The problem with last year’s box score

Receiver production is a chain. The offense creates plays, the player earns a share of those plays, and then a set of less controllable outcomes turns that opportunity into fantasy points. Most managers draft off the end of that chain, the fantasy points, even though that is the least stable part.

The useful question is not who scored the most. It is which parts of last year’s production are likely to happen again.

The stats that carry forward

Target share. The percentage of his team’s targets a receiver commands is the most stable receiving metric year over year. It reflects how a coaching staff and quarterback actually use a player, and that tends to change slowly. It is also the metric most directly tied to fantasy scoring because targets are the starting point for receptions, yards, and touchdowns.

Air yards share. This measures how much of the team’s intended downfield yardage was aimed at him. It tells you what kind of role the receiver has. Two receivers can split targets evenly while one runs mostly slants and the other runs posts, and only the second one has access to a much bigger weekly ceiling.

The two together. Target share tells you volume. Air yards share tells you how valuable those targets are. A receiver who leads his team in both is the primary passing-game option, and that role is much more likely to carry into the next season than the final fantasy point total.

The stats that regress hard

Touchdown rate. Touchdowns per target is one of the least stable numbers in football. Opportunity is what you should measure. The rate at which those opportunities turn into touchdowns can swing dramatically from one year to the next. A receiver who scored on an unusually high percentage of his targets last year is very likely to score on fewer this year, and the opposite is true as well.

This is one of the easiest ways to overpay on draft day. A player has a career year in touchdowns, his fantasy finish looks elite, and the market starts pricing him as if that scoring rate is going to repeat.

Efficiency on low volume. A receiver who was incredibly efficient on forty targets has not told you very much. Efficiency takes time to stabilize. Volume tells you much more quickly whether the role is real. When the two disagree on a small sample, trust the volume.

Yards after catch on a partial season. There is real skill involved, but the year-to-year noise across thirty receptions is still large. Be skeptical of a breakout case built on it.

Deep-ball completion rate. This depends heavily on the quarterback and on a small number of high-variance plays, so it can move around a lot from one season to the next.

The combination that identifies a buy

The best receiver buy is usually not the player who was the most efficient. It is the player who was already being used heavily but had poor conversion luck, especially when the situation around him is not getting worse.

The 2025 league average was one receiving touchdown per nineteen targets. These receivers commanded a large share of their team’s targets and air yards but finished well below that scoring rate, which is the kind of profile that can bounce back.

• Justin Jefferson, Minnesota. 141 targets, a 30 percent target share and a 38 percent air yards share, both team-leading by a wide margin, and two receiving touchdowns. That is roughly one score per seventy targets against a league rate of one per nineteen. Nothing about the role needs to change for the scoring to normalize. He is already priced inside the first round, so this is not a bargain. It is a warning against fading him because of last year’s finish.
• DeVonta Smith, Philadelphia. 113 targets, a 24 percent target share and a 30 percent air yards share, four touchdowns. Stable quarterback, downfield role intact, and a scoring rate about a third of league average. His price sits near the end of the third round, closer to last year’s points than to last year’s usage. The one change worth pricing is that A.J. Brown is no longer on the roster. In the four regular-season games since 2022 that Brown missed, Smith’s target share averaged 30 percent against 25 percent alongside him, and his air yards share averaged 49 percent against 29 percent. Four games is a direction, not a rate, and his touchdowns did not go up in that split, so treat it as a volume and downfield-leverage argument rather than a scoring one. The usage case stands on its own either way; Brown’s departure is upside on top of it.
• Jakobi Meyers, Jacksonville. 110 targets, a 22 percent target share and a 31 percent air yards share, with three touchdowns. Same team this year. He is going around pick 110, roughly WR46 or WR47, for a player who led his offense in air yards.

One buy with an asterisk. Wan’Dale Robinson posted a 28 percent target share on 140 targets with four touchdowns, which is the cleanest bad-luck profile in the sample. He also changed teams and now plays in Tennessee. Target share belongs partly to the role, not just the player, so a new offense resets that part of the projection. The usage tells you he can handle volume. It does not guarantee he gets the same volume again.

The combination that identifies a fade

The reverse profile is harder to act on, because it usually involves a player everyone remembers fondly. These 2025 producers scored at more than one and a half times the league rate per target while commanding under a fifth of their team’s targets:

• Davante Adams, Los Angeles Rams. 14 receiving touchdowns on 114 targets, a rate more than double league average, on a 20 percent target share. He is being drafted in the mid-forties. The touchdowns are the reason for the price and the touchdowns are the part of the profile least likely to repeat. His own career backs that up: he has cleared twice the league rate three times and given it back the following year every single time, and he has never repeated it.
• Tee Higgins, Cincinnati. 11 touchdowns on 98 targets with a 16 percent target share. Unlike the rest of this list, Higgins has scored above league rate four seasons running and climbing, so treat the red-zone skill as real. The caution is the 16 percent share against a third-round price, not the touchdowns. Great option for DFS.
• Dallas Goedert, Philadelphia. 11 touchdowns on 82 targets, a 13 percent air yards share, and roughly a 36 percent combined share of team passing value. That is a red-zone-dependent tight end priced as a starter around pick 120, and 2025 was by far the highest scoring rate of his eight seasons, well outside everything before it.
• George Kittle, San Francisco. 7 touchdowns on 69 targets in 11 games, with a 12.5 percent target share and a 10.7 percent air yards share. Kittle’s scoring rate has been above league average five years running, so project him above average, just below last year’s level. The efficiency is genuine and the volume is not there. Another DFS darling.
• Jauan Jennings, Minnesota. Nine touchdowns on a 16.4% target share, and he has already lived this cycle – he scored at about two and a half times league rate in 2021, then fell to roughly a third of it the next year. Add the move out of San Francisco and both halves of the profile reset at once. This is the spike-and-crash version of the fade. If I need a critical third down, I want Jennings. If I want an every-week starter, I’ll pass.
• Quentin Johnston, Los Angeles Chargers. Johnston has now finished above league scoring rate two years running, about 1.7 times in 2024 and about 1.9 times in 2025, on target shares of 18.5% and 15.4%. He finally started catching the ball. Two seasons is not a proven skill, but it is not a one-year fluke either. Fade him on volume, not on luck – the offense concentrates targets elsewhere and a 15.4% share leaves no margin if the rate softens at all. If his target share climbs toward 20%, the fade goes away.

Fade does not mean never draft. It means do not pay last year’s touchdown total for this year’s usage. Use the matrix cheat sheet to guide you.

The short version

• Target share and air yards share carry forward. Weight them heavily.
• Touchdown rate and small-sample efficiency do not carry forward nearly as well. Discount them aggressively in both directions.
• Buy heavy usage with unlucky conversion. Fade light usage with lucky conversion.
• Always check what the share is a share of and reset the read when a player changes teams.

Receiver drafting is mostly about separating role from outcome. The role is what the team chose to give the player. The outcome is what happened once those opportunities were created.

The role is much more likely to come back next year.

Usage figures are 2025 regular season, computed from public play-level data (nflverse, CC BY 4.0).