Let’s get it out of the way: playing with Tom Brady and Peyton Manning sure helps. From 2007 to 2013, Wes Welker had the best seven year stretch of his career, and most of that time came with Brady as his quarterback (there was one season with Matt Cassel and the 2013 record-breaking season with Manning). During those seven seasons, Welker’s teams averaged a remarkable 32.3 points per game. In 2014, Welker’s team — still the Broncos — also topped 30 points per game, but the other seasons of Welker’s career were spent on significantly less productive offenses.

Of course, in most of those other seasons, Welker himself wasn’t a significant part of the offense: he was a young backup or a past-his-prime player. I wanted to calculate how many points per game each wide receiver’s offense scored over his career. This is trickier than you’d think: what do you do for years where a player was a backup, or missed time due to injury? For Welker, he played 14 games with the 2004 Dolphins but as a returner and did not catch a pass. Would that team count in his career average?

To solve for these problems, I weighted each season by the percentage of career receiving yards he gained in that season.  Welker gained 9,924 receiving yards in his career.  In 2015 with the Rams, he gained 102 yards, or 1.0% of his career total.  That isn’t much, so the Rams production that year — 17.5 points per game, or 5.31 PPG below average — counts for 1.0% of Welker’s career score.  The 2013 Broncos averaged 37.88 PPG, 14.47 better per game than league average; since Welker gained 7.8% of his career yards that season, the 2013 Broncos stats count for 7.8% of his career total.  Welker’s best year was 2011, when he gained 1,569 yards.  That represented 15.8% of his career total, so the 2011 Patriots — 32.06 points per game, 9.88 points per game above league average — counts for 15.8% of Welker’s career grade.

If you perform this analysis for every season of Welker’s career, his team’s averaged 30.13 points per game once you weight for Welker’s production, which was 8.11 points per game above average. Here’s the math: the final two columns represent the product of multiplying his percentage of career receiving yards in that season by his team’s scoring (both raw and relative to league average):

I did this analysis for each of the players in the top 250 in career receiving yards. There are only six players whose teams averaged more than 28 points per game, and four of them have spent time with Brady, and two more with Drew Brees: Wes Welker, Rob Gronkowski, Michael Thomas, Elroy Hirsch, Brandin Cooks, and Julian Edelman.

Four players in the top 15 in career receiving yards played on teams who were below-average in scoring: you won’t be surprised to see that those four were Larry Fitzgerald, Steve Smith, Andre Johnson, and Anquan Boldin. In the top 35, Irving Fryar and Brandon Marshall join them, while FP favorite Joey Galloway (whose teams scored 1.8 points per game fewer than average) played on the lowest scoring teams of any player in the top 50 in career receiving yards.

Here’s how to read the table below, which is sorted by career receiving yards. Jerry Rice ranks 12th by this metric: he had 2,2895 career receiving yards, the most in pro football history. He played 1985 to 2004, and his teams averaged 25.93 points per game (weighted by Rice’s production) during his career, or 5.46 points per game above league average (which ranks 12th among the 250 receivers on this list). The table below is fully sortable and searchable.

What stands out to you? As noted above, players like Larry Fitzgerald, Steve Smith, Andre Johnson, Anquan Boldin, Irving Fryar, Joey Galloway, and Brandon Marshall really stand out for their production on bad offenses; to a lesser extent, so do Tim Brown and Henry Ellard, who had great career receiving numbers despite just barely better than average scoring offenses.

On the other hand, while one receiver can’t drive an offense, here are the top 15 receivers by this metric: Wes Welker, Rob Gronkowski, Don Hutson, John Taylor, Elroy Hirsch, Michael Thomas, Mac Speedie, Dante Lavelli, Fred Biletnikoff, Bob Hayes, Brandin Cooks, Jerry Rice, Marques Colston, Julian Edelman, and Lenny Moore. Every member of that group played on loaded offenses with star quarterbacks, but those were all great receivers, too.

What stands out to you?