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When it comes to drafting stud wide receivers and tight ends, we all pursue the same stats: receptions, yards, and touchdowns. It makes sense. Those three stats are the ones that ultimately yield actual, tangible fantasy points in every fantasy league, no matter the format. The savviest fantasy GMs often focus on targets, as without targets, receivers have no chance to score points. That's a good approach to assess a very important non-fantasy stat. But targets are not the only non-fantasy number worth considering.
There are plenty of "artificially-built" numbers that help us understand football and player performance better, like yards per reception, yards per target, and others like fantasy points per target that do the same thing only with a fantasy twist. Today, I'm here to explore two stats that usually go under the radar when analyzing receivers and tight ends. Some already take the first one (catch rate) into consideration, but the other (drawn pass interferences) might surprise you if you have never thought of its impact on the game.
That's why today I'm writing about the leaders in both statistical categories during the past 2021 season with our eyes already set on the upcoming 2022 one. Let's explore what the best players at the WR/TE position did when it came to catching rates and drawn pass interference.
Best 2021 Catch Rates - WR & TE
In order to limit the data to only fantasy-relevant players, I've only considered WRs and TEs to reach 150+ PPR points during the 2021 season, excluding touchdowns. There are 36 of them in the chart above, all with catch rates between 58% (Darnell Mooney) and 81% (Hunter Renfrow). The difference in the volume of opportunities between those two wasn't that high over the full season (140 vs. 128, basically a WR1 workload in a good single week), but the results were vastly different if only because of the 20%+ rate at which Renfrow caught his targets, something that all by itself boosted him clearly past Mooney in the fantasy leaderboards.
Tight Ends Overview
Compared to last year, when only two tight ends caught more than 65% of their targets while meeting all other used criteria, there were double that amount of players doing it in 2021--with a close four in Kyle Pitts (62.4% catch rate). Lowering the target threshold to 94 instead of 100, George Kittle would have also made the cut with a catch rate above 75%, the second-best only behind Dalton Schultz.
Recent-past marvels such as Jared Cook, Darren Waller, Rob Gronkowski, or Hunter Henry couldn't do a lot and missed on all fronts (<100 targets, <150 PPR) while having varying levels of success at catching their targets, ranging from around 58% to 74% among those at the top of this second-tierish group.
The Big 3 of the last year (Zach Ertz, Travis Kelce, and George Kittle) is a top-two now with Kelce and Kittle (this last one already raising some doubts) the only two of them able to break the 115-PPR point barrier among those three. Waller couldn't solidify himself as a bona fide top-notch TE, though it had more to do with his missed time than his actual performances.
One thing is clear, though, and that's that a new crop of tight ends seems to have arrived in Mark Andrews and oft-misused Kyle Pitts. You can make a case for Mike Gesicki too, although the Dolphins never had a proper QB (nor have one for next year pending decisions to make at the position) so that hurt Gesicki's outcome.
Wide Receivers Overview
Moving on to wide receivers, Hunter Renfrow was by far the most reliable pass-catcher of the 2021 season while putting up heavy fantasy production numbers. He was targeted way fewer times (128) than other studs at the position but catching 103 passes for an 80%+ catch rate elevated him to the top of the fantasy leaderboard. At the end of the day, even if you consider Renfrow one of the most boring players around, he was still one of only nine players with 100+ catches over the year and one of four with a catch rate above 70%. Not bad.
Of course, Renfrow kind of benefitted from that "low" volume of targets. Compared to Davante Adams' 169, Cooper Kupp's 191, or even Jaylen Waddle's 141, his 128 looks fall a bit short of what you'd expect a true stud to get over a full season, and that surely helped him raise/sustain his impressive catch rate. All things considered (again, not factoring TDs), all of the numbers combined for 339+ PPR in Kupp's tally, 278+ in Adams', but only 206+ on Renfrow, highlight how important that volume difference turned out to be even on Renfrow's huge efficiency.
A lot of stuff has been written about Kupp's nonsensical 2021 campaign, but he deserves all of the praise he's gotten. Kupp is coming off a 191-target year, something that has happened just seven other times since 2000. Not happy enough with that volume, Kupp made the most of it, catching more passes than anyone with 190+ targets over a year in that same span (145 receptions), and the second-most since 2000, only beaten by Michael Thomas' 149 catches in 2019 (on 185 targets). Of course, the 75.9% catch rate ranks 14th-best in the past 22 years among WR/TE with 100+ targets and is a top-three mark among those getting 150+ looks since 2000.
Baltimore was the only team to sustain a two-man army of receivers with 145+ targets each (Andrews and Marquise Brown), though only one of them could finish the year with a catch rate above 63% and more than 100 receptions. Limiting the field of player-pairs to just WRs, it was the Los Angeles Chargers with two players above 125+, the only team giving at least that volume of targets to two different WRs. Tampa Bay would rank second as Mike Evans and Chris Godwin logged 114+ each.
Worst 2021 Catch Rates - WRs & TEs
Let's move to the left side of the chart now, which contains the worst players in terms of catch rate. Robby Anderson or Chase Claypool, both missing on the chart above, can be considered the next-best players at any of the two receiving positions. Anderson finished the year at a 49% catch rate on 110 targets for 105 PPR (remember, no TDs factored in the score) and Claypool caught 57% on 105 looks, barely missing the cut because of his 145 PPR points.
Wide Receivers Overview
If you focus on the team logos and not the labels on the chart above, you'll see a clear jump from the far-left group of five players (DJ Moore, Darnell Mooney, DK Metcalf, Terry McLaurin, and Mike Williams) and the next one (Diontae Johnson, DeVonta Smith, and Marvin Jones). None of those eight players posted a catch rate of even 63%, but the first five were just way below the norm, not topping 60% in any case without actually getting that many targets (with the exception of DJ Moore's 163).
DeVonta Smith had an ugly rookie season. On barely 100+ targets, all the Eagles' WR could do was catch 61.5% of the passes thrown his way for 64 receptions and 155+ PPR points without accounting for touchdown receptions. Smith was one of only four rookies to post a 100+ target mark in 2021 (one of 42 WRs to do so since 2000), though his final PPR tally was the lowest among those in that group, same as in terms of his catch rate and his number of receptions. He only beat Amon-Ra St. Brown 916 yards to 912.
Darnell Mooney, the lowest-catch-rate player included in the chart above (57.9%), caught 81 of his 140 targets. For some historical context, that's most definitively not the worst season of the past 22 campaigns as the near-58% catch rate ranks "only" 159th-best among 237 player-seasons from WR with at least 140 targets.
Tight ends overview
In terms of the tight end position, and lowering our minimum requirements a bit (only 50 targets needed, no PPR points minimum considered), Cameron Brate (missing on the chart above) had a year to forget with a paltry 55.6% catch rate on his 57 targets. Good for Tom Brady, at least he could count on a good-not-great season by Rob Gronkowski, who finished at a much better 61% catch rate on 89 looks.
Raising the bar to 80 targets over the year, both Waller and Cook trailed the pack, catching only 58% of their targets and turning into the only two seasons at that volume-clip with a catch rate below 60% (Gronkowski followed them at 61%).
Getting back to Cameron Brate and his rather bad campaign, the truth is that, as was the case with Darnell Mooney (read above), Brate wasn't historically horrid. The worst season in terms of pass-catching from a TE targeted 50+ times over a year came from Detroit Lions' Mikhael Ricks all the way back in 2002 when he could only put his hands on 39.7% of his 68 targets. He is in possession of the lone season with a catch rate below 44% at that number of targets.
Engram's career is starting to get a little bit concerning as he has two of the 18-player seasons since 2000 in which a TE has been targeted 100+ times and posted a catch rate below 58%. He's also the only player at the position with such seasons since the 2012 campaign, having done so in 2017 and 2020.
Tampa Bay was the only team giving 55+ targets to two different tight ends (Gronkowski and Brate) followed by Cleveland, who looked Austin Hooper's way 61 times and also gave David Njoku 53 opportunities. No other team tossed the ball to two different TEs more than 45 times each (New England).
2021 Pass Interferences Drawn - WRs
In order to keep things simple when it comes to Drawn Pass Interferences, I have just limited the data to players with at least four DPI and 150+ PPR points in 2021 (TD-points excluded), which yielded a rather nice 13 players (compared to last year's nine). All of them are included in the chart above, and as you see, only one tight end made the cut (of course, the one with the closest profile to that of a WR in Kyle Pitts).
Among the highlighted wide receivers, the results varied wildly. The four of them were able to rack up the most DPI (seven or more), ranging from an average of 129 yards per DPI (Brandin Cooks) to a high of 222 (Davante Adams). Nobody got an outrageous number of DPI through the season, though, with Cooks the only player getting eight, followed by three more receivers at seven, making Cooks not that much of an outlier.
Justin Jefferson's 320 yards per DPI, on the contrary, can actually be looked at rather skeptically. Keep in mind that this metric is simply calculated by dividing the player's total receiving yards by the DPI and that it doesn't show the actual yards gained on penalties. It's just a proxy to know how many yards a player needs to get a flag going in his favor, something at which Jefferson was horrid (he needed the most yards, and on average 320 can translate to three top-tier games or a couple of sublime ones, so you get an idea).
Cooks' eight DPI on just 1,037 yards over 90 receptions are exactly at the opposite end of the spectrum. It'd be reasonable to expect at least a little bit of regression toward the mean, as he generated an average of one DPI penalty every other game, posting just 130 yards between them. Something closer to the 4-to-7 DPI range with a YDS/DPI in the 200-to-240 clip seems to be the reasonable mean for WRs with large target counts and prone to draw DPI penalties.
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