NFL fans and fantasy football managers don’t like to talk about luck. It’s better — easier, perhaps — to ignore the role of luck or variance or whatever you want to call it and instead believe that everything is controllable, that every team and every player is the master of their own destiny, that you either do the thing or you don’t do the thing.
I’m OK talking about the inescapable role of variance in football. Sometimes it bothers the folks tuning into my NFL on NBC YouTube live stream on Fridays during the regular season. They don’t want to know about a player getting lucky or unlucky; they want to know about which player is going to score some dang fantasy points that weekend. That’s fine. I get it. But we ignore variance at our own peril if we want our fantasy squads to score some dang points over the long run.
Every offseason I look at players who were on the right or wrong side of volatility — guys you might call regression candidates. Much of this analysis is based on air yards: How often they are converted, how many there were to go around, things of that nature.
Below is a look at quarterbacks with the highest and lowest rates of air yards conversion and dropped air yards in 2025. It’s a good starting point, I think, for judging which QBs were lucky, and which were unlucky.
▶ The presence of both Purdy and Mac Jones on this list comes as no surprise. Kyle Shanahan’s offense was designed in a lab to hack every football metric and make the spreadsheets endlessly hum. That’s precisely what they did in 2025 with both Purdy and Jones under center. Only Drake Maye and Jordan Love had a higher adjusted EPA per drop back than Purdy, who might just be good. One thing to note here: Purdy’s air yards per attempt fell from 8.5 in 2024 to 7.6 in 2025, a significant decrease that might have something to do with Brandon Aiyuk’s absence. In any case, Purdy remains one of the most reliable floor-based quarterbacks in all of fantasy.
That Maye was second in air yards conversion rate while leading the NFL in air yards per attempt is remarkable (though he was seventh in overall air yards due to the Patriots’ low-volume offense). It was quite the leap for Maye, who in 2024 converted just 44 percent of his air yards, in line with Will Levis and Jets-era Aaron Rodgers. I would expect some regression for Maye in 2026, though it probably won’t matter much for fantasy. Maye, severely injured his throwing shoulder and all, managed to eke out around 20 fantasy points against the Seahawks in the Super Bowl in what was by far his worst game of the season. He’s great for fantasy; there’s nothing much more to say.
▶ I have bad news for the Darnold haters. He was second in air yards conversion rate in 2024 and third this season. He might just be a good quarterback despite him being bad with the Jets eight years ago (everyone is bad with the Jets). Sure, JSN helps the cause. I think Darnold is sold short as a real life and fantasy QB though.
▶ George Pickens, it turns out, is good for converting air yards, if a team is into that sort of thing. Prescott in 2024 had a lowly 47 percent air yards conversion rate over eight games, the same as Aidan O’Connell had with a similar average depth of target. Pickens’ dominant play in 2025 and his downfield acumen led to an efficiency spike for Prescott. Hopefully for Dak and the Cowboys offense, Jerry Jones won’t play games with Pickens this offseason and will make sure he’s back on the field in 2026 as the team’s WR1(b).
▶ We saw a bunch of metrics-based red flags for Nix in his second season, even as the Broncos ran roughshod through the weakened AFC. That Nix had an air yards conversion rate below Cam Ward with a perfectly average air yards per attempt — meaning he wasn’t pushing it downfield at an unusual clip — is highly concerning. Nix’s drop back success rate was somehow below that of Justin Fields and Bryce Young. Nix since the start of the 2024 season ranks 31st out of 41 qualifying QBs in success rate. And if you’re wondering whether Nix’s air yards numbers are much different from his rookie campaign, they were not. He converted 42 percent of his air yards in 2024. That combined with the (potentially) chronic ankle problems could spell trouble for the Broncos in 2026 and beyond.
▶ Maybe it was the injuries to his pass catchers or maybe Mayfield was playing through more pain than we knew in 2025, but his metrics fell off in dramatic ways, including — as you can see — in air yards conversion rate. Mayfield in 2024 converted 55 percent of his air yards, a top-10 mark. I would say he’s due for the good kind of regression in 2026 if his primary downfield guy returns to the Bucs. It’s a good thing Mike Evans is coming back for a 13th season with Tampa. If Evans had jumped (pirate) ship, Mayfield would have been left with one of the worst downfield targets of the 2025 season, Emeka Egbuka, as his main deep ball target. Egbuka’s 37 percent air yards conversion rate was among the lowest in the NFL among wideouts who had at least 40 targets. Egbuka was 104th out of 110 qualifying wideouts in ESPN’s open score, which measures how much separation a pass catcher gets. Xavier Legette and Adam Thielen were among the receivers with a higher open score than Egbuka. That’s concerning.
▶ Mariota was weirdly good in his 2025 spot starts. He regularly exceeded 300 air yards — a high mark — and refused to stop pushing it downfield. No quarterback, in fact, had a higher air yards per attempt than Mariota in 2025. That he was able to convert about half of his air yards while making such low-percentage, high-variance throws is noteworthy, I think. He also ranked eighth among all QBs in completion rate over expected, better than Jared Goff, Lamar Jackson, and Dak Prescott, among others. Mariota, whose grey hair makes me feel ancient, could probably start for a few teams in 2026.
Quarterbacks Running Ice Cold
Though I’m not entirely sure how predictive dropped passes and air yards could be, I think it’s at least a fun exercise to see which quarterbacks ran cold in these categories.
Below is a look at last year’s leaders in dropped target percentage and total dropped air yards (obviously this latter category will mostly include 17-game starters).
▶ Xavier Worthy in 2025 was one of the only receivers worse than the aforementioned Egbuka at converting air yards into real yards. Worthy turned 33 percent of his air yards into receiving yards, a big factor in Mahomes’ massive efficiency drop-off in 2025. Marquise Brown’s 42 percent conversion rate was better than Worthy’s but not exactly glistening. Mahomes’ 8.2 air yards per pass attempt suggests he finally let it rip a little bit after two seasons of constant check downs to KC’s underwhelming group of pass catchers. That’s a positive sign. Maybe the Chiefs can upgrade their atrocious receiver room in the coming months. That’d be cool.
▶ For the second straight year Caleb Williams ran cold in air yards stats. While his on-target rate improved slightly, Caleb remains what you might call a high-variance passer. Some might call him troublingly inaccurate; it all depends on whether or not you root for the Bears. Anyway, Rome Odunze stunk in 2025 and might just be bad like the rest of the Washington Huskies from the 2024 draft class. Odunze converted a meager 35 percent of his air yards in 2025, near the dreaded Worthy Territory. In 2024, that number was 34 percent. As a downfield guy, this rate will never be all that high. Still, anything in the low-30s is concerning.
▶ T-Law is always, for whatever reason, among the league leaders in dropped targets and general bad luck. This, as you might know, is a running bit on the Rotoworld Football Show. I don’t know if that’s because Lawrence does not throw a catchable ball or because his pass catchers stink. He remained unlucky in 2025 in any case and still had a solid fantasy season. This might be related to Brian Thomas Jr. converting a mere 39 percent of his air yards. Maybe a little luck (variance) in 2026 can push Lawrence into elite territory. The Jaguars deciding not to waste valuable targets on Travis Hunter is probably a good step in this direction.
