The haters will call them prayer yards.
I call them air yards, and I think we can use them to learn about players who last season didn’t covert many air yards into, you know, actual yards.
Air yards, for the uninitiated, are measured as the distance from the line of scrimmage to the point of a reception or incompletion. For example, if a wideout is targeted 40 yards downfield and the ball falls incomplete, he’s allotted 40 air yards. If he catches it and is immediately tackled -- think Mike Evans -- he’s given 40 air yards and 40 receiving yards. Yards after the catch are not incorporated into a player’s air yards.
Finding Jerry Jeudy’s gut wrenching 2020 air yards situation -- he was sixth among all receivers in air yards while posting the 33rd most receiving yardage -- sent me down the air yards rabbit hole, where I bought a nice condo at a decent price (in this economy). I wanted to know which wideouts converted the lowest percentage of air yards last year and what that might tell us about their usage and their prospects for 2021 (and beyond). [[ad:athena]]
The below wide receivers were inefficient with air yards for a variety of reasons: Lousy quarterback play, lack of separation from defenders, and the kind of routes they run (deep threats are naturally going to prove inefficient in converting air yards into real yards).
You might find the below information actionable. Even if you’re a hater.
DJ Chark, Jaguars
2020 converted air yards: 54.3 percent
Chark’s woefully low 2020 air yards conversion rate followed a spectacularly efficient 2019 campaign in which he turned 75.62 percent of his air yards into real yards. This coincided with startling deep ball regression from Gardner Minshew, who completed just 34.9 percent of his passes of more than 20 yards -- an 11 percent drop from 2019.
Chark’s targets didn’t drop off all that much in 2020, down to 7.1 from 7.9 targets per game. His yards per reception dropped by half a yard and his yards per target fell by less than a yard. He simply didn’t convert his downfield opportunities from Jacksonville’s QB rotation. Chark caught 32.3 percent of targets at least 20 yards downfield -- a figure so low I had to check it 19 times. That ranked 65th in the league. It’s a far (far) cry from 2019, when Chark caught half of his downfield targets, the 17th highest rate in the NFL. A mere five wideouts had more 20+ yard receptions than Chark in 2019.
Now for the silver lining: Chark was third in targets at least 20 yards downfield in 2020, trailing only Calvin Ridley and Tyreek Hill, and only five wideouts had a higher rate of downfield looks than Chark. If Urban Meyer and the new Jaguars coaching staff continue to use the size-speed standout as a down-the-field threat with Trevor Lawrence under center, we could see Chark bounce back to 2019 form just in time to take full advantage of his depressed redraft ADP.
Darnell Mooney, Bears
2020 converted air yards: 54.69 percent
Mooney was the victim of heinous quarterbacking throughout his quietly impressive rookie season. He reeled in just four of 23 downfield looks, registering precisely zero drops on said opportunities. Mooney’s inefficiency, by all accounts, was not his fault, but that of Mitch Trubisky and Nick Foles.
The Bears clearly see Mooney as a receiver who can smoke defenders down the field. Nearly 25 percent of his 2020 targets came at least 20 yards from the line of scrimmage. We can probably expect more of the same in 2021. Mooney, by the bye, led the entire league in average coverage cushion (7.6 yards) last year, per Next Gen Stats. Defenses know he’s a problem.
Head coach Matt Nagy in March said he’s been “amazed at [Mooney’s] mental ability” to understand the Chicago offense and cited Mooney’s “rare element of speed combined with route running, hands, and passion” as reasons to be excited about the wideout’s “very high ceiling.” Nagy offered a generous comp for his second year pass catcher: Tyreek Hill. An upgrade at quarterback in Andy Dalton or, most likely, the highly accurate Justin Fields, could mean a little more downfield efficiency for Mooney in 2021, though he still profiles as a volatile week-to-week fantasy option.
Marquise Brown, Ravens
2020 converted air yards: 59.56 percent
The league’s second best receiver named Hollywood had a down year in 2020, much to the consternation of Robust RB drafters who thought they could get their WR1 in the fourth round. Best laid plans and all that.
Brown’s ability to convert air yards into actual yards was nearly unmatched in 2019, as the speed merchant turned 75.6 percent of his air yards into receiving yards. The idea, headed into the 2020 season, was that Brown would continue to roast defenses downfield while developing a better intermediate game.
Brown’s downfield prowess dropped off the face of the flat earth last year. He caught eight of his 25 downfield targets (32 percent) from Jackson and the gaggle of QBs who replaced L-Jax during his COVID list stint and Monday night bathroom break. And it’s not like Brown didn’t see the long ball opportunity he had in his 2019 rookie season; he saw a slight uptick in downfield target rate in 2020. But in 2019, he converted 46.5 percent of his 20+ yard targets.
Hence, Brown was a low-end WR3 by season’s end. Unless and until he develops new tricks and the Ravens Offense becomes a little less run heavy, Brown is who he is. There’s no reason to think he’ll be a markedly different fantasy producer in 2021. Baltimore adding receivers Rashod Bateman and Tylan Wallace in the draft certainly won’t help Brown’s volume in 2021, though the dynamic rookies could leave Brown with more favorable coverages.
Jerry Jeudy, Broncos
2020 converted air yards: 56.24 percent
The aforementioned Jeudy, with Courtland Sutton missing almost the entire season, got all the air yards he could handle. Only five receivers saw more air yards than Jeudy in his rookie year, though it didn’t add up to much. Drew Lock, you’ll be shocked to know, was the culprit. Lock was dead last in adjusted completion rate (68.7 percent), well below 2020 disasters like Carson Wentz and Sam Darnold. Coincidentally, his real completion rate (57.3 percent) was also dead dog last.
The likelihood of the Broncos once again turning to Lock and the return of Sutton -- who appears on track to start the season for Denver -- surely strips Jeudy of some of his air yards appeal. But after soaking up 32 percent of his team’s air yards as a rookie, fantasy drafters could wind up looking silly for letting a league mate draft Jeudy in the eighth or ninth round this summer. The admittedly outside chance that Denver could acquire the disgruntled Aaron Rodgers this summer would make Jeudy a screaming, hollering best ball value if you’re drafting in May and June.
Marques Valdes-Scantling, Packers
2020 converted air yards: 62.76 percent
MVS gets a mention here even though his converted air yards rate jumped by nearly 16 percent in 2020. That’s a lot. It’s certainly not a little.
His downfield efficiency spiked despite leading the NFL with three drops on passes of at least 20 yards. Watching NFL Red Zone, you -- like me -- may have thought Valdes-Scantling had 20 drops on deep throws from Aaron Rodgers. He did not. The brain is a strange organ.
MVS’s targets only increased by seven in 2020. It was his yards per target that jumped, from eight in his first two seasons and 11.1 in his third year. He posted 151 more air yards than he did in 2019 -- hardly a notable boost. Maintaining last year’s deep ball efficiency should once again make MVS usable in deeper fantasy formats.
AJ Green, Cardinals
2020 converted air yards: 37.22 percent
Hide your kids, hide your significant other, hide you pet fish in its fish tank pirate ship. We’ve come to the unquestioned master of leaving air yards on the field, the veritable deity of prayer yards: A.J. Green.
No one came close to Green’s 2020 air yards inefficiency, raising questions about why Joe Burrow and the Bengals continued to force the football to the supremely washed former star. His 2020 air yard conversion rate was a whopping 20 percent lower than in 2017, his last full season.
Green somehow finished the 2020 season 12th in air yards and -- get this -- 85th in actual, real life yards. It’s not exactly a mystery as to why Green converted 37 percent of his air yards: The not-so-wily veteran averaged a meager 1.7 yards of separation per target, tied with DeVante Parker for worst among all receivers. His inability to create any space meant Green had the second most contested targets in 2020. It was all very bad.
Now he’s set to function as the third or fourth target in the Arizona offense. There’s no universe in which he challenges DeAndre Hopkins (or Christian Kirk) for target primacy in Kyler Murray’s offense, leaving little to no chance he’ll get the ridiculous amount of opportunity he saw last season. I think we can safely ignore Cardinals general manager Steve Keim’s belief that Green has “a lot left in the tank” and write him off until the waning rounds of redraft leagues.
