I was reading an old Brad Oremland article and this line about Andre Reed’s career stood out to me:
Even his seven Pro Bowls are as much a reflection of the AFC’s weakness as anything. Who was he beating out? Haywood Jeffires, Anthony Miller, and Al Toon? The competition (Clark, Ellard, Irvin, Rice, Rison, Sharpe) was all in the NFC.
Reed made seven Pro Bowls in his career, and he did that consecutively from 1988 to 1994. But it’s true that those years were some of the weakest years the AFC receivers had relative to their NFC counterparts (the weakest would come the year after, in 1995). Here are Reed’s ranks in receiving yards in the AFC from 1988 to 1994: 7th, 1st, 6th, 2nd, 12th, 4th, and 2nd. That’s pretty good and while there are a few less than stellar years in there, in almost all of those you can see why he’d be a Pro Bowl receiver. But here are Reed’s ranks in receiving yards in the NFL during those seasons: 17th, 5th, 13th, 6th, 11th, 23rd, 5th. Without fail, his ranking in the combined AFC/NFC league looks worse than his ranking in the AFC each year.
For nearly Reed’s entire career, the receivers in the NFC were superior to those in the AFC. For each year since 1970, I looked at the top five leaders in receiving yards in both conferences, and recorded how many receiving yards was gained by the average player in each group. In 1992, for example, the top five leaders in receiving yards in the AFC gained 950.8 yards, while the top five leaders in the NFC picked up 1,252 yards. The NFC boasted the top five leaders in receiving yards that season, which is how Reed — who ranked 11th in yards that season — ranked 4th in the conference in receiving yards.
The graph below shows the average for each season from 1970 to 2019.
And here is the same information, but shown as the differential between the AFC leaders and the NFC leaders in each season. The biggest disparity came in 1995, when the top seven leaders in receiving yards were all in the NFC, and you have to go down to #16 in the NFL to get to the fifth leader in the AFC. But keep in mind that Reed’s Pro Bowls came from ’88 to ’94; during that period, the top five in the NFC outpaced the top five in the AFC by over 180 yards per season.
For what it’s worth, that trend re-emerged last season. The top three leaders in receiving yards in 2019 were all in the NFC South — Michael Thomas, Julio Jones, and Chris Godwin. The majority of the top ten leaders in receiving yards were also in the top 10, as those three were joined by Kenny Golladay, Amari Cooper, and D.J. Moore. In fact, 11 of the top 17 leaders in receiving yards were in the NFC, thanks to Cooper Kupp, Mike Evans, Allen Robinson, Darren Waller, Robert Woods, and Stefon Diggs (who will be in the AFC with the Bills in 2020).
The AFC, meanwhile, had only TE Travis Kelce, DeVante Parker, and Keenan Allen in the top 10, and Jarvis Landry DeAndre Hopkins, and TE Darren Waller in the top 17. Of course, the AFC was hurt when Antonio Brown became unable to stay on an NFL roster, T.Y. Hilton and JuJu Smith-Schuster lost their quarterbacks, and Tyreek Hill was injured. Also, the conference addition of Odell Beckham, Jr. didn’t go quite as planned.
Finally, here’s a bit of trivia: did you know that Kelce led the AFC in receiving yards last season? In doing so, he became just the second tight end to lead a conference in receiving yards since the AFL/NFL merger of 1970. The first? Jets star Rich Caster back in 1972 led all AFC players in receiving yards while playing for an offense that had three future Hall of Famers (Joe Namath, John Riggins, and Don Maynard).