(Leading up to the 2021 NFL season, FTN’s Tyler Loechner will dive into the fantasy football numbers to bring you his Fantasy Stat of the Day, five days a week.)

In Wednesday’s Stat of the Day article, we wrote about the RBs who were able to elude the most tackles per touch. (Not surprisingly, advanced stat king Nick Chubb topped that chart.)

Today’s piece will look at the WRs that cause the most forced missed tackles per touch. A few of the fantasy community’s favorite targets sit atop this list.

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Fan favorites Laviska Shenault, A.J. Brown are the most elusive WRs

The chart below shows last season’s RB leaders sorted by forced missed tackles per touch (minimum 100 total touches).

PlayerTouchesForced Missed TacklesForced Missed Tackles Per Touch
Laviska Shenault76220.29
A.J. Brown70170.24
Darnell Mooney65150.23
D.J. Moore68150.22
Cordarrelle Patterson84180.21
Brandon Aiyuk66140.21
Cooper Kupp96200.21
DK Metcalf83160.19
DeAndre Hopkins116220.19
Josh Reynolds53100.19
Tyreek Hill100180.18
Jerry Jeudy5290.17
Terry McLaurin89150.17
Curtis Samuel118190.16
Hunter Renfrow5690.16
Julio Jones5180.16
Stefon Diggs128190.15
Chase Claypool72100.14
Calvin Ridley95130.14
Russell Gage74100.14

Fantasy favorite Shenault crushed this study, lapping the field in forced missed tackles per touch. Shenault could be a legitimate fantasy stud as early as 2021 — assuming Trevor Lawrence picks up NFL-level play as fast as he’s expected to. For now, D.J. Chark remains the WR1 in Jacksonville, but Viska is lurking. This visualization helps you see how much better Shenault was than the field:

Behind Shenault is another fantasy fan favorite in A.J. Brown. Brown is viewed as more of a big, dominant WR, so seeing him rank up there with shifty guys like Shenault, Darnell Mooney, D.J. Moore, Cordarrelle Patteron, Brandon Aiyuk, and the like just goes to show how special and unique Brown is. He’s going to be a fantasy WR1 for a long, long time, though that might hit a temporary snag with Julio Jones now in Tennessee as well (Brown is still no less than a solid WR2 with Jones). 

Speaking of Aiyuk, the rookie was a fantasy league-winner in 2020 — but his hype isn’t as high as it would be during a normal offseason. That’s because the San Francisco 49ers have a question mark at QB and are expecting the return of Deebo Samuel and George Kittle, both of whom could realistically see more targets than Aiyuk in 2021. At the same time, Aiyuk proved capable of being a WR1 target hog — so it’s plausible he remains the team’s top dog in 2021. Exactly how the target tree shapes up in San Francisco has huge fantasy implications.

An interesting thought when looking at this data: This list shows the top 20 WRs based on forced missed tackles per touch, but the bottom of the list is significantly behind the top of the list. Calvin Ridley and Chase Claypool averaged 0.14 forced missed tackles per touch — good enough to rank in the top 20 among WRs — but still only half as many as the players at the top of the list.

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