On Monday, I looked at which receivers were the most productive on a per-team pass attempt basis. This is one good way to measure wide receiver production, but it is far from perfect.

Players on teams with bad quarterbacks will be harmed, as are players who are “competing” with really good receivers on their offense will be boosted. The two guys I’m really thinking of are Terry McLaurin (who ranked 23rd in ACY/TPA on Monday) and Allen Robinson (19th), two wide receivers we know are very good but had very poor quarterback play. ^[1]An interesting scenario is in Carolina, where the quarterback play was below average but D.J. Moore and Robby Anderson had to compete with each other.

So today I want to look at which receivers gained the largest share of their team’s receiving pie, measured simply as receiving yards in the games they played. Davante Adams led all players in percentage of team receiving yards, at 37.2%, and he did it while playing for the best passing offense in football. It is extremely rare for a wide receiver to both play for an incredible passing offense and have an insanely large share of the pie: it is one reason why Adams had one of the great seasons in receiving history in 2020.

Beyond Adams, who were the most impressive receivers in 2020? There might be some trade-off between being on a great offense and being on a bad one; all things being equal, it’s easier for Robinson or McLaurin to gobble up targets than say, someone in Tampa Bay or Kansas City’s offense. One way I like to measure receivers is to look at both the quality of the pie — i.e., how good was their passing game — and how big of a slice each receiver gobbled up. Getting a good-size pie on a great passing offense, a large chunk of a good passing game, and a huge chunk of a bad passing game are all about equally impressive if you think that players “compete” with their teammates for targets.

In the graph below, I’ve shown the percentage of the team receiving yards each receiver had in 2020 (limited only to the games they played) on the X-Axis, and their team’s passing efficiency (as measured by ANY/A) on the Y-Axis. I’ve also labeled some notable players who stood out.

The highest dot on the chart belongs to Allen Lazard: the Packers averaged 9.18 ANY/A during his 10 games, the best rate of any receiver in the league. Of course, Lazard only was responsible for 17.3% of the Packers receiving yards in those games, so he doesn’t quite stand out.  The best place to be is on the upper right, and we again see that Adams stands alone.

A.J. Brown continues to stand out, and certainly someone is underrated in Tennessee. The Titans offense is great, but there are those who think running backs don’t matter, and Derrick Henry isn’t a big reason why. Ryan Tannnehill may have great numbers, but detractors think they are a product of a play-action heavy offense and he wouldn’t succeed well in another system. Brown is great, but defenses have to focus on Henry and he’s got Tannehill throwing him the ball, so his life is easy….. you see where this is going. We saw on Monday that Brown had the 2nd best ACY/TPA of any receiver in the NFL in 2020. Today we see that he was responsible for 33% of the Titans receiving yards in his 14 games, and Tennessee had a top-5 passing offense. Brown, Justin Jefferson , and Stefon Diggs all form a cluster of alpha wide receivers who carried a great share of a great passing attack (again, Adams excluded; he’s on his own island). If you were impressed with Diggs and Jefferson carrying (i.e., gaining 32% of the receiving yards) top-8 ANY/A passing attacks, then you should be impressed with Brown doing the same in Tennessee. His raw numbers were low because of the two missed games and playing on a run-first team, but we know that efficiency is the way to measure production in the passing game.

Will Fuller is another player who really stands out here. He only played in 11 games last year, and that includes a zero in week two where he played with a hamstring injury (and was otherwise shut down by the Ravens secondary). But in those 11 games, he picked up 27.5% of all Texans receiving yards … and the Houston passing offense was outstanding. If we look at his 9 games after week 2 and before his season-ending injury, Fuller had 767 yards and 8 touchdowns, while all Texans receivers gained 2673 yards and 22 touchdowns. That means Fuller had 28.7% of Houston receiving yards during this stretch when the team averaged 9.05 ANY/A. That’s very impressive.

On the other side you have players like JuJu Smith-Schuster and Michael Gallup, who each finished with over 800 receiving yards on super pass-happy teams that were not very efficient. For Smith-Schuster, he gained just 20% of Steelers receiving yards for an offense that averaged only 6.28 ANY/A; Gallup was at 18.7% and 5.97, respectively. The same analysis would apply, at the higher end of the spectrum, to Amari Cooper: he finished with only 25% of all Cowboys receiving yards for a bad offense, which makes his 1,114 yards look a lot less impressive.

Cooper fares poorly in both this analysis and in the ACY/TPA metric because Dallas finished with 639 pass attempts. I can be sympathetic to Cooper here, as he actually was competing with some very talented wide receivers: the team’s offensive struggles would fall on the quarterback and the offensive line before the wide receiver group. So Cooper is probably underrated here and in Monday’s post; however, he’s certainly overrated if you look at just receiving yards, where he finished 14th overall. As always, a full analysis looks at all the statistics rather than just any one.