith Jr. ranked as the top CUSH pass-catcher among all qualified players along with John Brown (No. 95).

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