Key Fantasy Football Data from Week 1

September 15, 2021

Jon Anderson provides key fantasy football data, stats and charts from Week 1. Analyze the snaps, touches, opportunities and other key NFL metrics for fantasy.

Hello RotoBaller! I'm Jon Anderson, dipping my toes in the NFL waters. If you've read me on here before, you were reading about my specialty - fantasy baseball. I decided to take a crack at this NFL stuff here and the RotoBaller editing team graciously gave me a chance.

I'm not going to pretend to be a fantasy football expert. I am just a dude that is good with generating and publishing useful data on the Internet. Since the fantasy game is truly all about numbers, I feel I can contribute.

In this series of posts that will run once a week on Wednesdays, I will be throwing a bunch of numbers at you and letting you do the rest. I am going to do my best to keep the data interpretation to a minimum. This is intended to just be a good one-stop-shop for you to get the data you're interested in for each NFL week. The post will hopefully evolve into something better as the year goes on, but I'll do my best with the limited data we have right now. Let's get into it!

Team Data

We'll show this table every week, and starting in a couple of weeks we'll start showing season averages as well as weekly. What you see here is a sortable and searchable table of how many plays each team ran along with the breakdown of rushing and passing.

I've also included "neutral situation" statistics, which is defined as situations that fit the following criteria:

• The offensive team's win probability is between 25% and 75%
• The play was run on first down
• The play was run on second down and less than eight yards to go
• The play was run on third down and less than four yards to go

Limiting our data to this criteria, I think, gives us a decent idea of what a team prefers to do. In these situations, it makes sense to rush or pass - so the game environment is stripped away to some extent.

I have also included the deep and short pass rates. I defined deep passes as attempts that traveled more than 25 yards in the air, and I defined short pass attempts as less than 10 air yards. This gives us an idea of which passing offenses are playing most and least aggressively through the air. Okay enough talking, here's the data:

Plays run is pretty dependent on the game situation. That stat alone doesn't tell you a ton, especially when isolating just one week. We'll learn more from that after we have a handful of weeks in the books.

The 49ers led the league in neutral situation rush rate at 73%, and they also were near the bottom of the league in deep pass attempts at just 0.04% of their pass attempts going more than 25 yards in the air. This aligns with what we expected from the 49ers, so we probably shouldn't buy much into the big passing stats they put up this week. The Saints, Jets, Colts, Packers, and Ravens round out the top six in neutral rush rate, which is something we more or less expected from those squads.

The pass heaviest teams were the Cowboys, Panthers, Giants, Bucs, and Broncos. From that handful of teams, only the Panthers cracked the top ten in deep pass rate. That may be a team that airs it out a bit more than they have in the past this year with new starter Sam Darnold and the deep threats of Robby Anderson and DJ Moore.

You can sort through the table to find more!

Player Data - Snaps

Here we will check on snaps data every week. You can't score fantasy points if you're not on the field, so this is a logical first play to go to when looking at players. Here's the table, as always you can search for a player or a team with the search box:

The snap king of the week was probably Najee Harris, who did not leave the field in his NFL debut. He was a popular top 20 pick this year, and despite his mediocre fantasy score in week one, things are looking up. If you're getting that much opportunity as a running back it's going to be very tough to fail, so this was a great sign for the Steelers new running back. You see a trio of receivers there that also played every snap, including Darnell Mooney which was a bit of a surprise (at least to me!).

The best way to check this is probably to search by team abbreviation and see how it breaks down, as there are a ton of rows in that table. See what you can find!

Player Data - Touches

We define "touches" as rushing attempts plus receptions. I've included this data as well as how it broke down between rushes and receptions, with their average yardage on both. Here you go:

Joe Mixon led the way here with a rush 29 rush attempts and four catches. That is absolutely huge for his fantasy stock and he should be an easy RB1 if that continues (but of course it's not guaranteed to continue so stay tuned).

Some other (possibly) unexpected names that had encouraging touch counts: Mark Ingram, Damien Harris, Antonio Gibson, Miles Sanders, Elijah Mitchell, D'Andre Swift, Darrell Henderson.

Player Data - Pass Catcher Opportunity

Here is probably the most interesting table we have here. In this one, I've included targets, receptions, reception yards, air yards, and an average depth of target (ADoT). Simply sorting by air yards is a good way to see which pass catchers had the most opportunity this week. You would prefer a ton of targets with a lower ADoT to a huge ADoT on a low amount of targets, but both are good and should result in a plethora of fantasy points. Here's the table.

Darren Waller might be trying to give Travis Kelce a run for his money racking up 19 targets and 203 air yards on Monday Night. That's likely to be one of the biggest target games we'll see all year, a huge start for Waller even with the discouraging catch rate of 53% (10 catches on 19 targets).

Some other air yards notables: DJ Chark (199), CeeDee Lamb (159), Emmanuel Sanders (149), Brandin Cooks (132), Anthony Schwartz (126), Corey Davis (118).

Player Data - Passers Data

This one is pretty self-explanatory, especially here at the end of the post. Here's some data on the quarterbacks from week one:

Derek Carr had to throw the ball a ton on Monday Night, and that propelled him to the league lead in air yards thrown.

The highest average depths of pass attempt went to Baker Mayfield, Russell Wilson, Derek Carr, and Zach Wilson, although you can see how bunched up these numbers get.

You can once against see how outrageously efficient Jimmy Garoppolo and the 49ers were on Sunday as he racked up a beautiful 12.6 yards per attempt despite a really low 6.5 average depth of attempt. It was yards after catch city for San Francisco on Sunday, and it will be hard for them to run that pure in terms of efficiency again this year.

That's what I've got for week one, we'll have a lot more next week! Since this column is still in the development process, I am more than willing to take suggestions on data to include next week. Hit me up @JonPGH on Twitter with suggestions!

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