(“Today’s Crazy Fantasy Stat” is an occasional offseason offering from PFF that highlights something that catches our eye and aids in our preparation for the 2017 fantasy season.)
A wide receiver certainly doesn’t have to go deep to be successful. Wes Welker put up 9,490 receiving yards in the PFF era, and only 1,038 of those came on passes that traveled 20-plus yards in the air. To use a forced analogy to scoring in football, Welker kicked a load of field goals and only very occasionally scored a touchdown.
You can win that way. Week 10, 2007, the Bengals beat the Ravens 21-7 on the back of seven Shayne Graham field goals as their only points. But the typical route to success involves touchdowns, scoring big points at a time. It’s why home runs became en vogue in baseball. Yeah, three singles in a row will likely score a run, but one home run does that way easier and way faster.
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So back to the original point, no, a wide receiver doesn’t have to get big chunks of yardage at a time to be fantasy relevant. But it certainly helps. To wit, the leaders in deep yardage since 2006 is mostly populated by big-time receivers:
Most yards on deep (20+ yard) passes, 2006-2016 | ||
Rank | Player | Deep yardage |
1 | DeSean Jackson | 4152 |
2 | Calvin Johnson | 3595 |
3 | Vincent Jackson | 3402 |
4 | Steve Smith | 3319 |
5 | A.J. Green | 2947 |
6 | Brandon Marshall | 2775 |
7 | Reggie Wayne | 2751 |
8 | Andre Johnson | 2698 |
9 | Nate Washington | 2637 |
10 | Jordy Nelson | 2614 |
11 | Larry Fitzgerald | 2591 |
12 | Mike Wallace | 2487 |
13 | Greg Jennings | 2413 |
14 | Roddy White | 2386 |
15 | Malcom Floyd | 2314 |
16 | T.Y. Hilton | 2309 |
17 | Julio Jones | 2305 |
18 | Kenny Britt | 2044 |
10 | Torrey Smith | 1990 |
20 | Demaryius Thomas | 1980 |
21 | Terrell Owens | 1975 |
22 | Antonio Brown | 1963 |
23 | Dez Bryant | 1956 |
24 | James Jones | 1935 |
25 | Devery Henderson | 1911 |
DeSean Jackson is going to be our focus today. Of the top 30 deep-yardage seasons in the last decade, Steve Smith and Jordy Nelson have two apiece. A.J. Green and Calvin Johnson each have three. Everyone else on the list appears once … except Jackson, who has five of the top 30 seasons in yards gained on 20-plus-yard passes in the last decade.
Jackson played the last three seasons with Washington, where, in a one-hand-feeds-the-other situation, Kirk Cousins led the league in deep passing yardage in 2016. That was after Cousins finished 14th in 2015, when Jackson played only 10 games.
Now Jackson is with Tampa Bay, where Mike Evans had 575 deep yards in 2014 … but hasn’t gone over 372 (112th-best) in his two seasons with Jameis Winston. Adding to that, Winston totaled 646 total deep yards in 2016, but with 372 of those going to Evans, his other targets totaled only 274 deep yards. Buccaneers not named Mike Evans have gotten exactly 30 deep targets a season in Winston’s two seasons; Jackson has averaged 27 a year over the last nine years.
The downside to Jackson is the fungible nature of his production. Just like the increased fascination with home runs in baseball led to more strikeouts as well, Jackson’s deep-ball prowess means there are some games where he disappears. Between Week 1 of 2014 and Week 5 of last season, Jackson had 0 games of 5-9 fantasy points in standard scoring, and he only has five such games total in the last four seasons.
Jackson is currently going off the board as the No. 32 wide receiver in regular fantasy leagues, but No. 44 in MFL data, which is for best-ball leagues, and that’s just ludicrous. Now definitively relegated to being his team’s No. 2 receiver, Jackson might not carry the upside he once did over the whole season, but if he’s healthy, he will almost certainly have a handful of monster weeks, as he has done in the past. If you’re playing best-ball, Jackson is a valuable draft pick and should be going higher. And if you’re playing season-long fantasy … Jackson might be boom-or-bust, but those booms are nice, and if Mike Evans were to get hurt, Jackson would be a star.