Field Tippers — 2026, AFC

Player mentions

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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 contex…