Target Trends Week 3 (1 Viewer)

Just a grab bag of things that jumped out at me this week:

***EDITED: In week 3 we had two games mislabeled in terms of their opponents, and this skewed the target share %'s for DET, HOU, LAC, and PHI (sent all players' shares artificially lower). All other data was unimpacted, but this did impact some of other players' rankings.  Everything is corrected now below.

These updates will be on the site shortly as well.

Risers and Fallers

• Greg Olsen hoovered up a full one-third of new QB Allen's passes, a big increase from week 2's 20.8% market share
  
• Even better:  the average accuracy of those Allen targets was 85.7%, whereas the Cam targets were only 47.4% accurate
  
• Deandre Hopkins has seen his target share fall every week: from 51.7% to 29.6% to 20.6%
  
• Michael Thomas saw his target share fall from 43.3% in week 2 to 28% in the first week of Bridgewater game plan
  
• Alvin Kamara meanwhile jumped from 10% target share in week 2 to 36% in week 3.
  
• Evan Engram's target share seemed unaffected by the Barkley injury OR the QB change.
  
• Sterling Shepard saw his target share rise with Jones, from approx 16% in weeks 1-2 to 25.7% in week 3
  
• Darius Slayton went targetless in weeks 1-2 (did he even play?), and again in Q1 this week, but then drew 5 targets (14.3% share)
  
• Preston Williams was Josh Rosen's favorite target this week, and already has more Rosen targets than he does Fitz targets
  

SOURCE: https://nocheckdowns.com/app/target-analyzer/

Overall Ranks

• Keenan Allen leads the league in target share with 36.9%
  
• Michael Thomas is still second - for now - with 34.8% share
  
• Hopkins is still third at 33.3% despite the 3-week trend
  
• Darren Waller is fifth in the league with an astounding 30.5% market share
  
• Adam Thielen is fourth in the league at 31.5% share - but on only 17 targets! (Compared to Thomas' 32 and Waller's 29)
  
• Devante Parker, Keenan Allen, and Mike Evans lead the lead in INACCURATE targets, at 13 apiece.  Should we be considering this?
  
• Poor Devante Parker.  16 inaccurate targets and...  19 TOTAL targets.  The man has been thrown THREE accurate passes!
  
• Of receivers with 10 targets minimum, Devante Parker DOES lead the league in median target depth (18.0)
  
• As median target depth goes up, accuracy of target unsurprisingly goes down.
  
• ...Unless you're Demarcus Robinson, that is (14.5 median depth, 83.3% accurate).
  
• Austin Ekeler leads the league in YAC (226). His Air Yards? -17.
  
• On obvious passing downs, the go-to receivers are Kupp and Golladay (17 tgts), Julio (15), Keenan and OBJ (14).
  

SOURCE: https://nocheckdowns.com/app/wr-rb-te-target-sorter/

I suspect I could find many more things share-worthy but I do have to get back to my day job

If you find cool things though, share them in this thread!  I'd love to see what others find.

MODS:  as I said in other threads, this is a side project/hobby, and I never intend to charge for it.  It's (hopefully) good advertising for my company's business data consulting services, but there's no intention to make money off the football crowd.  I'm a longtime subscriber (rcollie, look me up) and in all seriousness owe my career in data to Joe Bryant's VBD article many years ago. Much love.

Deandre Hopkins has seen his target share fall every week: from 51.7% to 29.6% to 8.8%

WTH happened last week here?

Hey this is great ebzded! Thanks for sharing.

Some observations.

Over 3 weeks Chris Thompson leads all RB in targets with 22. 

Philip Lindsay is averaging 5.6 targets [er game. Last year as a rookie he was targeted 2.3 times per game. If this continues he is on pace for 90 targets.

Evan Engram is 4th overall in targets this season. Perhaps his market share declines somewhat with Tate coming back but the quality of targets has maybe improved?

Well thanks to your resource, I looked at accurate targets to Engram weeks 1-2 and the targets were accurate 86% of the time with Eli. With Jones in week 3 only 50%

I think the receiver error metric is particularly interesting. Donte Moncrief has the highest error of receivers with 10 or more targets. Willie Snead, Travis Benjamin, Breshad Perriman are players who do not really surprise me being so high in this metric. One that does surprise me is Anthony Miller even though it is only 4 targets. He used to have good hands. Amari Cooper is perhaps the highest profile WR relatively high on this list at 19% he is in some rough company.

A suggestion for another useful column would be yards per target.

Wow, Minister of Pain and now @Biabreakable - honored, sir.

As I said in another thread, folks like you are going to do better things with these tools than I will and so I am very keen to see how it all plays out.

Have you seen the Target Analyzer?  It goes deep on single receivers and already includes Yards per Target.

Biabreakable said:

A suggestion for another useful column would be yards per target.

Click to expand...

But that said, Yards per Target WOULD be a great addition to the Sorter app.  Just not enough real estate for everything, so I need to maybe make a second version, or add a toggle or something.

Was looking at the Carolina Panthers and I don't see any data for DJ Moore this past week (week 3) when he had a 52-yard TD reception.  Missing data?

lfh3 said:

Was looking at the Carolina Panthers and I don't see any data for DJ Moore this past week (week 3) when he had a 52-yard TD reception.  Missing data?

Click to expand...

Good catch, thank you!  I see the problem.  Working on it now.

EDIT:  fixed, but it will take as long as an hour for the fix to ripple thru to the live site.  In the meantime, u can see him as "D.J Moore" in week 3 (I believe).  After the fix, it will always be DJ no periods.

ebzded said:

Have you seen the Target Analyzer?  It goes deep on single receivers and already includes Yards per Target.

Click to expand...

I have. In the interface it defaults to the profile of Greg Olsen. If I reset the filters it adds Michael Thomas to the options with a radial button.

I did try clicking on the search icon but I am not seeing a way to search for other players?

In the passing dashboard you have many QB icons at the bottom where you can select different QB. Maybe this is what you are going to do with the target analyzer? It just isn't populated yet?

But that said, Yards per Target WOULD be a great addition to the Sorter app.  Just not enough real estate for everything, so I need to maybe make a second version, or add a toggle or something.

Click to expand...

I hear you. Just trying to be helpful by mentioning something I think is also useful for cross referencing with the other data you have presented there.

In regards to the targets to Philip Linsay being so high over the first 3 weeks. Well Royce Freeman has a lot of targets too. They have combined for 30 targets over 3 weeks so far.

This just reminds me that it is Joe Flacco and that he was doing this a lot with the Ravens as well. So if he is going to start for the rest of the season, perhaps we should adjust expectations for these two RB upward.

I think the pattern matching of QB targets is an interesting way to look at this. Despite the offensive game plan of the coaches and personnel it still is ultimately the decisions of the QB that determines who is getting the ball. So for projections it could be useful to look at this for each QB and how that may affect skill player opportunities.

Biabreakable said:

I have. In the interface it defaults to the profile of Greg Olsen. If I reset the filters it adds Michael Thomas to the options with a radial button.

I did try clicking on the search icon but I am not seeing a way to search for other players?

Click to expand...

Ya it's not super obvious.  When you open the dropdown, if you click NEXT to the search icon and start typing, you should be in business. Let me know if that doesn't work.

There's just too many receivers to do the "click on head shot" filter.

Biabreakable said:

Just trying to be helpful by mentioning something I think is also useful for cross referencing with the other data you have presented there.

Click to expand...

Absolutely.  I want requests like this actually.  Keep 'em coming.

Biabreakable said:

In regards to the targets to Philip Linsay being so high over the first 3 weeks. Well Royce Freeman has a lot of targets too. They have combined for 30 targets over 3 weeks so far.

This just reminds me that it is Joe Flacco and that he was doing this a lot with the Ravens as well. So if he is going to start for the rest of the season, perhaps we should adjust expectations for these two RB upward.

I think the pattern matching of QB targets is an interesting way to look at this. Despite the offensive game plan of the coaches and personnel it still is ultimately the decisions of the QB that determines who is getting the ball. So for projections it could be useful to look at this for each QB and how that may affect skill player opportunities.

Click to expand...

That's what I'm talking about.  Analysis like this.  Love it.  Keep THAT coming too!

The data available in this tool is really amazing. Great work.

Looking at Amari Cooper, it proves the point that Dak is just throwing lights out. 21 targets to Cooper, only one inaccurate pass. And those are straight away passes, sideline passes, deep passes, short passes. Dak is throwing darts right now....

On the flip side, you look at Tampa Bay WRs Godwin and Evans and you can really see that while they are putting up decent stats, if they could a few more accurate passes from Winston then they would be lighting it up....

It's interesting to dive into this stuff... Thanks for making it available...

idk why, but i cannot get this to work for me. The first link takes me to Olsen and wont let me search anyone else. The second link is stuck on a page that says click here for mobile version, and when clicked it refreshes the page

Im thinking this is just not mobile friendly

gpthatsme said:

The data available in this tool is really amazing. Great work.

Looking at Amari Cooper, it proves the point that Dak is just throwing lights out. 21 targets to Cooper, only one inaccurate pass. And those are straight away passes, sideline passes, deep passes, short passes. Dak is throwing darts right now....

On the flip side, you look at Tampa Bay WRs Godwin and Evans and you can really see that while they are putting up decent stats, if they could a few more accurate passes from Winston then they would be lighting it up....

It's interesting to dive into this stuff... Thanks for making it available...

Click to expand...

Yeah Dak is KILLING it.  By any metric.  Check out the depth of target and % attempts beyond sticks metrics for Winston and his receivers.  They are throwing deeper than others.  But still.  Winston isn't winning any accuracy awards.

And thanks for the kind words.  My pleasure to finally put this out there.

Johnny B. Goode said:

idk why, but i cannot get this to work for me. The first link takes me to Olsen and wont let me search anyone else. The second link is stuck on a page that says click here for mobile version, and when clicked it refreshes the page

Im thinking this is just not mobile friendly

Click to expand...

Yeah it's terrible on mobile.  I'm sorry about that, not much i can do on this budget.  Microsoft's platform makes desktop easy and low cost but then I have to spend big bucks to get the mobile stuff working.

(Maybe in a few weeks if this starts driving any biz to our data consulting company, then I could justify it).

ebzded said:

Yeah it's terrible on mobile.  I'm sorry about that, not much i can do on this budget.  Microsoft's platform makes desktop easy and low cost but then I have to spend big bucks to get the mobile stuff working.

Click to expand...

no worries. will try the laptop later. it looks right up my alley (stat head)

Is that some sneaky good news for Thielen? I know people have been calling him a sell due to low volume but could that high target % indicate an untapped ceiling that we might not be considering?

Ilov80s said:

Is that some sneaky good news for Thielen? I know people have been calling him a sell due to low volume but could that high target % indicate an untapped ceiling that we might not be considering?

Click to expand...

Yeah I think so, but only if something forces the Vikings to start throwing more.  Injuries, increased strength of schedule (either strong rush d's or strong opposing offenses), or perhaps teams just start stacking the box and daring them to throw.

Ilov80s said:

Is that some sneaky good news for Thielen? I know people have been calling him a sell due to low volume but could that high target % indicate an untapped ceiling that we might not be considering?

Click to expand...

In my view the market share doesn't tell us enough about the actual context of the situation to project a value from. This is true of any one data point really. You usually need at least 3 data points to start getting close to something useful.  Sample size is an issue here.

Yes Thielen leads the league in target share right now with 31% however the Vikings are dead last in total pass attempts at 63.

To put this in context the average number of passing attempts for a NFL team over 3 weeks is 106 or 35.3 attempts per game. The Vikings are only averaging 21 pass attempts per game so far.

In this case you have a target share that is exceptionally high because of the low total number of pass attempts. This will normalize itself over time. Adam Thielen had a 26% market share for the Vikings in 2018. I would expect that number to decrease towards this over the course of the season.

If we projected Adam Thielen based on the market share and the Vikings pass attempts so far I get 104 targets over 16 games. If I project based on targets per game he is on pace for 91 targets.

I am not sure which will end up being more accurate. I am guessing that the Vikings wont be able to throw as few as 336 times over the regular season as much as they might like to though.

Big test for the Vikings offense this week.

@Biabreakable that was great.  Like I said, I should leave the commentary to folks other than myself.  I'm a numbers guy but for some reason when we talk football, I get a bit sidetracked from the discipline.

Back to building the tools

hey folks, we had a glitch in the data for two games in week 3 and that impact target share percentages for folks on 4 teams.  see the edit to original post.

@ebzded awesome stuff.

Dividing the counting stats by games played is going to become more and more important with the bye weeks starting (and injuries mounting).

I know FBG show targets, targets/game(team), targets/game(player).

Having those as toggles would be terrific.  Targets/game(player) would be the one I'd click on.

@davearm aww yes we think alike.  We tell our biz clients, for instance, that if you're not using "per day" or "per workday" metrics, you may THINK you're steering, but really you're just drifting.

But oh boy, there's a lot of work ahead of me

OK @davearm it's not on the Target pages yet, but here it is (the toggle) on the Sortable QB Stats page:

https://nocheckdowns.com/app/sortable-stats/

The two little gold chart icons.  Kick the tires and tell me what you think?  I'll likely be adding this same sort of thing to the other pages tomorrow while watching games.