NextGen Stats Season Review: Wide Receivers and Tight Ends

February 13, 2022

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 2021 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 2021 longer-than-ever 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!

2021 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% / 2%

Leaders and Trailers:

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

Correlation with Fantasy Points: 6% / 62%

Leaders and Trailers:

Receptions / Targets / Catch% / Touchdowns

Correlation with Fantasy Points: 82% / 80% / 32% / 74%

Leaders and Trailers:

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

Correlation with Fantasy Points: 87% / 78% / minus-2%

Leaders and Trailers:

Yards After Catch / Expected YAC / YAC Above Expectation

Correlation with Fantasy Points: 18% / 8% / 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 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:

• Cooper Kupp has been able to put up such a ridiculous season that he's the clear winner of our NGS Award for pass catchers. He almost "doubled" second-ranked Davante Adams in the combined leaderboard of NGS metrics.
• Just out of curiosity, I have tried to cut Kupp's numbers down, and not even removing six touchdowns or 500 yards from his season tallies would make him drop below Adams. Such was Kupp's year.
• Now, counting the categories in which both Adams and Kupp finished as top-five players... there was a tie! That said, though, Kupp led four of those five categories (all of them overlapping between the two WRs) while finishing second in the other one. Adams had three top-two finishes along with two top-three and a top-five.

• A couple of hyper-impressive developments on the 2021 season. First, rookie Ja'Marr Chase led the league in top-five finishes, reaching such heights in six different categories. Year for the ages that of the Cincy freshman.
• Second, tight end Mark Andrews made it to the top-four in the NGS leaderboard, edging Tyreek and Chase by a nail, but getting there nonetheless and absolutely beating second-best TE Travis Kelce while at it. Andrews logged a couple of top-five finishes and was also a top-six player in two more cats.

• Disastrous season (on small samples of 47 and 45 targets respectively, though) for Rashard Higgins and Jonnu Smith. Higgins posted the most bottom-10 finishes among all qualified wide receivers and Jonnu did so for those part of the tight end cohort.
• At least Jonnu Smith put up a couple of top-five finishes in YAC/R and xYAC/R. In fact, he was the only tight end to finish inside the top-three players of those two cats.
• Higgins' best finish was a paltry 37th in the TAY (aDOT) category with an average of 11.7 yards per target (league average at 9.9).

• The correlation between FP/G and NGS scores is sky-high, sitting at 88.5% for the 2021 season. That, though, is a little bit below last year's 90 percent relationship.
• That 11.5-percentage-point gap explains the small differences in both ranks:
  • Top-5 NGS players: Kupp, Adams, Justin Jefferson, Andrews, Tyreek
  • Top-5 FP/G players: Kupp, Adams, Deebo, Justin Jefferson, Ja'Marr Chase
  • Bottom-5 NGS players: Rashard Higgins, Jonnu, Brate, Ricky Seals-Jones, Ray-Ray McCloud
  • Bottom-5 FP/G players: Rashard Higgins, Jonny, Tyler Johnson, Jalen Reagor, Ray-Ray McCloud

• Only three pass-catchers finished in the NGS top-12 while having a bottom-10 mark: Chase ranked 118th (out of 128 qualifiers) in SEP, Deebo ranked 119th in the YAC% cat, and Keenan Allen was tied for 113th in the YACOE leaderboard (seven-way tie).

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