Air Yards Report

Welcome, football fans, to the FINAL Razzball Air Yards Report for 2023. This is the place where we look at thrown footballs (both caught and NOT caught) to try and predict which receivers might have some positive and negative regression coming their way. The 2023 season was a wild one for air yards, as you will see below.

If you want a refresher on what air yards are and how to best use them, here are my takeaways from 2022 air yards data. In this iteration of the air yards primer, we will look ahead to 2024’s fantasy football season and see who might be due for some positive or negative regression. I hope you will join me each and every Thursday next season for our breakdown of the week that was in air yards.

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2023 Air Yards and Air Yards% Data

Below we have air yards and receiving data courtesy of FTN.com. Air yards is a tool that is now freely accessible everywhere, and you can find the site or format that works best for you.

This list represents the top 115 wide receivers from most to least air yards heading into Week 18. From Davante Adams’ 1,856 all the way down to Alex Erickson’s 272. I color-coded this to make the referencing easier to identify. If a wide receiver was closer to the top of a category, the darker green the number would be. The bottom of the list is primarily orange into red.

Just an easy eye test from the colors on this chart gives us a significant number of takeaways from 2023. We will dig into the five biggest things that jump out to me from this dataset.

Top 5 Takeaways From 2023 Air Yards Data

Draft Calvin Ridley in 2024

When you look at the top 20 in air yards for 2023, two names stand out. The first is Terry McLaurin, who is under 1,000 receiving yards because of an abomination of an offensive line, horrible play-calling, and a quarterback carousel with Sam Howell and Jacoby Brissett. The other name – with 1,636 air yards but just 910 receiving yards – is Calvin Ridley. Somehow, Ridley finished seventh in air yards but 27th in receiving yards. This is what a regression candidate looks like, and we should be targeting him next season.

Despite “generational” quarterback Trevor Lawrence for 95% of his season, Calvin Ridley had a 65.3% catchable target rate, 74th among wide receivers. 74th!!! If Trevor Lawrence is even halfway competent next year, there is no way that doesn’t improve in 2024. Zay Jones and Christian Kirk are back next year, but it was Ridley who led the team in targets and air yards.

Chris Olave Will be a Sleeper AGAIN

Ahead of the 2023 season, Chris Olave was a popular pick as a breakout candidate after he was sixth in air yards in 2022 with 1,686 but had only 1,042 receiving yards. Well, history is about to repeat itself, but Olave was once again sixth in air yards this year (1.787) and had just 1.067 receiving yards. He also had just four touchdowns, joining Garrett Wilson as the only players in the top 15 of air yards with fewer than five touchdowns.

Olave was second in the NFL in unrealized air yards with 1,058, partially due to a 71% catchable target rate (46th among receivers). Presumably, Derek Carr is going to be back under center for the Saints in 2024, so the quality of the targets may not improve, but one thing is certainly clear. The quantity will be overflowing for Olave, and if he can ever connect that to more catches, he is a top-10 wideout.

Rashee Rice Will Have a Different Role

The emergence of Rashee Rice over the second half of the season is a surprise to no one who saw his snap share and target share increase from week to week. But what does look surprising is the number of receiving yards Rice compiled up against his air yards. In just the 20th percentile of air yards this season, Rice finished with 79 catches for 938 yards.

Normally, we would say downgrade a player who sees such an exorbitant number of receiving yards over air yards, but this is a special case. First, Rice is tied to Patrick Mahomes. This is not a Chris Olave or even a Calvin Ridley situation. Second, Rice’s average depth of target for the season was 4.81 yards, so most of his yards came after the catch. But in the last two weeks of the season, when Rice had Mahomes’ complete trust, it jumped to 7.33. Justin Watson and Marquez Valdes-Scantling were unreliable downfield, so Rice may be in line to get more of that work next year.

We’ve Learned a Gabriel Davis Lesson

After four years of this, we have seen enough to not take Gabe Davis seriously anymore, right? He has one finish better than WR36 in Half-PPR leagues in his career, and that was WR27 two years ago. At his best, then, he was just good enough to be a WR3 in 12-team leagues. At this point, Gabe Davis is someone to stash on the bench and plug him in your lineup when you’re a massive underdog so you can pray to the fantasy gods he has one of his three or four big games a year.

No player with at least 1,100 air yards came anywhere close to matching the inefficiency of Davis’ 45 catches on the year. Davis has as many games with zero or one targets as he has with 10+ targets. I prefer to have some level of floor to go with my potential ceiling, but Davis’ floor was literally zero in four games this year. Four fantasy weeks, more than a quarter of the regular season, Davis had zero catches.

Marquise Brown Chicken or Egg?

I’m not exactly sure how a wide receiver gets 1,200 air yards but only 574 receiving yards on the season, but Marquise Brown figured out how to get it done in 2023. When you have that much of a discrepancy between potential usage and production, there are inevitably a lot of factors, but what needs to be analyzed before 2024 is whether this was a Hollywood Brown problem or a quarterback problem.

Remember, Brown missed four of the first 17 games and still managed 1,200 air yards on the season. Before Trey McBride emerged, Brown was the offense for Arizona. But for as bad as players like Ridley and Olave had it for catchable targets, Brown’s situation was worse. The combination of Joshua Dobbs, Clayton Tune, and Kyler Murray gave Brown the 95th-highest catchable target rate in the league, just 56.4%. That’s the combination that gets a wide receiver the 49th-most fantasy points at the position.

Look for some positive regression here in 2024.