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. [continue reading…]