In this weekly article, Bjorn Yang-Vaernet uses the Advanced Stat Explorer and other RotoViz tools to dive deep into wide receiver usage trends. Usage is key for making waiver wire adds, start/sit decisions, and finding the next blow-up WR in DFS.

Writing this article each week is a fun deep dive into all the WR situations throughout the league. Finding the players that should break out but haven’t yet, is very rewarding. However, the variance in a one game sample is very high and sometimes these underlying trends aren’t able to even out from one week to the next. For every D.K. Metcalf call I had leading into Week 3, there have also been the Stefon Diggs blurb of Week 4. In short, elite usage tends to lead to elite production and following the usage should always give us the best chance of winning in the long run.

With that, let’s see what WRs are trending up and down heading into Week 7.

Routes Run and Routes per Target

Routes run is the first key statistic I’ll focus on because WRs need to be on the field to produce. The second statistic is routes per target. Unlike RBs usage, targets are earned as a WR and routes per target is a helpful measure in figuring out which players are good (or which players coaches want to get the ball to).