Metrics that matter for wide receiver prospects

Measuring the correlations of wide receiver production, measurable, athletic and draft metrics to NFL success

This is the first in a multi-post process of developing my draft rankings for the 2023 wide receiver class. Before getting into more complicated and somewhat opaque modeling, I like to look at all the individual metrics that could give insight into who will be the most successful NFL players.

The power of using an ensemble of models that leverage tree-based algorithms is in their accuracy and predictive power, but they lack in interpretability. The more we investigate into the potentially insightful metric before getting into the thick of the modeling process, the more we may be able to adjust and interpret results.

Below I go through the wide-receiver prospect metric correlations to NFL success, which I measure in the unit of top fantasy production weeks. Specifically, I aggregated each prospects top-6, top-12, top-24 and top-35 weekly rankings in half-PRR scoring over their first four NFL seasons. I weight each of the rankings as such:

Top-6 Weekly Finish = 4 points Top-12 Weekly Finish = 3 points Top-24 Weekly Finish = 2 points Top-36 Weekly Finish = 1 point

For reference, the top NFL performer in this metric in the 2006-drafts classes were Steve Smith (102 points), Michael Thomas (93), A.J. Green (92), Justin Jefferson (91 in three seasons), Odell Beckham (89) and Tyreek Hill (85). NFL success for wide receivers doesn’t equate perfectly with fantasy scoring, but you can see from the list of top fantasy scorers that the correlation is very strong in terms of accolades and second contract values.

I’ll plot the correlations between each metric for production, measurable, athleticism and draft against the percentile of fantasy top-week points. The correlation for any particular metric isn’t particularly high, but we see a differentiation on strength by type, and draft position, or course, still measures the strongest.

For each category, I’ll list the top-5 prospects from the 2023 draft class in the metric with the strongest correlation.

FINAL SEASON PRODUCTION METRICS

I lined up four relevant final-season production metrics for wide receiver prospects in the plots below. You’ll probably want to click on the image and get a bigger image you can focus in on to get the details for each. I have the R-squared numbers for each metric on the plot, and have them ranked left-to-right in terms of low-to-high correlation.

I choose to look at share of team receptions (“Rec Share”), share of team receiving touchdowns (“TD Share”), share of team receiving yards (“Yds Share”) and receiving yards per team pass attempt (“Yds/Team Att”).