Ravens Draft Parables: How to draft a wide receiver (Part 2)

In this series of posts I will combine my love of analytics, the NFL draft and the Ravens to tell a story, usually a cautionary tale, a warning, a plea or just some added insight into the Ravens and their draft.

Big disclaimer – this post is data geek heavy, don’t read on if data bores you.

I mentioned him briefly in the first post; Breshad Perriman is the Ravens best cautionary tale on drafting wide receivers. His abnormally high yards per reception number was a big red flag – I’ve started calling this theory about high touchdowns and high yards per reception predicting future under-performance in the NFL, the “moth to a flame” theory. If you missed it in part 1, you should be mindful of statistical production from wide receivers at the college level, the likes of which we saw from Justin Jefferson, as long as it is combined with underperformance in two key categories – touchdowns and yards per reception. My theory being that we are all football fans first, analysts/scouts second; so we get drawn in by big, game-changing plays. No matter how hard we try to scout the traits of players, we are biased towards wonderment – we want to be wowed and artificially inflate the value of these players that wow us.

I also wanted to address here a deliberate omittance I made from the first piece and this one. I know that there has been some correlation found between breakout age (the age a college receiver is when he first dominates his team’s target share) and success in the NFL. It seems that the younger a receiver is successful in college, the more likely his future will be bright. I know the data behind this, I’m just not addressing it here – there has been lots written about this in the fantasy football community and for here, I’m more interested in creating a bigger picture of data that should play into our evaluation and inform how we scout rather than being genuinely predictive.

Noticing this anomaly that signals our unconscious bias seeping into our scouting, led me to be curious about whether any other talented receivers had signalled their future bust potential by giving us early warning signs of their impending doom. There were others, unsurprisingly. Corey Coleman was the best example I could find of this, former top 10 pick of the Cleveland Browns – he led the nation in touchdowns in 2015 and was 4th in yards per reception. 2015 also brought us Josh Doctson, the heralded TCU reveiver drafted at pick 22 by the Washington Redskins who hasn’t worked out – he was top 10 in both categories too. I should say that I did apply a minimum target number eliminator to get the receivers that were consistently seeing the ball thrown their way.

This who’s who of wide receiver busts that fell out of simply looking at top 10 lists on the yards per reception data-point led me to wonder, what the history of the top of this list looked like. That was where I found Breshad Perriman – sitting proudly at the top of the 2014 list. But he wasn’t the king of yards per reception – that title belongs to James Washington who led the nation three years in a row and has certainly not lived up to his billing. When he vacated the throne, leaving to clog up the Pittsburgh Steelers receiver room, a favourite of mine took over – Hakeem Butler.

So I said to myself, surely there must be someone from the top 10 in yards per reception over the years that has become a consistent producer at the NFL level. And I really could not find a stud wide receiver anywhere in these lists going back to 2014, it was like looking for a small piece of hay in a giant stack of needles (credit: Edmund Blackadder). There were some that are nearly there – Mike Williams, Corey Davis, Will Fuller and Michael Gallup – but all of these have flattered to deceive at times, and could be argued they have not lived up to their lofty draft capital. Mike Williams and Corey Davis especially, being high first rounders. Courtland Sutton looked like someone who could break the mould, when he flashed number one receiver potential in his rookie season but the jury is still very much out. Diontae Johnson and AJ Brown got close to the top 10 but didn’t quite make it.

There are going to be a number of tests to this theory over the next few years. Ceedee Lamb, Jerry Jeudy, Darnell Mooney, Tee Higgins all showed potential this year and were part of the top ten in yards per reception at some point in their college career. Ja’marr Chase and Devonta Smith also appear in the lists – but most of these receivers including Lamb, Chase, Smith and Jeudy were all dominant in many other categories. Among these other categories yards after the catch seems to be an important disqualifier for the yards per reception bust warning – when you know the receiver made a lot of yards on their own by making people miss, not simply running an extra 30 yards untouched after a deep bomb. Lamb and Chase certainly fit this bill.

For Ravens fans – one big concern – Marquise Brown was high on the list of yards per reception for a couple of years. He did also have high YAC but this wasn’t in the same way that Chase and Lamb got their yards after the catch. I do think he had a promising end to this past season so I can see him being a possible exception to the rule but it did give me pause to see him there.

So what does all this mean for this year’s draft; the big warning sign appears to be over Dyami Brown – he won’t be highly drafted for sure, but I have seen some people high on him and he will certainly be drafted. Worryingly for me, Rashod Bateman, who I am high on, appears on the list too. I may need to go back to the tape but I am comforted I think, by the scheme he was in and the many times I saw him get open in 2019 and not be targeted. Hopefully a different scheme and quarterback would have brought that average down.

Looking at the YAC on some of these high yards per reception receivers actually led me to one final lesson to be learned from the review of this data if you’ll permit me. It concerns non-power 5 receivers. I will tell a story to illustrate…

In the fall of 2015 I had begun to watch carefully the career of a Penn State sophomore named Chris Godwin. He was a catch-point extraordinaire – strong hands, great body control and plucked the ball out of the air, often close to a challenging defensive back. I thought he was underrated as a route runner and had enough speed to do damage at the next level. Over the next two years, I solidified my opinion and felt good about projecting him to a starting receiver role at the next level. In my preparation for the 2017 draft though, I also did my work on all the prospect receivers in the class and felt similarly bullish about Zay Jones after watching his tape. He was a standout at the Senior Bowl that year and I felt his best traits - a consistent route stem and suddenness at the break-point had him setup for a solid NFL career. We should also note this specific nugget from my analysis for later – “he is as physical as the day is long and plays with great intensity – this shows up most in his run after the catch where he shows elusiveness and the ability to run through contact.”

This was all based on my eye though, back then and still now for the most part, I ignored stats and went back to the tape, as the old adage goes, but sometimes numbers can help supplement our analysis. We all know the rest, at least us Zay Jones enthusiasts do. Godwin was one of my biggest hits as a draft analyst; Zay Jones one of the biggest misses.

But if we look back now at the more widely available stats we can see that there was nothing spectacular about Godwin at all, statistically – I was right to trust my eyes with the traits I saw. Zay Jones on the other hand, had a very high YAC number. And this was true of many other prospects from non-power 5 conferences who had topped many statistical lists but, most importantly, were top 10 in YAC.

The rule is, we cannot trust prospects from schools where the level of competition they faced was lower than prospects from big schools and where they took advantage of this after the catch, by padding their yardage totals as flat-track bullies. I’m not at all diminishing their achievements in college but when it comes to projection to the pros, we are simply not comparing apples with apples. I also don’t believe we can simply eliminate these prospects and write off their chances but as scouts/amateur draftniks we must account for the potential that we may be impressed by the yards they create after the catch and heighten our judgment of their skills before the catch and at the catch-point. I’m off to watch some more Jaelon Darden tape.