Air Yards Primer for 2023 Fantasy Football: Top Regression Candidates This Season

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Welcome air yards fans to Year 3 of the Razzball Air Yards Report. This is the place where we look at footballs (both caught and NOT caught) to try and predict which receivers might have some positive and negative regression coming their way. This season is going to focus much more on actionable takeaways that we can use to make our fantasy rosters better. 

If you want a refresher on what air yards are and how to best use them, here is my primer from 2022. In that year’s preseason piece, we looked at how Cooper Kupp breaks the air yards model. We called the negative regression from Deebo Samuel and identified Devonta Smith as someone whose air yards were telling us might have a big year. 

In this iteration of the air yards primer, we will look ahead to the last draft weekend of the offseason and see who might be good and bad values at their average draft position (ADP). I hope you will join me each and every Thursday during the regular season for our breakdown of the week that was in air yards. 

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2022 Air Yards and Air Yards% Data

Below we have air yards and receiving data courtesy of FantasyLife.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 75 wide receivers from most to least air yards. From Davante Adams’ 2,129 air yards all the way to Robbie Chosen Anderson’s 621. I color-coded this to make the referencing easier to identify. If a wide receiver was closer to the top of a state category, the darker the green the number will be. The bottom of the list is primarily orange into red. 

Just an easy eye test on the colors on this chart gives us a significant number of takeaways from 2022. We will dig into the five biggest things that jump out to me from this dataset. 

Top 5 Takeaways From 2022 Air Yards Data

Manage Your D.J. Moore Expectations

D.J. Moore was one of the pieces of the blockbuster trade ahead of the 2023 NFL Draft. He comes to Chicago by way of the Carolina Panthers and instantly becomes the best wide receiver Justin Fields has seen on his own team. But while we can’t take away the fact that Moore was top-12 in air yards in 2022 and looks to be the primary weapon for Fields, we shouldn’t get too excited about an ultra-outlier year like 2022. 

Moore saw a crazy 53.4% of his team’s air yards with Carolina last year. However, that only resulted in 63 catches and 892 receiving yards because, well, Baker Mayfield and Sam Darnold were throwing him passes. Moore’s 53% of air yard share was 12 percentage points higher than Davante Adams’ 41% and was the highest share any player has received in the NFL in at least the last three seasons. 

Moore will certainly lead the Bears in targets and air yards share this season, but he will likely come nowhere close to 53%. The more accurate passing should make up for that regression, but I guess what I’m saying is we shouldn’t expect that large a piece of the air yards pie plus a next-level accurate passer delivering him the ball. 

This is the Chris Olave Explosion Year

Also hindered by poor quarterback play in 2022, Chris Olave still managed to finish sixth in the NFL in air yards as a rookie, with Andy Dalton and Jameis Winston as his play-callers. But despite this, Olave was easily the player in the top-10 air yards with the fewest receptions (72) and receiving yards (1,042). 

Olave ranked eighth in the NFL in average depth of target (aDOT) for his targets last year, but the inaccuracy issues of his quarterbacks prevented what could have been an all-time rookie year. Dalton, Olave’s primary QB last year, ranked 30th in deep ball completion percentage in 2022. Now Olave gets Derek Carr, who attempted the fifth-most deep passes in 2022 and ranked second in air yards per attempt. 

If he gets another 39% of the air yards and another 120 targets, this could be a 95-catch, 1,500-yard season incoming. 

Gabe Davis Looks Like a Great Value

We were all hot and bothered for Gabriel Davis at the beginning of 2022, fresh off his four-score performance in the AFC Championship game in 2021. What’s changed exactly? Really the only things that are different this year over last year are Davis and Bills’ quarterback Josh Allen are completely healthy now. 

Davis still is second in the pecking order behind Stefon Diggs for targets. The Bills still don’t throw to their running backs. Trent Sherfield and Khalil Shakir are the wide receivers behind Davis on the depth chart. 

Gabe Davis was a top-20 player in air yards last season and was first in the NFL in yards traveled before reception on his targets. With Josh Allen healthy again, Davis’ targets and receptions should shoot up this year and vault Davis back into the WR3 conversation, if not higher. 

Diontae Johnson Should Positively Regress

This is not a touchdown regression prediction, although it would be VERY hard not to positively regress from zero scores on 147 targets and 86 receptions. Johnson now holds the record for most receptions in a season with breaking the end zone. But despite seeing over 37% of his team’s air yards, he joins D.J. Moore and Gabe Davis as the only receivers in the top 16 to not have at least 1,000 yards receiving on the year. 

Only Adams, Justin Jefferson, Tyreek Hill, and CeeDee Lamb saw more than Johnson’s 147 targets in 2022. With a year of improvement likely coming for second-year quarterback Kenny Pickett, Diontae looks to be one of the steals of the draft with an ADP of around pick 80 on Sleeper heading into Labor Day Weekend. 

Amon-Ra St. Brown is a Freak

Average depth of target can do funny things to a player’s air yards output. Take Amon-Ra St. Brown and Marvin Jones, for example. They had identical air yards shares on the Lions last season. But St. Brown earned his on 146 targets, while Jones drew just 81. St. Brown was only 40th in total air yards last season, but he parlayed that into a top-10 season in both receptions and receiving yards because he was fourth among all wide receivers in yards after the catch last year. 

With Marvin Jones now about 94 years old, Jameson Williams suspended, and Kalif Raymond next in line, St. Brown is poised to explode early in the season. This is a big part of the reason why St. Brown is a consistent second-round pick. If he can even double the seven targets he saw inside the 10-yard line last year and push up his touchdown equity, we may be talking about the Sun God in terms of a first-rounder in 2024.