Making decisions in your dynasty rookie drafts can be incredibly tough. Especially when you are forced to choose between two players you like or even two players you don’t know much about. There are a few factors that can sometimes help break the tie and make this decision much easier. One of them is a player’s yards per team pass attempt (Y/TPA) from their best college season. This metric is mainly for wide receivers, but can also be applied to running backs with yards per team play. But what are yards per team pass attempt and how can it help us? Let’s find out below.
What is Yards Per Team Pass Attempt?
Yards per team pass attempt is exactly how it sounds. It is a metric that measures a player’s receiving yards in relation to their team’s pass attempts. This metric is used intuitively because it helps to give context to a player’s receiving yards. If player A has 1000 receiving yards while player B has 500 you may think player A is better to have. But, if player A is on a team with 800 pass attempts and player B is on a team with 250 pass attempts this matters. Player A would have a Y/TPA of 1.25, while player B earned a Y/TPA of 2.0.
But, what is so special about having a higher Y/TPA? How can this help us make decisions in our rookie drafts?
Well, having a high Y/TPA is a good thing. It typically means you were more productive at your position relative to your teammates. Being better than your teammates means a lot in college, if you cannot earn targets against college players how will you earn them against NFL players? This stat also does another thing. By giving context to a raw number like yards we can compare prospects across schools. In our example above, initially, we’d prefer player A. However, when using Y/TPA we can see that player B was more impactful to his team and is likely a better player.
Now, this single stat can still not capture all the context needed when evaluating these prospects. But, it is a step in the right direction and still a useful tool. You just have to remember to use the rest of your tools as well when making selections in a rookie draft. For now, let us see how useful this exact tool is when paired with draft capital.
Why does having a high Y/TPA matter?
I have amassed a database of rookie profiles that include all drafted and some undrafted wide receivers since 2013. With this database, I have grouped both the players who had a Y/TPA above 2.9 and those who did not. I chose 2.9 through the use of regression analysis that I cannot get into right now so you will just have to trust me. I chose to cut off my sample after round three because historically those hit rates are already sub-par. We can cover that in another article.
First, we will look at the standard hit rates for draft capital tiers. These are the day one and day two players. I am calling any player who has scored 10 or more PPR points per game (ppg) over their career a hit and any player who missed that mark a miss. In dynasty, we want sustained production and ppg over a career seemed to be the fairest way to evaluate that. The bottom row holds the players that I have not declared as a hit or a miss yet due to lack of games played. They are undecided. We can see here that on average, players drafted on day two ‘hit’ at a 45.6% rate. While players drafted on day one hit at about a 65% rate.
In the above chart, I have divided the day two and day one players who did and did not reach my 2.9 Y/TPA threshold. First, we can see that players drafted on day two and did not hit the threshold miss at a higher rate. This is good because we can use it to determine which day two guys to avoid drafting. Down below we can see the group of players that were drafted on day two but did hit my 2.9 threshold. These players hit at a higher rate than just draft capital would say and almost a 20% higher rate than the players that missed the threshold.
On the right side is where we see the good information. Our day one players typically miss at a 35% rate. However, when you add Y/TPA to the mix you get large increases. For players that were drafted on day one and do not hit the Y/TPA threshold, they miss at double the rate, almost 70%. This can be used as a great indicator for which first-round picks we should not be taking shots on. Then, if we look below at the players drafted on day one who did hit my threshold we see a similar story. The hit rate of these wide receivers jumps from 64.5% up to an 89% hit rate. We should all be heavily targeting first-round wide receivers who also hit or exceed the 2.9 Y/TPA mark.
Conclusion
Yards per team pass attempt is a useful tool that adds context to an otherwise unrelatable stat. It can provide good insight on its own, but when paired with draft capital it provides great insight. The ability to find a group of players that hit at close to a 90% rate using only two metrics is a certifiable cheat code. This may only count for a few players each year but sometimes they can leak into the late first or even early second round. An example of this in 2021 was Rashod Bateman (WR – BAL), who reached both of these marks but was constantly drafted in the late first-round and early second-round. Come with me as we learn more ways to use analytics to take advantage of these instances and build a true dynasty.
Wow, you read all the way through! Thank you, I really appreciate you using your time to enjoy my content. If you would like to talk to me about my article or ask me any generic dynasty or trade questions, you can find me on Twitter @ChrisMiles1017, DFF Draft Director. Shoot me a DM, they are always open. Come join the #DFFArmy where I provide #Dynasty, #Redraft, #Rankings, and #Analytics content for @DFF_Dynasty. Thank you so much!
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