Let’s compare two groups of 2018 receivers.

Group A

Adam Thielen
Odell Beckham
DeAndre Hopkins
Zach Ertz
Julio Jones

Group B

Brandin Cooks
George Kittle
Mike Evans
Tyreek Hill
Cooper Kupp

Which group of receivers would you rather have going forward? I think you know the answer to that question.

The receivers in Group A are the top 5 receivers this season as measured by one simple metric: yards multiplied by targets.

The receivers in Group B are the top 5 receivers this season as measured by another simple metric: yards divided by targets, based on a the players who rank in the top 50 this season in targets.

Here’s how to read the table below. Brandin Cooks has played 5 games this year and has seen 33 targets and gained 452 receiving yards. If you multiply his yards by his targets, he has 14,916, and his Yards x Target rank is 28th. On the other hand, he has averaged 13.7 Yards per Target, which ranks 1st in the league through five weeks.

There are 6 receivers who rank at least 20 spots higher in Yards divided by Target compared to their rank in Yards multiplied by Targets. They are: George Kittle, Brandin Cooks, Dede Westbrook, Mike Evans, Tyreek Hill, and Keelan Cole. On the other hand, Stefon Diggs, Odell Beckham, Jarvis Landry, Zach Ertz, and Antonio Brown all rank at least 20 spots higher in Yards multiplied by Target compared to their corresponding ranks in Yards divided by Target. I think I know which group of receivers is the more talented set.

There are many, many, many statistics one can use to analyze receivers. But if you were forced to pick just one metric, and your only options were (Yards/Target) or (Yards x Target), I think it’s pretty clear that (Yards x Target) is the better and more meaningful statistic. For misleading reasons, Yards/Target has become valued as a stat to measure wide receiver efficiency, but today’s example should show why that’s a bad idea. Yards are a good thing. Targets are a good thing. Yards represent player quality. Targets represent player quality. When you have two good things, you should not divide one by the other (like grading a passer by yards per touchdown); if you have to choose, multiplying them by each other makes more sense.

As I’ve written before, here is why yards per target is absolutely not the measure of efficiency some analysts think it is:

But targets don’t help identify the player who deserves blame: on a random incomplete pass, assume three receivers are running routes, and one of them is targeted. Absent a drop, I have a hard time saying that of the three wide receivers, the targeted one did the worst of the three. If we grade a receiver by his yards per route run, each receiver is equally penalized with one route run on the play; if we grade a receiver by yards per target, the two wide receivers that did not get open are not penalized, while the one that was targeted is penalized. That seems fundamentally wrong to me.

Here’s another problem: In a broad sense, the player with more targets (or percentage of his team’s targets) is in a very real sense a bigger part of his team’s offense. Either he’s open more often, or the quarterback is throwing in his direction even when he’s not open (whether because the coaches call more plays for him or because he’s earned the quarterback’s trust). In any event, the target itself is an indicator of quality, and penalizing a player — which is what you do when you place targets in the denominator — for an event that is highly correlated with quality is not something I’m comfortable doing.

But don’t take my word for it. The table below shows the top 50 receivers in terms of targets from the 2017 season. I have provided the number of targets, receiving yards, yards multiplied by target (and rank), and yards per target (and rank). The table is sorted by yards per target, but it is fully sortable and searchable.

Jarvis Landry, Larry Fitzgerald, Demaryius Thomas, Dez Bryant, DeAndre Hopkins, and Mike Evans are the receivers who ranked at least 20 places higher in (Yards x Target) than in (Yards / Target). Mike Wallace, Stefon Diggs, and Cooper Kupp are the receivers who rank at least 20 places higher in (Yards / Target) than in (Yards x Target).