The 2025 TPRR posts — AFC

Part 1 of my favorite early offseason articles

Jan 22, 2025

∙ Paid

I’ve written about TPRR for years now. I’ve tried to document it, with the lengthiest list of links back to my early thoughts coming in the introduction to my 2022 version of this post, if you’re a newer reader who wants to work your way back.

The keys for where I’m at with it in 2025 are twofold: 1) It’s a foundational stat, as I’ve taken to calling it, not an end-all, be-all; 2) We’re playing a market-based game, and there are moving targets.

The NFL is constantly evolving. I’ve written about that recently, and as part of my recent writing, I’ve had to note that my beloved RB stat High-Value Touches has become a little less powerful in a modern NFL where bigger, rush-oriented RBs can rack up more yards on the ground against lighter defenses (at least relative to the days of the passing-down HVT stars like Darren Sproles, or even the discount versions like Theo Riddick and Nyheim Hines). We always have to be willing to recognize a shifting landscape for this constantly evolving sport — how it’s strategized, and thus how it’s played — can influence the ways we analyze.

Fantasy football is also constantly evolving. Different strategies go in and out of popularity, and prices shift for different positions, and even different types of players within positions. There’s some correlation, but the fantasy market evolution is often late to the NFL’s evolution, and often the two forces are working in different/opaque ways to change up the best value propositions. This is the premise of a market-based game, and it’s never a simple puzzle to solve. As more money changes hands, and more people get better at utilizing data and advanced techniques, the market gets sharper, edges get more difficult to identify, and the puzzle doesn’t get any simpler.

I’m a strong proponent of needing flexibility with analytical processes in football. It’s what has kept me so engaged doing this for so long, and it’s why I’ve written about the renewed vigor with which I attack this offseason, because I feel like 2024 brought forth new challenges from the past couple seasons. To be honest, I never really knew how long I would do this stuff, because I didn’t know if it would keep my attention span long enough, but what I have written so far in this introduction gets at why I’ve kept coming back. I’m constantly forced to reinvent the ways I think about the sport.

This is why I love TPRR. When I say targets per route run is a foundational stat, I am not ignoring the flaws that have been covered (and I’ve responded to in the past). There is context that needs to be applied. Some people make strong points that need to be considered; others attack the stat in bad faith based on flaws that are not fatal. Every stat is only as good as its utility. When I use the word foundational, I mean that TPRR — used correctly — gives us very important introductory information from which we can build out the nuance of the individual profile.

You can build an entire process from the ground up that might try to accomplish similar, but another thing stats try to be are shortcuts. So there’s this middle ground — we know that stats and data can be heralded as shortcuts only to be far too complicated, and lacking context, but we also want to use them to improve processes where applicable. This is the premise behind my use of TPRR, and my continued use of it after nearly a half decade, as my foundational receiving stat. I believe it tells me very important information, and that — most importantly — the stuff it does not tell me is stuff I don’t necessarily want to try to simplify into a stat. That’s the stuff I want to peel back the layers on, and have a more artsy understanding of, rather than plain mathematical science.

And to tie it back into my point about the league evolving, one huge advantage is I can make those adjustments as the league adjusts. For example, as No. 1 WRs have seen target share rise in recent seasons, we can understand that their TPRRs will scale up accordingly, specifically as it relates to individual situations like single-high, man coverage looks, because that’s an area where this concentration on top options has become an answer for quarterbacks trying to identify the newer things secondaries are doing.

So, again: Foundational, and flexible to the market-based element of what we’re trying to do here. I wrote a little less organized and a little more involved version of these concepts in a standalone piece that served as the introduction for this series last year, if you’re interested in more.

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. To get a good grasp on that, keeping the sample to an equivalent number of games (i.e. the regular season) is extremely helpful. I wrote about this more in a (second) introduction last year, but this idea 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.

Last year, in just two postseason games, Romeo Doubs was fantastic, and Dontayvion Wicks fell off a bit from his excellent per-route numbers, and it meant their regular season numbers really converged if you included those playoff games. It was an important piece of data I admittedly didn’t do a good enough job of accounting for as it related to those two players, but I will try to ensure that type of oversight doesn’t happen this year, while still maintaining the regular season parameters I’ve always utilized, for significant reasons.

As I’ve done in past years, let’s set 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 150 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 - 0.37, 0.86 (278)
Malik Nabers - 0.30, 0.73 (556)
Nico Collins - 0.28, 0.75 (350)
Alvin Kamara - 0.28, 0.48 (311)
Josh Downs - 0.28, 0.62 (365)
CeeDee Lamb - 0.28, 0.65 (526)
Drake London - 0.27, 0.71 (548)
Cooper Kupp - 0.27, 0.64 (357)
Diontae Johnson - 0.27, 0.70 (247)
A.J. Brown - 0.26, 0.71 (361)
Trey McBride - 0.26, 0.57 (536)
Davante Adams - 0.26, 0.63 (522)
Dalton Kincaid - 0.26, 0.60 (276)
Mike Evans - 0.26, 0.70 (416)
Jauan Jennings - 0.26, 0.65 (432)
Evan Engram - 0.26, 0.55 (242)
Marvin Mims Jr. - 0.26, 0.58 (196)
Dontayvion Wicks - 0.25, 0.67 (293)
Amon-Ra St. Brown - 0.25, 0.59 (551)
Brock Bowers - 0.25, 0.55 (592)

I have a database that goes back to 2006. Last year’s Tyreek Hill season topped it for best TPRR, minimum 150 routes, when he was targeted on 35% of his routes. Puka Nacua ran almost 200 fewer routes than Hill did last year, so that’s important context, but his 37% clearly goes another step further. Interestingly, because of his 8.0 aDOT, his wTPRR actually ranks fifth in the sample, behind Hill and three others (career-high seasons from Julio Jones and A.J. Green, as well as the injury-shortened but epic 2015 for Alshon Jeffery, which holds the high wTPRR mark at 0.97 on 281 routes).

Surprise names include Josh Downs, Dalton Kincaid, and Marvin Mims. The latter two have smaller routes samples, which is a big part of it, and efficiency is the missing link to this stuff, so when we see that Kincaid and Evan Engram were close in TPRR and wTPRR to Trey McBride and Brock Bowers, we do have to recognize that part of what makes McBride and Bowers so good is they catch everything and they both have elite YAC skills. Those things matter, a ton, in addition to the numbers, and it’s how we separate the different TPRR profiles. Broadly, we look at those things as “after-the-target efficiency,” and you’re talking about catch rate, yards per target, and TD rate.

Because there are differences in routes by different sources, note that I’m using PFF numbers. 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, there’s a timeline on the left side of the screen, which allows you to easily click through the different teams. I’m not entirely sure if that feature is available in the app and it’s not in email, but I find it helpful.

Let’s get into it.

AFC North

Baltimore Ravens

Zay Flowers - 0.24, 0.61 (470)
Justice Hill - 0.20, 0.32 (234)
Mark Andrews - 0.19, 0.49 (358)
Isaiah Likely - 0.18, 0.44 (308)
Rashod Bateman - 0.15, 0.44 (447)
Nelson Agholor - 0.13, 0.38 (208)
Derrick Henry - 0.12, 0.18 (179)
Tylan Wallace - 0.11, 0.24 (109)

Zay Flowers unfortunately missed the postseason, but his second season featured a big jump across the board. A 23.8% TPRR is very strong, and while it’s a bit inflated for him by some short-area targets, his rookie year numbers featured a 19.9% TPRR at an aDOT of 8.8, and he took that aDOT to 10.7 this year while increasing the TPRR. In other words, the increase wasn’t just more manufactured touches, but rather earning more volume down the field. One minor concern is the possibility that Todd Monken is hired away and the offense looks a little different, but the way the Ravens found a minor role for Anthony Miller in the postseason running a few of the Zay concepts (4 catches in two games) was a good indication the system wants and needs Zay to be healthy.

In this space last year, I talked about how Mark Andrews’ TPRR and aDOT had both declined, while he was somewhat constrained to a slot role. In 2024, his slot rate actually reversed so much it was lower than his typical rates in the old Greg Roman offense, although that didn’t necessarily mean Isaiah Likely was running more routes in the slot, as his rate was even lower. These two guys were somewhat interchangeable, at least in the sense that there wasn’t a clear blocking and receiving TE role in this offense, and both set easy career highs for pass block rate, while neither ran enough routes to be as dynamic as they could be. Andrews’ red zone role showed he still has a ton of talent when utilized correctly, and it’ll be interesting to see where the offense goes from here if, again, Monken isn’t back with the Ravens.

Rashod Bateman had his efficient moments, and his aDOT was a career high at 15.2 yards, but his TPRR of 15.0% was also a career low. The 1.69 YPRR he posted thanks to a career-high 11.3 YPT is decent enough, and his production continues to bounce around year to year. He’s not a star, but he’s a viable NFL player, and there’s an argument different usage could unlock a different type of season somewhere down the line.

The TPRR numbers show what most people know from his game log: Baltimore proactively used Justice Hill as a receiver in certain gameplans in a way that was pretty cool. This was his second straight season with over 500 yards from scrimmage and 4 TDs, but he did it in different ways, with his rush attempts cut nearly in half this year while he caught 50% more passes. He turned just 27 this past November and figures to be part of the offense again next year.

Cincinnati Bengals

Ja'Marr Chase - 0.24, 0.58 (709)
Tee Higgins - 0.23, 0.61 (445)
Erick All - 0.20, 0.38 (107)
Mike Gesicki - 0.20, 0.45 (420)
Chase Brown - 0.19, 0.33 (339)
Zack Moss - 0.17, 0.28 (155)
Andrei Iosivas - 0.10, 0.27 (573)
Drew Sample - 0.09, 0.16 (239)

Tee Higgins had another injury-plagued year where he failed to reach 500 routes, making it the fourth time in five seasons he’s failed to do so. Ja’Marr Chase ran the second most routes in the entire NFL behind only Jerry Jeudy, who we’ll cover in the next team. Chase was also far more efficient after the target, and that’s a major part of what makes him so special. But it’s pretty notable that Higgins was nearly right in line with Chase in terms of TPRR and wTPRR. These were career-high numbers for Higgins, whose 2.05 YPRR was his second season over that 2.0 threshold we’re looking for. That’s all very positive for Higgins, who had a very impressive 12-game season.

Chase was way up at 2.41 YPRR and has been over 2.0 in all four of his seasons because he’s a superstar. It’s both worth noting that his per-route stuff didn’t improve that much — he had a career year largely through routes volume and efficiency spikes — and also an argument that there’s even more meat on the bone if the Bengals ever want to really force feed him the ball up over 25% of his routes over a full season. That of course would probably have a negative impact on his efficiency, though. What I’m saying is Chase’s profile is what it is at this point and I’m not worried about regression in part because I do believe even bigger seasons in the future are possible.

Erick All is a blocking TE who barely qualified for enough routes, as so his 19.6% TPRR can be in part chalked up to it being more likely to be a unique play design when he does block and release and therefore he might see more designed targets. By comparison, Mike Gesicki posting a 19.5% TPRR while running 420 routes and putting up an 8.1 YPT — all personal highs dating to at least 2021 — is far more notable in terms of him actually earning a receiving role and succeeding in it. It’s even more notable when you see the degree to which Andrei Iosivas was a routes-based producer (posted half Gesicki’s TPRR) and recognize it’s difficult to earn any volume in an offense with the stars at the top. Gesicki may have found his home, and his best case is definitely going back to the Bengals, though he was on a one-year deal and is a free agent.

Chase Brown wasn’t necessarily notable as a pass-catcher this year, but was dynamic as a runner and figures to be in the Bengals’ future plans as his cheap Day 3 rookie contract is a real asset for them right now with their big offensive cap expenditures.

Rookie Jermaine Burton ran just 96 routes with a 14.6% TPRR and 1.11 YPRR. The off-field issues feel like an additional negative note, but it’s at least plausible those get sorted out a la Jameson Williams, and it’s probably double counting to act like his lack of playing time wasn’t influenced by that. I likely won’t be in on him because the hit rate on guys turning around from a season like this is extremely low, but a player who straightforwardly had this bad of a season would be more of a red flag than what happened with Burton.

Cleveland Browns

David Njoku - 0.24, 0.51 (379)
Jerry Jeudy - 0.20, 0.52 (714)
Jordan Akins - 0.17, 0.38 (314)
Elijah Moore - 0.16, 0.40 (594)
Cedric Tillman - 0.16, 0.44 (278)
Pierre Strong Jr. - 0.16, 0.26 (134)
Jerome Ford - 0.14, 0.23 (304)
Michael Woods II - 0.09, 0.23 (198)

As noted, Jerry Jeudy ran the most routes in the NFL, and he and Ja’Marr Chase were not just the only guys over 700, but the only guys over 670. Only six other players hit 600. Elijah Moore’s 594 actually finished ninth in the NFL, regardless of position, and his 0.91 YPRR due both to this low TPRR and a career-low YPT is not great, relative to any perception he had a surprisingly decent year. But where Moore was mostly a product of the volume and aggressiveness Jameis Winston brought for his brief stretch of notability in 2024, Jeudy was not, at least not entirely.

Jeudy’s 1.72 YPRR was below his career average, but it was serviceable, and that was true for both components (TPRR and YPT). But for all these guys, the QB situation was historically bad for a good chunk of the season with Deshaun Watson. Undervalued headed into 2024, it’s possible Jeudy will be overvalued for 2025 given he added more than 250 routes to his three-year high of 460, and those routes were the driving force of his breakout. But that’s not to say he won’t be worth considering, because the whole body of work is solid, and this is what happens when you pay attention to what’s there on a per-route basis for a guy who then stays healthy and sees his routes spike.

David Njoku kept his 2023 gains and even set another new TPRR career high, while he also kept his low aDOT. I discussed heavily last year that the production late in 2023 wasn’t just because of Joe Flacco, but also due to ways he was being used differently, and even under a new coordinator they made a point to use him as a catch-and-run weapon. His YPT left some to be desired in 2024, but again QB play was a problem, and Njoku wasn’t always healthy. One exciting factor in 2024 was his pass block rate, which was less than half his previous career low, as he got out in more routes per snap. With back-to-back seasons of TPRRs over 23% and the potential for efficiency spikes due to his athleticism, he’s not a TE to ignore.

Cedric Tillman finished with a pretty boring line, though his after-the-target efficiency wasn’t nearly as poor as Moore’s, and his sample is smaller, which naturally creates more uncertainty.

Pittsburgh Steelers

George Pickens - 0.23, 0.65 (436)
Najee Harris - 0.21, 0.32 (220)
Jaylen Warren - 0.20, 0.33 (216)
Pat Freiermuth - 0.17, 0.36 (448)
Calvin Austin III - 0.15, 0.40 (377)
Darnell Washington - 0.15, 0.31 (155)
Van Jefferson - 0.10, 0.27 (381)
Mike Williams - 0.10, 0.30 (341)

One of the things that was true of the Browns and is also true here is high sack rates hurt the TPRRs across the board. Pittsburgh’s 49 sacks were quite a bit shy of Cleveland’s 66, but they also dropped back quite a bit less, as you can see by the high end of their pass-catcher’s routes. That was ultimately the reason I faded Steelers this year, and even as George Pickens backed up his 2.11 YPRR in 2023 with 2.06 this year — including a big jump to a 22.9% TPRR after 19.3% in 2023 — his 436 routes were limiting.

Ditto for Pat Freiermuth, who rebounded from a poor 2023, but mostly in YPT and not so much in TPRR. The rest of the team is not interesting, both because of the circumstances and who the players are. Mike Williams had a really poor year for two different teams, but neither of those teams had functional passing games. Calvin Austin showed a little. I’m honestly not sure what to say, because the truth is I’m not putting a ton of weight on any of this past Pickens and Freiermuth.

AFC East

Buffalo Bills

Dalton Kincaid - 0.26, 0.60 (276)
Khalil Shakir - 0.25, 0.53 (382)
Amari Cooper - 0.22, 0.60 (375)
Curtis Samuel - 0.19, 0.39 (227)
Ray Davis - 0.18, 0.34 (101)
Keon Coleman - 0.17, 0.51 (326)
James Cook - 0.17, 0.29 (225)
Ty Johnson - 0.13, 0.31 (191)
Mack Hollins - 0.12, 0.33 (413)
Dawson Knox - 0.10, 0.26 (298)

We’ve reached our first team that is still playing, and what we’ve seen in the postseason so far is Khalil Shakir adding 13 more high-efficiency targets to his breakout season, while Dalton Kincaid has seen just 5 through two games and no one else has surpassed that. With Kincaid this year, a lot of what I hoped for was the low-aDOT stuff he got hammered for being too reliant on would be there, but then he’d add some air yards. Well, he did get downfield looks, and his aDOT rose from 6.7 to 8.2, but the underneath stuff became Shakir’s bread and butter.

Shakir’s aDOT fell from 12.0 his rookie year to 8.6 in 2023 and then down to 5.6 in 2024. That’s what drove his 24.9% TPRR, which was massively higher than last year’s 13.6%, and was buoyed largely by those designed plays. Still, Shakir’s 76% catch rate was extremely strong, and he was coming off a year with a ridiculous 13.6 YPT in 2023, such that we now have a three-year sample on this guy where his aDOT has been very different in different roles, but it equates to him looking like he’s an efficient football player, over about 850 routes, which is a pretty solid sample. His usage in 2024 was pretty gimmicky usage, but efficiency drives usage, and he got that gimmicky usage off the efficiency 2023, so it’s not like a very solid 2024 with a 2.15 YPRR is going to dissuade the Bills from using him. There’s some concern about his ability to back up the same level of statistical production, especially if the Bills can get more production from other places in the passing game — something they tried to address in the draft and also at the trade deadline last year, but with limited success — but Shakir is definitely a fantasy-relevant player.

Amari Cooper’s combined TPRR numbers look fine, but he’s never really played as much as you’d have expected with the Bills, and that’s part of why his 1.46 YPRR is so putrid — it’s driven by a career-worst 6.7 YPT that was largely from the Browns games (he was actually at 9.3 with the Bills). Turning 31 in June, Cooper’s best days may be behind him, but he also doesn’t register as clearly washed, or anything. His combined 21.9% TPRR is basically in line with his career numbers.

Keon Coleman also had a strong YPT with Buffalo, and rode that to a decent 1.71 YPRR as a rookie. It wasn’t a perfect year, but it certainly wasn’t one you discard, as he earned a decent 17.2% TPRR made better by a very high 15.5 aDOT for a 0.51 wTPRR, and added a 9.9 YPT.

The gap between Kincaid and Dawson Knox in TPRR was just massive, but due to Kincaid’s injuries, Knox wound up running a few more routes. Honestly, I have no idea what to make of Dalton Kincaid. I’ll be very straightforward and say he’s a dude I’m biased against after drafting a decent amount this past year, so if there’s something there this offseason, it’ll likely take me some time to see it.

ETA: Buffalo’s final playoff game loosely followed the trends of the prior two, with Shakir leading the team with 7 targets, and four others tied at 4.