Week 9 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 8 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 9 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 8 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 65 wide receivers from most to least air yards. From Diontae Johnston’s 188 air yards all the way down to  Khadarel Hodge’s 42. 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 8. We will dig into the five biggest things that jump out to me from this dataset. 

Top 5 Takeaways From Week 8 Air Yards Data

Adams and Family Basement

That 128-yard discrepancy between Davante Adams’ air yards and his receiving is indicative of the larger problem that has plagued the Raiders and forced them to fire their coach and GM. Adams came out several weeks ago saying he needed the ball more if they want to win. He is right, of course, but they need people who can get him the ball in good spots, as well. Enter Aiden O’Connell who will take over for Jimmy Garoppolo moving forward. The hope is O’Connell’s promising young arm can deliver more than just air yards to Adams. 

If he keeps getting 7+ targets and 139 air yards most weeks, the big games are going to come. Adams leads all wide receivers in red zone targets this year (15), but his catchable target rate ranks 56th at the position (70.4%). Almost any quarterback will improve on that number, so the red for Adams should start to disappear from this chart. 

Rashid “Randy Moss” Shaheed

You’ve surely seen the Randy Moss meme where he is looking into the camera with the graphic that shows his 3-catch, 163-yard, 3-touchdown game from 1999, right? Well, that’s essentially what Rashid Shaheed did on Sunday, just take away two of the touchdowns. Derek Carr has been bombing the ball downfield to Shaheed through the first half of the season, and his 18.2 average depth of target (aDOT) ranks second among wide receivers with at least 20 targets this year. 

Sunday could be an outlier, however, because traditionally those longer throws are the hardest to catch and easiest for the defender to have time to adjust. Carr and Shaheed completed them all on Sunday, but the New Orleans quarterback ranks just 28th in deep ball completion percentage this year (26.8%) and 33rd in deep ball accuracy rating. The big games will definitely be there for Shaheed, but we should also expect some duds mixed in as well. 

Adam Thielen Top Off

Adam Thielen has been balling this year, becoming the primary target for Bryce Young and the Carolina Panthers. He did his big-time usage thing again on Sunday against Houston with 11 targets and eight receptions, but this time it was just for 47 air yards and 72 receiving yards. The 25 yards after the catch ranked above the league leaders on Sunday, and it’s a good thing he got them because otherwise, this would have been a complete bust of a game. That’s hard to do with 11 targets. 

The problem was that the Caroline offensive scheme took topped off Thielen ceiling with just a 4.2-yard aDOT on Sunday. That’s almost half of his seasonal 7.26 number. There were mumbles about Thielen potentially not being as involved after the bye week thanks to a change in offensive play-caller duties. He was still plenty involved, but now we have to worry about if he is just going to be a line-of-scrimmage possession receiver. Thielen needs to get these targets downfield to continue to be fantasy relevant. 

Kupp/Nacua Danger Zone

This is now officially danger zone time for Rams’ wide receivers Cooper Kupp and Puka Nacua. They combined for 17 targets on Sunday, which is good, not great. But they had only 110 combined air yards and 64 combined receiving yards. Matthew Stafford did get hurt in this game, so perhaps that played a factor, maybe even a major factor. But with the Rams looking like they are preparing for Stafford to miss a little time, can 98-year-old rookie Stetson Bennett really support two fantasy WR1s? 

In the end, talent will likely win out, but this may be a situation where the Rams do need to dial back the aDOTs for Kupp and Nacua to make sure they have catchable targets. They can then take their other-worldly yards after the catch skills and do work around the defense. But this is now just 116 combined air yards and 50 combined receiving yards for Cooper Kupp over the last two weeks and the Rams need to find some way to remedy that. 

YAC Monsters

Speaking of Yards After the Catch (YAC), we had a couple of monster performances in Week 8 from unheralded receivers. The first was from Khalil Shakir of the Buffalo Bills, who finished with 92 receiving yards and 53 of those were after the catch. Shakir was a trendy mega-deep sleeper in the offseason as a player who could play the productive slot role in Buffalo, but with the emergence of Dalton Kincaid and the elite play from Stefon Diggs, Shakir’s role has been slim. Shakir saw an explosion in his snap rate to 65% in Week 8, double any other week of the year. With Dalton Knox on the shelf and the Bills interested in playing a lot of three wide-receiver sets, Shakir is a name to keep in mind as someone who could see a big spike in production. And based on what we saw in Week 8, he doesn’t need a massive aDOT (8.8 yards) to gain a lot of yards. 

Elsewhere, another receiver who has stepped up due to injury has been K.J. Osborn. On Sunday, he ended up fourth overall in YAC with 50 of those yards and 99 total yards. Osborn’s aDOT was even lower (5.6) but he was peppered with 10 targets and managed to catch eight of them. Can this YAC expert manage to keep up the production with Josh Dobbs now and Kirk Cousins out? Time will tell, but if Jordan Addison is going to play some of the Justin Jefferson role, Osborn will fill the role Adam Thielen played for so many years.