Wide receivers have been considered the prima-donna position of the NFL for quite some time. One of the biggest shifts seemed to come in the early 2000s, when players like Terrell Owens and Chad Johnson forced themselves into the spotlight in good times and bad. When they were on, their play spoke for them. When things weren’t going their way, they made sure that the cameras stayed on them due to their overreactions concerning their unsatisfactory situations.
Need we revisit “that’s my quarterback”?
With the value of the position rising over the past two decades, it is not surprising to see WRs continue to get more attention. When players started looking for contract extensions the year before their previous contract expired, it was viewed as heresy. Today, it is commonplace. Heading into 2024, Ja’Marr Chase was looking for a contract extension two years before his contract was set to expire. If not for playing for the perpetually frugal Bengals, there is a good chance he may have gotten it. With the idea already being floated, it will probably not be long before more players try to employ the same tactic.
Superstar players trying to protect themselves financially in such a brutal sport is understandable. But just recently we have seen two WRs entirely skip the practice of holding-out or holding-in and take it to an entirely new level. Instead of acting like professionals, they just decided to passive-aggressively skip practice entirely without notifying their teams of their intentions.
In the case of Romeo Doubs, the Packers feared something had happened to him, and sent people to his house to check on him. Green Bay then suspended Doubs for the following game after the stunt. But his ploy seemed to work, as he has become the focal point of the Packers’ passing game over the past two weeks.
Obviously, we do not know the full scope of Doubs’ situation as outsiders looking in, but the results he is seeing could lead to more players trying this tactic in the future. For the sake of keeping the drama down and focusing on football, let’s hope that’s not the case.
Before we get into the latest information available in the Advanced Stats Explorer, just a few quick reminders about the article.
- Leading up to the season, I looked at the five years of data available in the Advanced Stats Explorer and broke it down into four separate articles: Routes and Targets, Intended Air Yards, Yards After the Catch and Evasion, and Catchable Targets, Drops, First Downs, and Touchdowns.
- When working through the five-year sample, we found that the 90th percentile and above generally included most of the top-24 wide receivers for each metric in any given season. The 75th percentile and above included the top 55 to 60 WRs in any given metric per season. Given that these two cohorts easily apply to a normal 12-team fantasy league, they will be referenced often throughout the article.
In Week 7, the total number of players who earned at least one target during the 2024 season grew to 190 after our Week 6 sample included 182 players.
