Week 17 Air Yards Report: Top 5 Takeaways

Welcome, football fans, to the Razzball Air Yards Report. 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. Week 16 was another wild week in the 2023 air yards season, 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 Week 17 of the 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 during the regular season for our breakdown of the week that was in air yards.

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Week 16 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 66 wide receivers from most to least air yards. From Amari Cooper’s 286 all the way down to Jameson Williams’ 33. 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 Week 16. We will dig into the five biggest things that jump out to me from this dataset. 

Top 5 Takeaways From Week 16 Air Yards Data

Diggs Down Bad

There was a lot of social media chatter over the Christmas weekend about the fact that Stefon Diggs has not had a 100-yard receiving game since Week 6 this year. In fact, it’s even worse than that piece of information. In his last three games, Diggs has only COMBINED for 101 yards, and he has one score since Week 10. As we can see above, Diggs is still getting a very healthy share of the air yards share and the target share from Josh Allen, so what exactly is going on and causing this sharp decline?

It certainly isn’t target share problems. At 30.2%, Diggs is fourth among all wide receivers this year (and he is at 34.3% over the last three games). It isn’t air yards share, either. At over 36% on the season, he is right in the neighborhood of CeeDee Lamb and Ja’Marr Chase this season. The real reason can be broken down into two parts. First, Diggs’ average depth of target (aDOT) is 9.7 yards this year, which ranks 67th among all wide receivers. Second, he is only 43rd at the position in target separation, according to Player Profiler. With short throws his way and no separation on those throws, it’s just been nearly impossible for Diggs to rack big yards after the catch numbers. 

Hanging With Mr. Cooper

We have a new single-game air yards leader for this season, and Amari Cooper blew his teammates’ old record out of the water. With 286 air yards in Week 16, Cooper had 31 more air yards than Elijah Moore, who put up 255 with Joe Flacco in Week 13. Is it possible Joe Flacco is a wide receiver kingmaker at 92 years old, or however old he is? Clearly, Flacco is telling his wide receivers just to run, and he will get them long targets. 

Cooper’s aDOT this season is 14.3 yards, which is a fantastic number, but on Sunday that popped up to 19.1. With this performance, Cooper passed several wide receivers for the overall air yards lead in 2023 with 1,834 yards. With 72 receptions and 1,250 receiving yards on the season, Cooper has somehow found a way to put up WR1 numbers this season despite a crazy carousel of quarterbacks getting him the ball from week to week. 

Sun God Perfect Game

If there was a definition of the quintessential Amon-Ra St. Brown game in the dictionary, Week 16 would be used as the example. With 14 targets resulting in 12 catches for 106 yards and a score, St. Brown only needed 54 air yards to get it all done. He is a player who best operates with plenty of room to wiggle upfield and gain his yards after the catch. In Week 16, St. Brown gained another 50 yards after the catch and ranks third among all wide receivers in that category this season. 

St. Brown continues to be a cheat code in PPR formats and consistently proves he can deliver on fantasy production even with targets that might not be as “high-value” as some of the other top receivers. Among the top 12 wide receivers in yards this year (St. Brown is fifth), the Sun God is the only one with an aDOT lower than nine yards (his is 7.4). Air yards is a fantastic metric for determining current and future wide receiver value, but St. Brown may be the mold-breaker until the end of his playing career. 

Rice is Cooking

If you’re looking for the Week 17 explosion player based on air yards and unrealized potential from Week 16, look no further than Rashee Rice. Despite setting a career-high with 12 targets, Rice was held down by a very weird game and rare horrific Patrick Mahomes performance. Rice was only able to gain six catches and 57 yards on his 88 air yards, and he didn’t find the end zone for just the second time in five weeks. 

With at least nine targets in each of the last five games, only wide receivers have more total targets than Rice’s 31 over the last three weeks. His 27% target share in that time is a full 10% over the seasonal number, and he has also surpassed Travis Kelce as the go-to option on the team. Despite being lightly used at the beginning of the season, Rice now is a top-five receiver in yards after the catch and ranks only behind Deebo Samuel for yards after the catch per reception (7.6 yards) for receivers with at least 40 targets. 

Pickens Likes Rudolph Lighting the Way

Back in Week 5, George Pickens led the NFL with 196 air yards, which gave him 130 receiving yards and a touchdown on 10 targets. There were rumblings at that time it could be the Pickens breakout game, but it was, in fact, not the breakout game. What happened was a series of tumultuous and meme-worthy performances that left people caring about whether Pickens cared about being on the Steelers. Perhaps what he actually cared about all along was a quarterback who could hit long throws downfield. 

One game is too small a sample to judge whether or not we can trust Pickens long-term, but these next two weeks with Mason Rudolph under center should go a long way to helping determine where Pickens should be taken in drafts next season. When Pickens is not involved in the offense, he clearly checks out. But if Rudolph is getting him 4 to 5 long bombs per game, Pickens has the chance to turn into an elite version of what people always wanted Marquez Valdes-Scantling to be.