Fantasy Football Stat of the Day: The leaders in passer rating when targeted

Tyler Loechner

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(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.)

This week’s Stat of the Day pieces have been exploring “boom” plays for pass-catchers with a look at WRs that scored the most deep TDs and the TEs that accomplished similar feats in 2020.

Today, we’ll stick with the trend of looking at receiver stats, but this time we’ll look at WRs that help their QBs the most in the passer rating department.

Your WR doesn’t directly score any fantasy points for helping his QB earn a high rating — but maybe you can argue the points are indirect, because a high rating usually correlates to high trust, and therefore high volume.

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Chris Godwin and Mike Evans both ranked in the top 10 — and so did A.J. Brown and Julio Jones

The chart below shows the 20 WRs (min. 50 targets) from 2020 who had the highest QB rating when targeted. So for example, Tom Brady had a QB rating of 131.1 when targeting Chris Godwin last year.

Player	Targets	Recs.	Yds.	TDs	Passer Rating When Targeted
Davante Adams	150	115	1374	18	135.8
Will Fuller	76	53	879	8	132.5
Chris Godwin	84	65	840	7	131.1
Tyreek Hill	134	87	1276	15	130.1
A.J. Brown	106	70	1073	11	126.0
Mike Evans	109	70	989	13	125.5
Julio Jones	70	51	771	3	123.0
Tre’Quan Smith	50	34	448	4	122.8
Adam Thielen	108	74	925	14	122.6
Corey Davis	93	65	984	5	122.3
Tyler Lockett	132	100	1054	10	120.6
Rashard Higgins	52	37	599	4	119.0
Mecole Hardman	62	41	560	4	116.3
Laviska Shenault	79	58	600	5	116.0
Nelson Agholor	82	48	896	8	113.7
Justin Jefferson	125	88	1400	7	112.8
Stefon Diggs	168	127	1535	8	111.6
Emmanuel Sanders	82	61	726	5	111.1
John Brown	52	33	458	3	110.9
DK Metcalf	129	83	1303	10	110.7

A few thoughts from this list:

Sorting by passer rating when targeted did a fantastic job of surfacing some of the best WRs in the league, both in real life and for fantasy.
Will Fuller was dominant prior to his suspension last season. He could be a real steal in 2021 fantasy drafts.
Chris Godwin and Mike Evans both ranked in the top 10 last season in this metric — but they weren’t the only teammates to accomplish this feat. A.J. Brown and Corey Davis also both ranked in the top 10, as did Brown’s new teammate, Julio Jones.
Potential rising stars Mecole Hardman and Laviska Shenault both ranked the top 15 in this metric last season. Considering the company they kept on this metric, there’s definitely legitimate reason for optimism.