RADIO
Time's up! The 2022 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 kickoff 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 2022 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 NGS-primer. Now, let's get to the data!
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2022 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 45 targets for both WR and TE.
Cushion / Separation
Correlation with Fantasy Points: minus-6% / minus-10%
Leaders and Trailers:
Correlation with Fantasy Points: 7% / 66%
Leaders and Trailers:
Receptions / Targets / Catch% / Touchdowns
Correlation with Fantasy Points: 85% / 83% / 22% / 74%
Leaders and Trailers:
Total Yards (Air Yds + YAC) / Air Yards / YAC%
Correlation with Fantasy Points: 87% / 77% / minus-2%
Leaders and Trailers:
Yards After Catch / Expected YAC / YAC Above Expectation
Correlation with Fantasy Points: 12% / 1% / 19%
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 by 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:
With Cooper Kupp missing a good bunch of games this season, there was always going to be a new NGS (and fantasy, for that matter) pass-catching king. This season, after 18 games, that is clearly Justin Jefferson.
The Vikings wideout put a 12+ NGS-point gap between him and second-place Tyreek Hill. That same point difference is the one found between no. 2 Hill and no. 6 Davante Adams, showing how unique Jefferson was but how the next-best crop of players was solid (and very bunched) behind him.
As many as five pass catchers, all of them playing the WR position, finished inside the top five in five different categories featured on the NGS website: Jefferson, Hill, A.J. Brown, Stefon Diggs, and Adams.
One who didn't top five in five categories was the no. 5 player on the NGS leaderboard, CeeDee Lamb. He only reached the top five in two statistical categories: targets and receptions, quite the classic football metrics for receivers outside of total yards and touchdowns (he landed in sixth place on both fronts).
Jefferson was the clear best player with three different top finishes and another top two on top of that. The three cats he led were receptions, targets, and yards with a top two finish in Air Yards and one more top five rank in TAY%.
No other top-36 WR/TE in the NGS combined leaderboard ranked at the top of more than one category at the end of the 2022 NFL regular season, while Tyreek Hill and Davante Adams were the only two other players to get two top two finishes in different statistical categories.
Outside of that top 36, though, there start to appear some oddities. For example:
- Gabe Davis ranked 37th OVR in the combined NGS leaderboard while topping one category (TAY) and making the top two in another one (YAC%).
- George Pickens (40th OVR) led two categories (CUSH and YAC%).
- Dallas Goedert (59th) had three top three finishes (CATCH%, YAC/R, xYAC/R), topping one (the latter) cat.
- Deebo Samuel (64th) topped two categories (YAC/R and xYAC/R) while also finishing inside the top three in another one (YACOE).
- Chigoziem Okonkwo (103rd) finished top two in two categories. Foster Moreau (118th) finished top four in two cats.
DK Metcalf was the best-ranked player (14th OVR) to finish in the bottom 10 of three different categories (SEP, YAC/R, xYAC/R). Teammate Tyler Lockett ranked 16th overall with two such finishes (CUSH and YACOE).
Both A.J. Green and Tyquan Thornton ranked bottom 10 in most categories with eight such finishes each. No other player ranked so badly in so many statistical categories. The "next-worst" players were Greg Dortch and Rondale Moore with five bottom 10 finishes each, both members of the Cardinals.
- The correlation between FP/G and NGS scores is a rather-high 84% for the 2022 season. That, though, is a little bit below last year's 88-percent relationship.
- The 16-percentage-point gap explains the small differences in both ranks:
- Top Five NGS players: Jefferson, Hill, Brown, Diggs, Lamb
- Top Five FP/G players: Kupp, Jefferson, Hill, Chase, Diggs
- Bottom Five NGS players: Thornton, Green, Renfrow, Logan Thomas, Moreau
- Bottom Five FP/G players: Green, Quez Watkins, Nelson Agholor, Jauan Jennings, Nick Westbrook-Ikhine
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