Field Tippers — 2026, AFC
Contextualizing the per-route profiles of the league's receiving weapons
This is my favorite exercise early every offseason, where I use Targets Per Route Run as a foundational stat to talk through the receiving profiles of each key player in the league. As always, I don’t think TPRR is a miracle stat, but it’s a very strong stat for what it tells us. It predicts itself very well, and targets remain the lifeblood of fantasy football scoring.
And yet, TPRR is not a stat you should look at ranked lists of, and then comment on the stat, which is what a ton of people love to do. If I had a nickel for every time someone completely missed the point of TPRR and then blamed the stat — like using a screwdriver to try to hammer in a nail, then declaring it a broken tool — well, I’d have a few dollars, or something.
TPRR is a stat that requires proper context on an individual basis, because no two receiving profiles are identical. No two offenses are identical, no two players’ alignment packages are identical, etc. As far as the data, the first big piece of statistical context is always depth of target, and not just the average depth (aDOT) but also an understanding of the distribution, because for example some deep threats who also get a bunch of manufactured touches have an aDOT in the middle that basically only tells us the number of manufactured touches that dragged down the deep shots. That’s a different intermediate aDOT than a true intermediate threat.
Secondly, it’s extremely important to layer in efficiency, which I refer to as “after-the-target efficiency” sometimes, because the old way of analyzing fantasy stats as opportunity and efficiency really only fits for rushing. For receiving, there are three things, routes run as the real measure of opportunity, all the stuff after the target is earned (catch rate, yards per whatever, TD rate) as the real measure of efficiency, and then the bridge thing — TPRR.
Traditionally, targets were considered the opportunity metric, and many experienced analysts are still going to talk about them that way. Others refer to TPRR as efficiency, because targets are earned, though it doesn’t really fit the way the industry otherwise talks about efficiency, which is to sometimes say that fluctuations in stuff like TD rate are things to largely regress. I don’t really think about it either way, and prefer to instead think about TPRR in a different bucket entirely than the opportunity/efficiency framework that has defined so much of fantasy analysis for so many years.
Anyway, proper understanding of after-the-target efficiency — which is what I’ll refer to when I just use the word “efficiency” — is key. The whole concept of always regressing out hyper-efficient seasons is actually a problem when used as a default, because we’re looking for outliers who can break what seems statistically possible. It’s a great example of misapplying the aggregate to the specific to always regress out great players doing great things, just because regression can be proven in the aggregate. Some great players have their own “means” where the regression isn’t to a league mean but to a much higher number for that individual for that stat.
For some players, efficiency is something to regress, because we have a longer view of that player and we need to be conscious of working with small samples every year. For others, consistently high efficiency may be something to play into. It’s a case-by-case thing.
The third piece of major context around TPRR would be a whole group of stuff I’ll just call team context. You’ll hear me talk about how good the other four eligible receivers were in a given offense. When a guy is running routes alongside scrubs, he often sees an elevated TPRR against his own skill baseline, though we may also see an efficiency decline as he’s force-fed work. Conversely, when a team has four legit target-earning profiles, we can frequently understand the TPRRs as being weaker than they could have been in another setting. This is useful in thinking through contingent scenarios in the future; George Kittle saw a 2.5-point bump in TPRR from the strong 2023 49ers’ season where Brandon Aiyuk had his career year, and Deebo Samuel and Christian McCaffrey were healthy on a team that went to the Super Bowl, versus his 2024 season where he had to be more of the focus of the passing game as all of that trio missed time.
Other team context would relate to QB profiles, including some who don’t process well and thus hold the ball too long, leading to high sack and scramble rates, and per-route stats that are deflated because more routes than some baseline weren’t actually targeted. That same issue can come from terrible offensive lines, that similarly lead to fewer quality targets per dropback/called pass play. And then the called run/pass split is also relevant, as teams that run the ball suboptimally do tend to juice the per-route receiving numbers — or, put the opposite way, throwing into obvious pass coverages a ton is tough on per-route numbers (that may be different for different styles of player, though, like how Trey McBride was the go-to underneath target for so many Jacoby Brissett dropbacks).
So there are a lot of different considerations that you’ll see me cover, as I work through how each player’s numbers are different. My thoughts on TPRR have evolved a ton since I pushed it as a key metric everyone in the space should be using back in 2020, and helped usher in the rise of its relevance, but I do still find it to be very useful in all the ways I always have. It’s a simple stat, and it measures the right stuff, which is very helpful in that it’s also clear what it’s not measuring, including all the stuff I just said I’ll use to contextualize the data.
In 2024, I wrote a longer intro to this series that became its own post, which has more. In the intro back in 2022, I wrote what was to that point the most concise version of how I use the stat, and I’ve linked back to that before, as well. Here’s the intro last year. You can follow these links down the rabbit hole as you so desire. I’m going to share some administrative stuff then get into the player takes.
As I go team by team in this post, I’m going to look at players who ran 100 or more routes last year. Next to each player, I’ll list their TPRR, their weighted TPRR (which incorporates air yards), and then — in parenthesis — their total routes, which both provides important context around sample size and is also in its own right a key piece of data. It will look like this:
Player Name - TPRR, wTPRR (total routes)
The routes information will be regular season only, as will the data we look at, because one of the key takeaways we can find here is players whose production was inflated by a high number of routes. It’s also relevant when a player has a fantastic per-route profile but doesn’t see the routes spike enough. Luther Burden immediately comes to mind, and he’s a guy I was on and I know a lot of people are excited about going into the offseason because of a great per-route profile, but the fact he couldn’t parlay that into more raw routes is not nothing. It isn’t guaranteed to be the same as Adonai Mitchell’s issues in Indianapolis that led to his in-season trade to the Jets this year, but Mitchell also comes to mind as an example of a player whose per-route profile was more impressive until you understood the context around his total routes.
To get a good grasp on total routes, I prefer to look at all 32 teams on the same regular season sample. Introducing the postseason obviously impacts the number of games played. I wrote more about this in a different 2024 introduction than the one I linked above, but a key point to emphasize is viewing the stats this way doesn’t mean I will ignore key data from the playoffs. A few players every year will meaningfully change their outlook with a few key games in the postseason, which gets at the small sample nature of everything we’re doing, but that’s good data that I want to include, and will strive to reference where applicable.
As I’ve done in past years, let’s set the high end of the scale for these stats by first listing out the league leaders. I like to increase the routes minimum when looking at the league leaders, so let’s go up to 200 routes. Note how the TPRR and wTPRR spreads are different for TEs and RBs who make the list, because their aDOTs are lower:
Puka Nacua - 0.35, 0.84 (462)
Jaxon Smith-Njigba - 0.32, 0.84 (495)
Rashee Rice - 0.29, 0.60 (265)
Ja’Marr Chase - 0.29, 0.69 (632)
Amon-Ra St. Brown - 0.29, 0.68 (566)
Davante Adams - 0.27, 0.76 (410)
Drake London - 0.27, 0.69 (392)
Mike Evans - 0.26, 0.75 (227)
Chris Olave - 0.26, 0.69 (587)
Keenan Allen - 0.25, 0.60 (467)
Justin Jefferson - 0.25, 0.64 (556)
CeeDee Lamb - 0.25, 0.68 (455)
Jahmyr Gibbs - 0.25, 0.43 (368)
Luther Burden III - 0.25, 0.57 (242)
A.J. Brown - 0.25, 0.66 (487)
Nico Collins - 0.25, 0.68 (476)
Kenneth Gainwell - 0.24, 0.40 (331)
Zay Flowers - 0.24, 0.61 (479)
Wan’Dale Robinson - 0.24, 0.59 (541)
Garrett Wilson - 0.24, 0.60 (225)
I already mentioned that this isn’t a stat to look at a ranked list of, while removing context. Still, it’s often said that good stats have stars at the top of their lists; the first 12 names here are all WRs that have or will go in the first two rounds overall at some point in their careers (Jaxon Smith-Njigba maybe doesn’t qualify until 2026). It doesn’t always work out this way, but in 2025, the list was led almost exclusively by current or aging stars.
Because there are differences in routes by different sources, note that I’m using PFF numbers. There is a lot of discussion around this, including sources that claim there is a correct answer. I do understand other sources are more discerning than PFF with their classification of what is a route — including Fantasy Points Data and Sports Info Solutions — and that their data improves certain correlation metrics for the stats. I still pretty strongly dispute the notion that an improved r-squared clearly answers a question of one data set being “better” than another. It’s imperative to understand what you’re looking at with any data set.
I hit on this at length in the intro to the in-season look-in for this post, but a short version would be that I don’t dispute that some “routes” PFF classifies aren’t real routes, and yet I also think there’s considerable evidence that if we wanted to get into that type of delineation, we’d need to know more about different concepts, because there are probably even more routes even when a guy gets down the field where he’s in no way in the progression and is extremely unlikely to get the ball even if he does “win” on his route.
That’s the nature of the sport, and how passing concepts work, and to some degree, for me, the signal can be argued to start at the play-calling level. Yes, it’s relevant that a guy’s route had no chance within a specific screen play design, but maybe they don’t run that if another guy is on the field, so maybe the fact that someone didn’t run a real route isn’t all that different than him running a real route but it being a first-read target elsewhere — in both cases, from the play-calling level, the team wasn’t concerned with getting that guy involved.
We know a lot of target share is this type of first-read stuff. I find that it’s OK to be super inclusive with all the plays a guy is on the field where he wasn’t really in the progression, like PFF does it. It’s a very chicken-and-egg conversation about first-read targets and “earning” volume by creating separation, because every snap is not played out in a vacuum where the best route gets the ball. That’s impractical.
There’s more of a breakdown of my thoughts on this at that in-season link three paragraphs upstream, but my point is merely to defend that there’s gray area, because you may have heard elsewhere it’s more black and white that there is a correct and incorrect way to look at this data. As I alluded to, what I believe to be important is to know the data you’re using, and analyze it appropriately, which is not as common in this space as you’d think.
So we’re using PFF data here. For players who changed teams, all data is their full season, and they will typically show up with their final team (though just to state that again, not all of their listed data will have been accumulated while on that team).
If you read this at bengretch.substack.com rather than in your email, there’s a timeline on the left side of the screen, which allows you to easily click through the different teams. Bookmark it and go back to it! I’m not entirely sure if that feature is available in the app, but I find it very helpful.
Let’s get into it. Last year, I started in the North division and worked around to the West, so we’ll go the other way this year.
AFC West
Denver Broncos
RJ Harvey - 0.22, 0.37 (262)
Troy Franklin - 0.21, 0.57 (489)
Tyler Badie - 0.20, 0.32 (137)
Evan Engram - 0.20, 0.39 (363)
Courtland Sutton - 0.19, 0.53 (629)
Marvin Mims Jr. - 0.18, 0.46 (276)
Pat Bryant - 0.15, 0.38 (309)
Lil’Jordan Humphrey - 0.13, 0.34 (174)
J.K. Dobbins - 0.12, 0.18 (114)
Adam Trautman - 0.11, 0.23 (213)
Starting with Denver out of the gate is a little tricky, because you may not be calibrated enough to recognize that it’s odd for the routes to be so spread, and also for a team leader to be sitting at only a 22% TPRR (and for that to be a RB). Such is the nature of Sean Payton.
Last year’s big notes in this space were about total route volume, with Courtland Sutton pacing everyone by miles. That did happen again, but to a lesser extent, and more notably Sutton dropped from a career-high 22.5% TPRR in 2024 down to 19.1% in 2025, which is more in line with most of his career. His resulting drop from a 1.84 YPRR to 1.62 also fits with more of his recent seasons. Touchdowns and deep efficiency will always drive a decent portion of his value, which will likely fluctuate year to year, but the underlying stuff in 2025 (and the prior seasons) suggests the good 2024 season was more of a spike than a baseline.
Troy Franklin did get into a decent number of routes at 489 as the No. 2, and his TPRR jumped to 20.9%, but his YPT efficiency was still pretty poor. He’s simply not been good enough at the catchpoint in his young career, but there was at least Year 2 improvement. Pat Bryant dealt with a lot of injuries, including in both postseason games after he seemed in the early gameplan in both (5 first-quarter touches on just 12 total snaps in those two games, leaving one with a concussion and one with a hamstring). Like many rookies, Bryant was more involved later in the season; from the Week 12 bye through the playoffs, his TPRR was up to 21.8%. After taking routes from Franklin down the stretch, Bryant strikes me as a better play in this passing game than Franklin going forward.
Of course, the lesson in 2025 was again that no one in this passing game is ever great due to pure routes issues. After noting that about Evan Engram during the projections process, I got a little excited through the preseason, and did take him in a couple places where the cost was right. That was a major mistake; he should’ve stayed a clear Fade. His TPRR was down from his years in Jacksonville, the weak YPT efficiency remained, and most importantly he did not run full-time routes. Also, I learned once again not to listen to anything Sean Payton says.
I did a better job of sticking to my guns with Marvin Mims, who was the cautionary tale I warned about all last offseason. The efficiency he showed both on a per-route and per-target basis were mirages based on specific 2024 usage, and they completely disappeared as the team tried to expand his responsibilities. The signal here was always in his very limited 2024 routes.
RJ Harvey’s 22% TPRR relative to J.K. Dobbins’ 12% does show intent to get him the ball in space, though some of that was due to struggles between the tackles and needing to be creative. Dobbins was the reliable success-rate runner. Still, Harvey as a sort of Darren Sproles lite in the Payton offense remains a big part of a bull case. Going forward, he’s scoring system sensitive, to me, and more interesting in PPR. I expect Dobbins or someone like him to be with the team and handling a good chunk of rushes in 2026.
Kansas City Chiefs
Brashard Smith - 0.31, 0.47 (108)
Rashee Rice - 0.29, 0.60 (265)
Marquise Brown - 0.18, 0.49 (393)
Travis Kelce - 0.18, 0.40 (577)
Xavier Worthy - 0.17, 0.46 (424)
Tyquan Thornton - 0.14, 0.56 (258)
Noah Gray - 0.13, 0.28 (253)
JuJu Smith-Schuster - 0.11, 0.23 (387)
Isiah Pacheco - 0.11, 0.17 (242)
Kareem Hunt - 0.09, 0.14 (276)
What a disaster. Rashee Rice continued to earn volume at a massive per-route rate, but his YPT cratered and his YPRR fell to a career-low 2.15. That’s an impressive number for a career low, obviously, and now three straight seasons of very strong TPRRs are a big signal. We learned that the 91 routes in 2024 weren’t fully predictive, while at the same time there is a ton to be excited about here. The questions going forward will be about whether improved players around him might cut into such a high TPRR number. It may be difficult for him to keep hitting rates up around 30%, though there’s part of me that thinks improved teammate play might just open up the soft, underneath zone spaces Rice operates in. He’s still the same enigma I described last offseason, where he’s not on par with the elite WRs around the league in terms of what he actually is as a player — that much was proven out by his 2025 efficiency, I think — but the fit in the offense can still lead to a fantasy profile that does raise to that level, especially in PPR. I’m fine with his early price at the Round 2/3 turn; as I’ve talked about already this offseason, finding WRs with true high-end scoring profiles is everything, and I do think there are still arguments he has that.
Everything else here was a disaster. Marquise Brown had to be relied on to play more of a role than you’d want, and his peripherals didn’t suggest there was any exciting improvement hiding there. Travis Kelce also was forced into more routes than made sense, and his after-the-target efficiency was better than it should have been mostly due to his explosives coming as a result of defenses no longer thinking he was worth covering — this guy might have been wide open more in 2025 than the rest of his career combined. His TPRR still cratered to 17.9%, after it had never previously fallen below 20%, and it seems likely he’ll retire this offseason. There are nearly 1,000 routes available in this offense between those two alone, if neither is back. Both finished with YPRRs just below 1.50.
Tyquan Thornton finished with an absurd 27.8-yard aDOT as a pure deep threat, but his ball-tracking was solid, and enough of those hit that he posted a 12.2 YPT that would look a bit less amazing if you try to depth-adjust to control for the cartoonish aDOT, but is nonetheless way above a generic league average. He only had a 14% TPRR but his 0.56 wTPRR tells more of the story, and it’s kind of crazy it wasn’t that far off Rice’s 0.60. This is a great example of why wTPRR can’t be relied on alone — it helps us contextualize the target rate for air yards, but the raw number of targets matters to fantasy football, and Rice doubling Thornton’s TPRR is key. Also of note is Thornton’s routes, as he was more of a rotational deep threat. There’s maybe enough of a role here that he could be a last-round best ball add-on for Chiefs’ stacks, but that’s about it, because you’d need to see several things for a real ceiling (both different deployment and also different skills displayed at different depths).
All of that leaves Xavier Worthy, who got his shoulder separated on one of the first snaps of the season by a lazy route from Kelce (who later candidly acknowledged as much on his podcast), then dealt with ankle issues later. One of the youngest players you’ll ever see at time of entry into the NFL, Worthy is still just 22 years old right now (turns 23 at the end of April), and people who have already written him off entirely are objectively too certain about development at those ages. Still, his 2025 was not good. The yardage efficiency remained poor, which was a knock in the prospect profile you had to try to look past a bit, because of poor QB play at the college level, and because there was potential signal in the amount of volume he racked up in a variety of ways. Unfortunately, the hope that working with Patrick Mahomes would make him a more efficient per-target or per-route player has not materialized through two seasons. His 9.4-yard aDOT as a rookie in 2024 rose up to 12.5 in 2025, which I think is notable in that he lost a lot of the manufactured touches people used to knock him but that were always a positive element to his profile. When you go back to that first game where Worthy was hurt right away, and recall that Brown seemed to take over his role in the gameplan en route to 16 targets and 10 catches for 99 yards, including a lot of manufactured stuff, it’s hard not to see the entire season’s elevated aDOT as a response to that shoulder issue that was known to be a reinjury risk. I’m not trying to wave away one of my biggest misses, for what it’s worth — it’s honestly way easier to just say, “I was wrong and he sucks” when there’s not much in the data that does anything but confirm naysayers’ opinions — but within the context of a failed offense, at a young age, and playing through multiple injury issues (the ankle for a bit really sapped him of his biggest differentiating trait, his speed, and might have been a bigger issue than the shoulder at times), the circumstances were clearly wrong for the breakout to come, and an objective analysis of that would probably be that it would’ve been really pretty impressive had Worthy somehow had a strong year in the face of all that. That doesn’t mean he’s definitely going to be good, either; the conversation isn’t binary, and Worthy’s season wasn’t even “solid” or anything, but just bad. Without question, I’m less interested in rostering Worthy going forward. I never thought Worthy was a perfect prospect or player — the weight stuff is of course a limitation, for one — and I respect the people who were out on him having the opportunity to feel very right about something in a hobby where we’re rarely proven as correct as anti-Worthy people were this year (including simply the claim that his frame is too small to stay healthy at the NFL level). Acknowledging all that, I do still think the objective response when looking forward is to say when the contextual stuff works against a guy to this degree — and one we absolutely knew coming in was going to need situational elements to be elevating, like Mahomes and the Chiefs often have been for receiving weapons, until more recent seasons — you’re going to get more certainty in the victory laps from the haters than an honest assessment would dictate. Yes, there’s a major concern for this player to keep flopping, but it’s a market-based game and we do need to be aware of where his clearly damaged price winds up.
I said Worthy was last here, but Brashard Smith seeing a 30.6% TPRR on just 108 routes deserves an honorable mention, though it’s very difficult to understand the lack of involvement through the season given Kansas City’s other RB options. Maybe that can expand, or maybe that is a concern that they only really see him as a return specialist and gadget player. A big notch on his belt is Smith forced missed tackles and added YAC at a high clip per reception. On the negative side, the Chiefs’ interest in Breece Hall at the deadline may foreshadow a decent offseason addition at the position that could make it much more difficult for Smith to earn playing time.
Las Vegas Raiders
Michael Mayer - 0.21, 0.44 (222)
Brock Bowers - 0.21, 0.48 (400)
Ashton Jeanty - 0.19, 0.29 (359)
Tre Tucker - 0.15, 0.40 (582)
Jack Bech - 0.15, 0.36 (193)
Tyler Lockett - 0.14, 0.32 (374)
Dont’e Thornton Jr. - 0.12, 0.37 (253)
Starting with two pretty involved teams got us off to a slow start in a long piece, so it’s good to have the Raiders here. Brock Bowers played hurt for a significant chunk of his 2025, and his TPRR fell from 25.0% as a rookie to 20.8% in Year 2. He still finished with a very solid 8.2 YPT (solid at his 7.5-yard aDOT, and among other TEs), and his 1.70 YPRR is not great but also not bad for a TE. In an offense with a clearly broken passing game that finished below 100 air yards in five games, Bowers’ production was fine. It’s very similar to my Worthy commentary above, where you have a guy playing hurt and in a tough situation, except in Bowers’ case the production was still very solid. That’s a huge difference. If this is the floor, you want exposure to the ceiling. You have to be excited about Klint Kubiak and likely Francisco Mendoza elevating the situation around Bowers, and allowing him to play more to his ability. And from what I know about Bowers, this is not a dude I’d want to bet against coming off a down season. I just wrote about Worthy being a 2025 miss I’m down on but at least want to be aware of cost going forward; Bowers is a 2025 miss I am ready to jump back into for 2026, headfirst. The TE position got deeper, but he still has the best long view profile of them all. Don’t let anyone convince you he’s the same as anyone else.
The rest of the team doesn’t really matter. Jack Bech came on a bit near the end, but only earning 193 routes and a 15% TPRR in an offense that frankly had no receiving weapons bodes poorly for an older rookie who turned 23 during the season, and never had the production profile to back up his second-round draft capital. Similar stuff applies for Dont’e Thornton, who only earned a 12% TPRR and doesn’t have the profile to suggest a real NFL ceiling.
Tre Tucker is just a guy, and for the second straight year he ran a ton of routes to help a bit but that’s all the profile is, and that can go away if they can improve at the position. A 1.20 YPRR this year was both an improvement over last year and definitely not good enough in an offense that needed him to do more. Going forward, there’s a world where as a deep threat he can hit a few more splash plays in a more functional passing game, but there’s not a lot of hope for more.
Michael Mayer is the only other thing the Raiders really have positively going for them beyond Bowers, and that’s nice for a Kubiak system that will probably leverage multiple-TE sets and use the run pretty heavily. Mayer’s TPRR was easily a career high, as was his 1.48 YPRR. He’s a better blocker than Bowers, and his presence in this offense should help free Bowers up. If the Raiders can acquire even just one good WR, and then they run a lot of 12 personnel with Mayer on the field and somebody like Tucker or maybe Bech as the WR2, you’re probably talking about a much better-looking passing game, pretty darn quick.
Ashton Jeanty was definitely involved in the passing game, and his 359 routes were seventh at the position. It’ll be a new offense, but he’ll obviously be a focal point again.
Los Angeles Chargers
Keenan Allen - 0.25, 0.60 (467)
Omarion Hampton - 0.18, 0.28 (185)
Ladd McConkey - 0.18, 0.46 (563)
Oronde Gadsden II - 0.17, 0.42 (399)
Quentin Johnston - 0.16, 0.44 (488)
Tre Harris - 0.15, 0.36 (294)
Kimani Vidal - 0.09, 0.15 (216)
This is an intriguing roster in flux, and how to play it in 2026 will be very interesting to track relative to different prices. In 2025, there were definitely issues for the passing game with both tackles out and the protections a major concern. If they can just get a healthy season out of one of those two former top-10 overall picks, with the upside to get both Rashawn Slater and Joe Alt in there for most of the season, you’re talking about things improving really quickly with Mike McDaniel now designing the offense. I like this to be a really good, rising team in 2026, and we probably want some pieces, but it may also be the case that the RB is the primary way to play it, if they wind up pretty run heavy and the routes are somewhat spread.
Ladd McConkey went from a 22.8% TPRR rookie season down to 18.1%, and his YPT also fell from 10.4 to 7.7, which meant his YPRR falling from 2.38 to 1.40. That dip is even more pronounced if you include the playoff games, as his full 2025 number would be 1.35 and back in 2024 he had the monster playoff game and pushed up to 2.59. I honestly have no explanation for it, but the early draft market thinks maybe McDaniel can help. I think going into 2025, it was right to look back at McConkey’s collegiate profile and see some really nice per-route stuff that was limited by the number of routes (both situationally and due to injury), and then say, “OK, this is a bit like Puka Nacua where he got into the NFL and into more routes and has carried over the impressive per-route traits.” That doesn’t always fit, as my above commentary on Marvin Mims detailed, but when you look at a rookie year like McConkey’s, that definitely felt like the right approach. I’m relitigating that because after his Year 2, I think you have to reconsider even the prospect profile. Now I am probably more concerned about the sample size of the per-route stuff in college, as well as how his rookie year in the NFL totaled just 519 routes with the playoff game included, against pretty weak target competition in a run-based offense, and then he got up to 606 routes in the tougher Year 2 and was just so much worse. We still have a two-year NFL body of work that is pretty darn good overall, but I’m probably more concerned there’s a cap on what this player can be, at this point, especially in what figures to be a crowded passing game going forward. McConkey’s late Round 2 ADP coming into this year was justifiable from the perspective he might have a real-life top-10 WR ceiling, but it’s harder for me to see that type of outcome as we go into Year 3.
The fact that Keenan Allen was so dominant earning volume on a per-route basis at a 25.3% TPRR is a concern for everyone else. He’s a free agent, but frankly shouldn’t have been able to gap everyone else by this much at his age, regardless of how good of a route runner he’s always been.
Quentin Johnston got off to a fast start, but ultimately finished with a 1.51 YPRR that was down from 2024’s 1.77. He was more efficient this year, and importantly improved his contested catch rate a bit, but I personally still see a pretty limited player here. He’ll likely be involved, though, because he’s clearly a tough matchup as a size/speed demon with a huge catch radius. That “he’ll probably be involved but doesn’t have enough ceiling” thing is what starts to become tough for some of the other guys, and this is weird but I’d say any outcome where QJ misses time probably unlocks the fantasy value of multiple other receiving weapons because of how it could concentrate things more. (This will be important to nail down all offseason, though, because McDaniel has always had pretty concentrated offenses, and we want to chase different types of upside, including OC upside, so it’s all very interesting to parse.)
I’m really curious what’ll happen with Tre Harris and Oronde Gadsden. Gadsden had a strong 9.8 YPT and with the 17.0% TPRR that’s not great but isn’t disqualifying for a TE — especially at a higher aDOT for the position of 9.4 — he finished with a 1.66 YPRR that was very solid for a rookie. McDaniel’s offense in Miami last year found some good stuff for Darren Waller to do really from the moment Waller was able to get healthy enough to be on the field, which suggests there might have even been meat on that bone and McDaniel really wanted to make even more use of that kind of player. That’s a really nice upside comp for Gadsden, if things move that direction and he looks like the clear lead receiving TE going into next year.
And then Harris didn’t necessarily have a great receiving profile with just a 1.10 YPRR as a rookie, but his playing time expanded as the year went on, and the team started using him a ton in single-WR formations as the lone guy there, I believe because of his run blocking, which is always great to see from a rookie in the early going. He had a really impressive production profile in college — so impressive that it almost seems fake, including a final year YPRR of 5.12 that many noted was due to situational usage and scheme, but even if, I don’t know, we gave him twice as many routes and said he wasn’t targeted on a single one of those other added routes, he’d still have had a solid per-route profile, so it’s one of those things where the specific degree to which you want to discount the boost of scheme and those things is relevant. Every year he had at least 200 routes — four times — he had at least a 23.0% TPRR and 9.0 YPT, for a YPRR of at least 2.17, so my read is he’s pretty clearly capable of production. And my read on his rookie year for the Chargers is a lot of his routes became clear-out routes and those things because his usage was somewhat situational and tied to the run game a little bit, but I do find him intriguing in a new offense for 2026.
Just to contextualize a bit, because I find this to be a really interesting team here in mid-February, McConkey is going at the Round 3/4 turn on Underdog, which feels aggressive (though I recognize the number of intriguing WR profiles thins quickly), Johnston is going at the Round 7/8 turn which also feels aggressive, Gadsden is going in the middle of Round 9 as the TE9 which frankly also feels somewhat aggressive but is more palatable given the TE element, and then Harris is going in Round 16 as the top way I’d be wanting to play this passing game given these current prices (Allen is virtually undrafted as a current free agent, but is frankly somewhat intriguing very late if he were to wind up back with the Chargers on a one-year deal, too). After Harris, I’d be interested in Gadsden and to some extent McConkey, and then Johnston would be my least favorite option given we started to see his role decline down the stretch. (In 2024, he played 15 games, went 91-55-711-8, and was a later-round pick for 2025. Then in 2025, he played 14 games, went 84-51-735-8, and is now going solidly in the single-digit rounds, mostly because people tend to remember the early part of the season vividly and probably don’t yet realize how much worse he got later in the season, both in terms of production and also playing time as other guys emerged. To put numbers to that, Johnston started the season with 70+ yards in each of his first four games, and four TDs in that span; from that point forward, across 11 games including the postseason game, he went for more than 53 yards just twice, had 30 or fewer yards six times, and had four more total TDs. The more I write about this, the more convinced I am he’s actually a terrible pick in early drafts as he’s probably several rounds overvalued.)
Omarion Hampton’s 18.4% TPRR was far more impressive than Kimani Vidal’s 9.3%, which probably says a bit more about Vidal being a rush-only bowling ball of a RB, but can also be seen pretty optimistically for Hampton within the context of McDaniel’s offense and how he’s used De’Von Achane over the past few seasons. Hampton isn’t a perfect one-for-one fit with Achane, but I don’t think McDaniel’s offense is likely to look extremely similar to his time Miami, I guess, because he just didn’t have this depth of skill position talent to utilize in various ways. I think we see McDaniel get more creative here. But I do want to be on record as feeling like Hampton is probably the biggest winner of his hiring. He’s a fun Year 2 RB to be on.
AFC South
Houston Texans
Nico Collins - 0.25, 0.68 (476)
Dalton Schultz - 0.20, 0.45 (499)
Jayden Higgins - 0.18, 0.50 (363)
Christian Kirk - 0.18, 0.41 (279)
Jaylin Noel - 0.16, 0.40 (202)
Woody Marks - 0.15, 0.27 (242)
Nick Chubb - 0.14, 0.25 (126)
Xavier Hutchinson - 0.14, 0.36 (401)
If I’m being honest, I don’t feel like I have a strong read on the Texans’ offense. Nico Collins’ 24.6% TPRR, 9.5 YPT, and 2.35 YPRR were all three-year lows, since his Year 3 breakout, and in terms of YPRR it was a half-yard worse than either 2023 or 2024. That doesn’t mean 2.35 is bad, because it’s objectively not. Collins remains a legit prototypical No. 1 as a big-framed outside WR, but maybe there’s a touch more concern about his ceiling after we got weaker per-route numbers in a year where the team’s identity moved toward defense and ball control.
Jayden Higgins is another big-bodied outside WR, and we saw his routes spike when Collins missed. Higgins ran routes on 76% of dropbacks in Week 8, with Collins out, which was his only game over 70% until the next time Collins missed in Week 18. In both Week 18 and the Divisional Round playoff games that Collins missed, Higgins was up at 94% routes. That part is interesting in that it does suggest part of selecting Higgins was to build in some redundancy should Collins miss time, or to view him as a potential replacement. Collins is under contract through 2026 and likely 2027, though there is theoretically less dead money that could make a cut next offseason more viable, not that it would make a bunch of sense. He has two void years in his contract starting in 2028, and you’d probably be thinking about a restructure at that point as he enters his age-29 season. What I’m saying here is I don’t think there’s some hidden likelihood Collins might be gone in the near term, which further calls into question what the team was doing with Higgins, drafting him with the second pick of the second round last April but keeping him below 70% routes in games Collins played while not holding him back from full-time routes when Collins missed, pretty clearly displaying that Higgins was not being limited by development but by a lack of vision for him and Collins playing full-time together. As far as Higgins’ TPRR profile, an 18.5% TPRR and 7.8 YPT for a 1.45 YPRR as a rookie isn’t great but also isn’t terrible by any means. I’d add that I think the eye test stuff was pretty solid, and it’s frankly a bit surprising to me he was below 1.5 YPRR, but there’s an element where Collins’ surprising dip in per-route numbers might also be telling us that the passing game overall was holding back these stats a bit. It’s interesting, because C.J. Stroud’s sack rate actually fell quite a bit, so it’s not that he wasn’t able to turn dropbacks into pass attempts. My suggestion would be it was more about offensive design, and where the pass concepts were driving targets, to different areas of the field than where Higgins (and to a degree Collins) tended to operate. I’m probably still pretty bullish on Higgins from a longer-term perspective, but a bit more concerned about how 2026 looks. (Circumstantial stuff like that is always a possible fade when you believe in the talent, but it does make price calculations important.)
Fellow rookie Jaylin Noel matched Higgins’ 1.45 YPRR on a little more than half the routes. Christian Kirk posted a 0.86 YPRR, less than half his rate in any of his previous four seasons. Kirk’s 4.8 YPT was mostly to blame, and you could see he’s not the same guy in terms of potential efficiency, but a 17.9% TPRR was also down from his typical rates, and was the second-lowest figure of his career.
Dalton Schultz was one of the beneficiaries of whatever this offense was, as he posted a 20.4% TPRR that was just shy of his career high (20.6% in 2022), and his 1.56 YPRR did in fact set a new high. Schultz’s aDOT fell 1.4 yards down to 6.6, his lowest figure since a small rookie sample of 115 routes back in 2018. In other words, he mostly compiled underneath stuff as the passing game tended not to push to the more vertical routes as much as it had in Stroud’s first two years. It’s possible that was Stroud being coached to take what was there rather than holding the ball and waiting for slower-developing routes downfield, in an attempt to reduce the sacks. Stroud still pushed the ball vertically a decent amount, and maybe that’s dialing in a more optimal distribution for him, but I guess I’d rather see the Texans utilizing other guys than Schultz on some of the underneath routes.
Xavier Hutchinson posted YPRRs of 0.53 and 0.44 across his first two seasons, on 435 combined routes, so the Texans decided a good deployment of their WRs was getting 401 routes for Hutchinson in the 2025 season. He returned a 1.07 YPRR, and was the targeted receiver on three of Stroud’s four first-half interceptions in their playoff loss, including a ball that went off his hands I felt he should’ve made a better play on. Because he’s Xavier Hutchinson. This is the part of the offense where I don’t understand what we’re doing here?
Woody Marks was a bad rusher, but his calling card is receiving. A 14.9% TPRR and slightly below-average (for a RB) 5.8 YPT isn’t interesting. Context around that YPT only makes it worse, as he got loose for a 37-yard reception in Week 2 on a blown assignment where no one covered the outlet and literally any RB could have had a huge gain there, assuming they didn’t drop the pass in the open field. People love to say you can’t just remove a player’s biggest play, but I find it relevant to note in a sample like this — 36 targets, 24 receptions — when one of the plays was a bunch of free yards, because my expectation then would be efficiency that’s a bit above average. In this case, it speaks to the majority of Marks’ yardage efficiency in the passing game reflecting his lack of explosion, the same way his 3.6 yards per carry did on the ground. Expect the Texans to seek out more RB upside this offseason after Joe Mixon somewhat unexpectedly missed the whole season, and for that RB upside to have the edge in terms of earning more work from Marks as the 2026 season progresses, relative to whatever the split is in Week 1, because I truly do think roughly 99% of NFL-caliber RBs would look better than Marks while sharing a backfield. The current iteration of Nick Chubb was the 1 in 100.
Indianapolis Colts
Josh Downs - 0.22, 0.52 (379)
Tyler Warren - 0.21, 0.46 (502)
Michael Pittman Jr. - 0.20, 0.48 (537)
Alec Pierce - 0.17, 0.58 (477)
Mo Alie-Cox - 0.16, 0.35 (117)
Jonathan Taylor - 0.13, 0.21 (412)
An offense with only six guys over 100 routes is clearly concentrated, and even more so when you consider one of those six was a secondary TE who hit 117.
Josh Downs led the team in per-route volume, but the route volume is a major red flag. And relative to that route volume, his per-route numbers were not as strong as we saw in 2024. Part of what was so compelling about him coming into this year was a 27.9% TPRR and solid 7.9 YPT at his low 6.7-yard aDOT for a 2.20 YPRR in 2024. In 2025, that stuff all got worse across the board. The TPRR was down to 22.2%, the YPT was down to 6.7 despite the aDOT actually rising to 8.4, so depth-adjusted that decline was even worse. It left him with a 1.49 YPRR. Downs is still a clearly talented player, but given the sport moving away from heavy workloads for slot WRs, and the presence of Tyler Warren in this offense, Downs is a tough bet.
Warren was strong as a rookie, though his production certainly tapered off after a fast start. Still, a rookie TE posting a 1.63 YPRR with a 21.1% TPRR and 7.7 YPT is strong. I definitely expect him to be a focal point of this passing game going forward.
With a lot of competition in the passing game, Michael Pittman was down to a three-year low with a 1.46 YPRR. His 20.5% TPRR was his lowest since his rookie season. Pittman’s solid, but I always pegged him as more of an ancillary WR thrust into a No. 1 role early in his career, and we’re seeing that more as his career progresses.
Alec Pierce was the particularly notable name. A 17.4% TPRR isn’t necessarily something to write home about, but it’s more impressive when you consider the 20.0-yard aDOT. His 0.58 wTPRR led the team, and he was not far off the team leaders in routes, coming up shy of them only because he missed two games, but not because his usage was in any way rotational within the games he did play in. Pierce’s 12.1 YPT really stands out, and drove a 2.10 YPRR. It was the second straight year he posted a YPT over 12, which doesn’t make that some new baseline, but does reinforce this is a guy who plays the ball very well down the field. More observationally, he made several impressive catches this year. That said, deep efficiency tends to be one of the more difficult things to sustain year over year, and we’re not dealing with a huge volume profile. There’s certainly risk here, and what he did in 2025 is probably closer to a ceiling going forward than something he’ll build off further. The early market has Pierce priced as the Colts’ WR1 in the seventh round, and that’s too much points-chasing and recency bias on tougher-to-sustain efficiency for my blood. While he’s gotten better, we do have three other seasons of data here that are all weaker versions of the 2025 profile. He makes more sense in that first group outside the WR window, where his best-ball-friendly profile would be worth prioritizing, with an ADP in the triple digits (currently 79.7).
Jonathan Taylor’s 412 routes were third most among the NFL’s RBs, and also represented his first season over 300, so a substantial increase over his previous career high that helped him set new receiving highs across the board (targets, receptions, yards) despite an unspectacular per-route profile. That’s exciting to see for an RB known more for his rushing upside, and there may be more meat on the bone for receiving production if he does keep running a lot of routes.
Jacksonville Jaguars
Parker Washington - 0.21, 0.59 (412)
Jakobi Meyers - 0.20, 0.50 (526)
Travis Hunter - 0.19, 0.45 (225)
Brian Thomas Jr. - 0.19, 0.54 (471)
Brenton Strange - 0.19, 0.42 (317)
Dyami Brown - 0.18, 0.52 (205)
Travis Etienne Jr. - 0.17, 0.26 (277)
Tim Patrick - 0.15, 0.39 (163)
Johnny Mundt - 0.13, 0.28 (133)
Hunter Long - 0.11, 0.23 (131)
LeQuint Allen - 0.08, 0.12 (146)
I’ve been going long on some of these writeups this year, but I do think part of the stuff I’ve been writing about where the league is headed, with different packages and scheme being more important, gets at this idea of iterating within a season. The last two teams are opposites of that — the Colts were pretty straightforward with their personnel deployment throughout the year, and I feel like we had more of that in a bygone era, whereas this Jaguars’ team clearly went through phases from the start of the season through the end, and I feel like more teams these days are evolving through the year, from Week 1 to Week 18.