The Weapon Score: Who has help, and who is doing it alone?
Introducing a new metric—Weapons—for measuring the breadth of talent in a receiving corps.
Tom Brady is the GOAT. He won the most Super Bowls and holds all the records. That alone is impressive. What is more impressive, is that the records he accumulated, we largely credit him with achieving without much help.
Apart from a few Randy Moss seasons, and a smattering of Gronk, Brady was making do with good, but unserious receivers. Receivers that would have found themselves moving down the depth chart on other teams.
The opposite of this effect what Patrick Mahomes first years in the league. The roster was stacked. Sammy Watkins—who had come into the league with back to back 900 and 1,000 yard receiving seasons was the third-best option on the team. Ahed of him were all-pros: Tyreek Hill and Travis Kelce.
The difference, colloquially, is something football fans refer to as “weapons”. That is: some quarterbacks, some teams have weapons and some do not.
Why you would want weapons—good receivers and tight ends—is obvious. The better players can get open more, giving the quarterback more obvious throws. The better players put more pressure on the defense, forcing the defense onto its back foot—preventing blitzes and aggressive play calling. Better weapons make an offense better.
But it is not clear how we would go about assessing who has weapons and who doesn’t. In this post, we propose a Weapons metric, that attempts to measure just this.
Weapons Baselines
Before we discuss the weapons metric that is, it’s important to think about a few metrics that we could have chosen, but did not:
Total Receiving Yards
+wEPA/Pass
Avg. Yards/Route Run
Receiving yards is the natural default here. It’s a counting metric, very easy to understand, and very common. But it has a big flaw—and this flaw will become something of a pattern—it is not clear from the number of receiving yards who should get credit. Should all the credit go to the quarterback?
What if a team has one great receiver and a bunch of duds? That team doesn’t really have “weapons” plural—they have just one. How can we assess how good that is, versus a more balanced line up?
Similar, EPA per pass would give us a good idea about how effective a team’s passing game is—but we wouldn’t really understand where to place credit. The measure includes a lot of things, one of which is receiver skill. But it doesn’t do a good job of approximating it.
And lastly, Avg. Yards per Route Run. This is another intuitive metric, but it suffers from an embedded bias problem. When teams use formations with more wide receivers—as they may when they have more good weapons—the average yards per route run of each receiver goes down.
That is, more weapons becomes more wide-receiver heavy sets and more passing. But that same effect actually decreases the yards per route run of all the receivers—who are running more routes and getting the ball less, because the weapons across the team are better.
So all in all, none of these metrics quite fit the bill…
Introducing the Weapons metric
Note: The formula for Weapons was originally misstated as the square of the product of the squares of the targets of a team’s second and third best receivers. The formula has been corrected.
So we are introducing a new measure, fit for purpose. The weapons metric is calculated by multiplying the total receiving yards of a team’s best receiver, by the square-root of the product of the number of targets of their second and third best receivers. This total, is then divided by 10,000 to give a number that is easier to compare.
Calculating this for all teams and all seasons from 2015 to 2022, we find that a weapon score of 64 is about average, with anything over 95 good (top 25%) and anything below 40 bad (bottom 25%).
The best set of weapons, according to this metric, was on the 2022 Minnesota Vikings. All-Pro Justin Jefferson lead the receiving corps, which included Adam Thielen—a reliable All-Pro-level player in the number two spot—and feisty K.J. Obsborn as the third option.
The worst was a 2015 Chicago Bears team that didn’t have a single receiver over 1,000 yards.
This metric passes the intuition test—with several of the top receiving corps getting elite grades. We can also justify it logically.
Including the yards of the top receiver stands in as a proxy for how difficult the team is to cover. An elite receiver who gets a ton of yards is evidence of an effective receiving group. But that alone is not enough. We can easily imagine situations where a single receiver may be unguardable, but everyone else is horrid. Consider the 2018 Houston Texas with DeAndre Hopkins. Hopkins was first-team All-Pro, but no other receiver caught a ball in more than 10 games. That’s not having weapons—that’s having exactly one weapon.
To account for this, we include the number of times the number two and number three receivers were targeted—as the square root of the sum of squares. This method of averaging punishes teams for having a decent two, but a terrible three; rewarding teams for having two good secondary options.
Elite Units
One of the interesting things we can do with Weapons score is to look at which teams have the best receiving corps. Unsurprisingly, the Steelers—who are famed for being able to replace elite receivers like Antonio Brown without interruption—top the list. Minnesota and Atlanta—two traditional passing powers—also top the list. Fantasy owners will know many of the top Pittsburgh, Minnesota, and Atlanta receivers.
And rounding out the top six come Kansas City—no doubt buoyed by the impressive receiving group that ignited the Mahomes era—the L.A. Rams, who spent heavily on their receivers, and Tampa, whose receiving prowess was enough to persuade Tom Brady to move on from his only team: New England.
Basement Dwellers
Then, of course, we have the opposite of the elite units: the teams that can never quite figure out how to put together a receiving corps. Houston and Tennessee top the list of worst teams. Houston, which we talked about already, had Hopkins and no one else; while Tennessee is a running power, led by Derrick Henry. A passing game in Tennessee would be a welcome change—but it’s not in the cards.
Chicago has never been able to pass, so it’s no surprise to find them on this list. And the Jets don’t seem to have talent anywhere on the offensive side.
The 49ers are a surprise—because of their current composition—but their passing game was an afterthought with Kapernick and Garappolo up until recently. Run-first coaches in Chip Kelley and Kyle Shannahan likely contributed to that.
Lastly, the Baltimore Ravens round out the list. Another defense and running team—in the style of Chicago and San Francisco. Most years since 2015, Baltimore has not had a 1,000 yard receiver.
New England, it is notable finishes just ahead of this group, seven from the bottom with a score of 58.
How to use the Weapons metric?
The Weapons metric was made for purpose—identifying which teams have good “weapons” and which don’t—so it’s only right to finish with an explanation of how this metric should be used.
Some good ways one could use this metric would be:
Evaluate the effectiveness of general managers in assembling an offense
Estimate the credit a quarterback deserves for passing success (or lack thereof)
Evaluate the likely passing success following significant receiver changes
Track overall receiving corps health
In the future, we’ll try to do some of these—especially items 2 and 3—as we evaluate quarterbacks and teams.