What are Air Yards?

If you play NFL DFS, you probably have heard the term air yards. But do you know what they are or why they're important? I'll cover all that and more in this blog post to help you get a full and complete understanding about air yards and how you can use it to your advantage when researching for a DFS slate or player props.  Our NFL receiving stats page provides all the metrics mentioned in this article and more such as red zone targets for free.

Air Yards

The name kind of gives it away but air yards are the amount of yards in the air a player is targeted regardless of the outcome of the play. You calculate air yards by seeing how far a ball is thrown past the line of scrimmage to the intended target. There are two types: complete and incomplete.  

Completed Air Yards

This isn't fancy. Completed air yards are just receiving yards that take out the yards after catch (YAC). If a receiver never gained any yards after a catch, their air yards would match their receiving yards.

Incomplete Air Yards

This is the opposite of completed air yards. For whatever reason a target to a wide receiver didn't turn into a catch, you count the amount of yards the ball traveled from the line of scrimmage. 

You add up the completed and incomplete to get the total air yards for a player. It helps shine a light into who a quarterback is targeting and how they are targeting the player in the game. The higher the number of air yards the more opportunity that receiver has to turn those into actual receiving yards. More on that later.

Why are air yards important?

Air yards correlate highly to fantasy points because in simplest forms it represents opportunity.  If a player only had 30 air yards for a game, their opportunity is limited. Sure they can catch it and run with it getting more yards but the majority of a players yards are at the catch, not after. Now this isn't true for all and positions like RB benefit from massive receiving yards with often times negative air yards because the target is behind the line of scrimmage.

What is aDOT?

aDOT is an abbreviation that means average depth of target. Total Air Yards / Total Targets gives you aDOT. Made popular and known by Mike Clay. It tells us how deep on average a player was targeted down the field. It gives context to the targets and the air yards data we are used to looking at.

What is RACR?

RACR stands for receiver air conversion ratio. This metric was created by Josh Hermsmeyer and is receiving yards / total air yards. It takes into account catch rate and YAC into one simple metric. Josh describes the metric as answering the question:

At the depth of target a player is targeted most, how efficient was he?

What is WOPR?

WOPR stands for weighted opportunity rating. This was another metric from air yards created by Josh. WOPR is a weighted combination of the share of team targets a player receives and the share of team air yards. The formula is: WOPR = 1.5 × Target Market Share + 0.7 × Air Yards Market Share.  Elite wide receivers are seen having 0.70+ WOPRs.

Summary on Air Yards Metrics

Air yards are a great way to understand a receiver's performance. While air yards don't have context applied to them such as "was it catchable" it is the best metric we have that showcases the potential opportunity they had in a game to convert into fantasy production. We are exploring ways here at Add More Funds to apply more context to these air yards to try and make this metric even more helpful when trying to predict future performance since it's a cornerstone stat to help make better predictions moving forward.