Guides
How to read a career stat line
Trey McBride caught 111 passes for 1,146 yards in 2024 and finished the season on 243.8 PPR points. Two receiving touchdowns. I would have told you that was a good year badly paid, and I would have been half right.
The next season he caught 126 for 1,239. Fifteen more catches, ninety-three more yards, nothing anyone would call a leap. He scored eleven touchdowns and finished on 315.9.
| Year | GP | Tgt | Rec | Yds | Rec TD | PPR |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2022 | 9 | 39 | 29 | 265 | 1 | 61.5 |
| 2023 | 17 | 106 | 81 | 825 | 3 | 181.5 |
| 2024 | 16 | 147 | 111 | 1,146 | 2 | 243.8 |
| 2025 | 17 | 169 | 126 | 1,239 | 11 | 315.9 |
That is the receiving line from his player page, with the PPR column from the fantasy tab sitting next to it. The whole reason this page exists is that those columns answer two different questions in the same typeface. Volume counts how often somebody touched the ball: targets, catches, carries, attempts, games played. It records what a coaching staff decided to do. Efficiency grades what happened next: yards per catch, yards per carry, touchdowns. Nobody in the building decides those.
I mix them up less than I used to. I still mix them up.
Targets
A target is a choice. Somebody decided he was the read on that play, and the decision gets repeated all season. McBride was thrown at 169 times in 2025. That is a lot of small opinions from the people who watch him at work every day.
I wanted to know whether that holds up rather than just assert it, so I ran it over this site's own career data: every back-to-back pair of seasons since 2016 where the same receiver or tight end saw at least 50 targets and played at least 14 games in both years. That comes to 216 pairs. Only players this site still tracks are in there, so anyone long retired is missing from it. Then I asked how well each column predicts itself twelve months later.
| Column | Year to year |
|---|---|
| Targets per game | 0.70 |
| Yards per target | 0.40 |
| Touchdowns per target | 0.16 |
None of that is a law, and 0.70 leaves a lot of room to be wrong. The ordering is the point. How often he gets the ball repeats. What he does with it repeats less. The touchdowns barely repeat at all.
Michael Pittman is the case I keep coming back to. 129 targets and 1,082 yards for Indianapolis in 2021, then 141 targets and 925 yards in 2022. More work, fewer yards, a season nobody enjoyed owning. In 2023 he saw 156 targets and the yards arrived: 1,152, and 252.2 PPR points, the best year he has had.
The reverse costs money. Pittman's targets fell to 111 in 2024 and everything else went with them.
When two players look level on yards I take the one whose targets are climbing. I could not tell you the size of that edge and I am wary of anyone who quotes you one.
Eight games, 150.1 points
Rashee Rice played eight games in 2025 and scored 150.1 PPR points. In 2023 he played sixteen and scored 212.5. Read only the totals and 2023 wins by a third.
Per game it is 13.3 against 18.8. So which of those seasons would you rather draft off? I take the eight-game one, and it is not close.
The totals column answers what he gave a roster last year. The PPG column next to it answers what he is when he is on the field, and that is the question you are actually asking in August. Both sit on the fantasy tab. I read the second one first, and when games played falls two years running I stop reading the totals altogether.
What the table does not say is why he played eight. It never does.
The rookie row
Kyren Williams as a rookie: 8 games, 35 carries, 139 yards, no touchdowns, 30.5 points for the entire season. The following year he ran for 1,144 yards and 12 touchdowns in 12 games.
McBride's rookie row is in the table above. 39 targets, 265 yards, 61.5 points. Three years later, 169 and 1,239.
A rookie row records a season in which he was frequently not being used yet. That is a fact about a depth chart, not about him. Rookie rows are close to worthless and I would not spend long on one.
Does anybody decline on schedule?
The shape is real enough. Most players are at their best somewhere in their twenties and worse afterwards, and running backs are supposed to be the clearest case of the lot.
Then there is Derrick Henry, born in January 1994, who carried the ball 307 times for Baltimore in 2025 and finished on 279.5 points. Travis Kelce was 35 when that season kicked off and drew 108 targets across 17 games.
Two players do not overturn an age curve and I am not pretending they do. But I have never found a rule about age I would act on without looking at the workload underneath it, and I do not have one now. Age is a chip in the bio line above the table rather than a column in it, and I think that is roughly the weight it deserves.
What the table cannot see
It cannot see the offensive line. It cannot see a coordinator losing his job in November.
Go back to McBride's last two rows. 147 targets and two receiving touchdowns, then 169 targets and eleven. The table records both of those correctly and says nothing whatsoever about why the second one happened. Whether Arizona changed what they did inside the ten, or a run of finishes landed that was never going to repeat, is not a question a row of totals can answer. I lean towards the second and I would not spend a second-round pick on being right.
The numbers are honest. They are just not the whole explanation, and the methodology page is candid about where each of them comes from. Use the table to find the question and go somewhere else for the answer.