Buyer Beware: 2015 WR TD Ratios that are tough to maintain

Torrey Smith scored TDs at a league leading pace last year. Can he keep that up in San Francisco? (Photo: Rob Carr/Getty Images North America).

There are players in the league who catch touchdowns more often than others, this much we know. However, there are also players who have exceptional years crossing the chalk and then find themselves struggling to repeat in subsequent seasons. Catching a touchdown once every six balls in the NFL is an impressive feat – but because it is so impressive it is one that is difficult to repeat.

As fantasy owners, we should avoid paying an expectant price based on a stat that is unlikely to be repeated. Because touchdowns have such a significant impact on fantasy scoring, a player with an inflated TD ratio could be in for a significant fall if he can’t keep that up. With that in mind, I’ve identified a few of the top candidates for regression.

This view is overly simplistic, to be sure, as there are a number of factors that go into a player’s production and in his likelihood to catch a touchdown, but, it does paint one part of the picture when trying to predict future performance.

Below, you’ll find the top-25 Reception/TD ratios from the NFL last year after accounting for players who caught fewer than 25 balls a season ago (Jordy Nelson and Kelvin Benjamin were excluded) with a reference to their overall line, and their 2013 TD ratio. In cases where the contrast is glaring… we’ll highlight that, and talk a bit about the player.

Simply: guys who caught a lot of TDs relative to their overall number of catches last year may be candidates for overall fantasy regression, particularly if they haven’t done so before.

2015 WR TD Ratios

Again, the analysis could stand to go a little deeper here… but, in short, if a guy has a negative number in the far right column it means that his 2014 number of receptions for every TD (like AB/HR in baseball) was higher than his mark the prior year (suggesting on a year-to-year comparison basis it’s likely to regress a bit this season). If we can’t project more catches for a player, or worse yet, if we’re projecting less it could mean that lesser fantasy production is to follow.

The Rookies

You’ve got a few guys with the ‘dreaded dash’ next to their name in the tables above. Jeremy Maclin and Malcom Floyd find themselves in this group, with the former an already identified target for regression given that he is leaving an Eagles team that threw 21 TDs to receivers last year for a team that threw 0. Moreover, though, the rookies are tough to project. Some players, given size, explosiveness, red zone separation skills, and hands are natural candidates over the course of their career to catch a high proportion of touchdowns for every reception (i.e. Dez Bryant, Brandon Marshall, Randall Cobb who won’t be discussed here) while some need an abnormal combination of good luck and red zone targets to post a high number.

That’s the group we’re trying to identify here, the ‘lucky’ ones who aren’t likely to repeat… and with the rookies, we don’t have a book on them.

Here’s what we know about Mike Evans and Odell Beckham Jr., though. They have the size, catch radius and hands to be relied upon as consistent options and as such should be trusted to produce in their second seasons. Evans, however, has an inconsistent first year QB lining up under center and took one of every 5.67 catches to the house last year including a number of long scores. His ratio, and his overall production could be much harder to reproduce than Beckham’s, and he thus represents a bigger risk as a bet to finish as a top-10 WR. His upside, remains, however.

With Jordan Matthews, John Brown (and Allen Hurns, if you’re interested) the case is much less clear. Matthews is a good bet to see an increase in targets this season, and Maclin takes 10 of the above-noted 21 WR touchdowns with him in his departure from Philly, so I wouldn’t consider his production at risk. As for Brown, again, he has sleeper written all over him and with 26 targets over 20 yards last year and more projected in 2015, he’ll have the opportunity to take some deep balls to the house as well, but, as a guy who caught right around 50% of his targets in his rookie season and then took one of every 9.6 of them to the house, he too is a candidate for a step backward in scoring. Fix his catch rate and increase his targets a bit, and his overall scoring should go up. If he fails in either area, however, he’ll have a hard time improving on a WR47 ranking on 48 receptions.

The Top Two

Torrey Smith‘s 2013 was disastrous from a scoring perspective, while he righted the ship in that area in 2014 with 11 touchdowns. A fair projection of a 2015 number obviously lies somewhere in the middle of his 16.25 Rec/TD mark from 2013 and his league best 4.45 mark from last year. Something right around the middle, say, 1/10 catches is a score has him on pace for a 6-7 TD season in San Francisco with the potential to finish somewhere around 1,000 yards assuming Colin Kaepernick can hold up his end of the bargain. That’s roughly 140 fantasy points, which would match last year’s total but requires an additional 20 receptions from a wideout whose targets aren’t expected to rise dramatically in San Fran, and who has a QB who gave away two percentage points in terms of completion percentage last year.

Elsewhere, Terrance Williams‘ penchant for the big play as a rookie carried over to his second season, so his 4.63 mark isn’t quite as alarming as Smith’s, but those calling for a breakout season need to bear in mind that Dallas is still going to run more often than they pass and thus his targets shouldn’t spike dramatically. It’ll be hard to produce another 8 score season on less than 40 catches, too.

Both Smith and Williams are coming off the board as WR3s in and around rounds 9 and 10, so, they aren’t overwhelmingly risky picks but the path to upside is less enticing if they are scoring at lesser rates.

Elsewhere, the list is full of a lot of big names who’ve proven themselves as fantasy producers (i.e. Antonio Brown and Demaryius Thomas rounding out the list) so you shouldn’t be troubled, but, when contemplating changing roles and/or workloads for players like Michael Floyd, Kendall Wright and DeSean Jackson, and changing sceneries for Eddie Royal and Hakeem Nicks, the ratio is something to be aware of from both an upside and downside perspective.

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