Tape Tells All: Is D.J. Moore Back?

Welcome back to Tape Tells All, the weekly series where I look at film and data for something that happened in the NFL this week.

The Panthers traded Christian McCaffrey, and with McCaffrey gone, D.J. Moore sort of looked like D.J. Moore again, posting his best stat line of the season with seven receptions for 69 yards and a touchdown.

Was it just a fluke? Or is the McCaffrey trade the thing that will spark D.J. Moore back to fantasy relevance? He's likely been lingering on your bench for a few weeks now, with you being too scared to drop him and also too scared to start him. Is this the start of Moore being a weekly WR2 play again like we all expected him to be this season?

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D.J. Moore's Season Pre-McCaffrey Trade

Let's go down a dark path called "remembering the first six games of the season for D.J. Moore."

Over those first six weeks, Moore averaged 3.3 receptions for 34 yards per game, with one total touchdown. His best showing from a yardage perspective game in Week 5, when he had 59 receiving yards, but if you thought that might have been the start of something from Moore, you were quickly disappointed when he had three catches for seven yards the next week.

For comparison sake, last season Moore averaged 5.5 receptions per game for 68.1 yards, and even that was low for him after he'd averaged over 75 yards per game in both 2019 and 2020.

This year's issues had a lot to do with the quarterback position, as Baker Mayfield started the first five games of the season. Mayfield completed just 54.9% of his passes over that span, and of his 153 pass attempts, just 36 went to Moore, as 23.5% target share. Last season, his target share was 28.2%. So, Moore was getting fewer targets, and the ones he was getting were lower in quality than what he was seeing last season.

That helps explain some issues for Moore, but we shouldn't just full excuse Moore for his struggles. Per PlayerProfiler, Moore ranks pretty low in a lot of efficiency stats. He's 72nd in yards per reception and 63rd in true catch rate, and he's recorded 61 yards after the catch this season, which ranks 69th among wide receivers. Last season, he was 12th in yards after the catch.

Moore just hasn't really looked like the electric player that we've seen in the past.

D.J. Moore's Performance Against Tampa In Week 7

But against the Buccaneers on Sunday, we finally got to see something out of Moore, as he had his best game of the NFL season. The big question though is how sustainable is this? Did Christian McCaffrey getting traded unlock something in how Moore is used by this offense? Was P.J. Walker being the QB part of it? Or was this just a fluke and Moore will recede into the background after this game?

The uncertainty at quarterback makes it a little tough to judge just what to think here. There was a clear effort to get the ball to Moore on Sunday, as he saw 10 of the team's 22 targets, with no other player getting more than three targets. The running back duo of Chuba Hubbard and D'Onta Foreman combined for five targets, whereas last week with McCaffrey still on the team, the backs combined for nine of the team's 21 targets.

A clear issue here: there aren't a lot of targets to go around with Walker starting. In his five starts, the Baker Mayfield Panthers averaged 30.6 attempts per game. In the two Walker starts, the team has averaged 21.5 targets. If Mayfield—or Sam Darnold—reclaims the starting role, there's a chance we see this team going to the air more.

But Moore has averaged 8.5 targets and a 39.5% target share in the two games Walker has started. In the first five games, he averaged 7.4 targets still, but when you add in the additional volume coming from this offense then, he was only seeing 23.3% of the team's targets. And one of those targets came from Walker, who played the final series against the 49ers.

Anyway, that's a lot of setup to say something really short: Moore had a good game, but there are worrying signs because of the QB position and the nature of this offense that make it tough to project that he's "back."

...

Oh, yeah, this is "Tape Tells All." Let's look at D.J. Moore playing football.

This game was a reminder that when he's getting targets, D.J. Moore is a good football player. He can make some things happen in the deep passing game, though we also need to worry about how many deep looks he can get in this offense. He's fourth among NFL wide receivers in air yard share with 39.4% of the Panthers air yards, but he's only 24th among receivers in total air yards, highlighting just how seldom the Panthers are actually looking down the field.

Last season, for context, Moore dominated his team's air yard share around the level he has this year (39.9% then), but he was fifth among all NFL receivers in total air yards.

Sunday's game reminded us of what D.J. Moore's capable of. But moving forward, we have to wonder what the Panthers offense as a whole is capable of, because that really impacts how many opportunities Moore will have. Not having to compete with Christian McCaffrey for targets should be a pretty big help, but he's still going to have to deal with subpar QB play.

D.J. Moore Fantasy Value

Look, Moore was maybe a WR4 play before the McCaffrey trade, and in the first post-McCaffrey game, he looked like the consistent receiver that he was expected to be this season, which would make him a weekly WR2 play.

But with all the limitations of the Panthers offense, I'm not ready to say that Moore's "back" in the sense that the word "back" would imply. But because McCaffrey is gone, I would expect Moore to at least garner more targets per gone, so he's not the absolute avoid that he was before.

So, let's split the difference for now. I'm comfortable saying that Moore's a WR3 with upside. I'm not going to go out of my way to try to buy low on him right now because the offensive situation in Carolina worries me too much, but if he's on my roster already, I won't be as reluctant to play him.

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