I don’t disagree with that, but I still think this is better than pure receiving yards. And while I think Moss > Rice is not right, that’s somewhat an artifact of the artificial baselines I used to present the data. Moss has 8 seasons that rank as follows:

15…69…71…95…157…158…246…313

Rice has 7 seasons that rank:

6…44…48…54…67…75…223

Rice’s seasons are pretty clearly better: he has six top-75 seasons, compared to 3 for Moss. And his 7th season is better than Moss’s 7th best season. It’s only on the very singular look at the 8th-best season does Moss win.

I think Moss > Rice illustrates why I don’t like this methodology, though: it improperly emphasizes peak at the expense of consistency; there’s no floor or baseline to say that a zero performance is worse than a modest non-zero performance. There’s something to be said about junk production and replacement level, but 32 does not equal zero, and a system that treats them as equal is inevitably flawed. Gaining 30 yards in a 2015 game is not impressive or significant, but it is better than zero, and this system fails to recognize that.