Wide receivers already get a lot of recognition because their production can be neatly summed up in the box score and with fantasy points, but sharp fans already know that you need to dive deeper than those numbers to get a better indication of true performance.
Efficiency, rather than volume, is often the best indicator of performance, and PFF has several ways of measuring this receiver efficiency.
Subscribe to
YARDS PER ROUTE RUN (YPRR)
Yards per route run is one of PFF's most stable and predictive measures of receiver performance. It is a relatively simple concept but immediately introduces a broader context to those box score statistics.
Instead of simply looking at total yardage, we look at how a receiver moves the ball relative to his team's passing opportunities by dividing that receiving yardage by the total number of routes run. The measurement also indirectly factors target share into the equation, as lesser-targeted receivers will spend a lot of pass plays running patterns without generating receiving yardage and will therefore score a lower figure.
Statistics don’t get much simpler than yards per route run, but it’s impressive how much valuable context can be added by measuring receiver performance this way.