2019 NFL Draft Wide Receiver Review - Dominator Rating vs. "ROI"

NFL Action in Less than 1 Month!

NFL football kicks off August 1st when Denver takes on Atlanta in the first preseason game of 2019 and so it's a  great time to review some of the NFL's newest players selected in the Player Draft held this past April.  

This space focuses on receivers and so we will take the time to compare and contrast players drafted based on the following performance metrics:

Dominator Rating 

Dominator Rating, or "DR" measures the average of a player’s percentage of team receiving yards and percentage of team receiving touchdowns.  From online sources, this concept was brought to the internet mainstream by the guys at Rotoviz.com.  They admit the Dominator moniker is not a promise the player will dominate at the next level, but an apt description of how the player dominated his team's passing game.  A DR > 50% would suggest NFL superstar potential (top 10 draft pick) for a prospect, 40%-50% would suggest a player worthy of a top 20 pick, 35%-40% indicates late first round,early second, and so on.
In looking at evaluating receivers I felt such a measure would be great at isolating potential NFL prospects for further review...but something didn't feel right.  Just because a player was targeted more frequently, did that mean he was the best player on the field in the passing game?  Maybe he was the guy because he it was his turn as a senior or maybe the coach just liked him or maybe he had the hype going into the season and running the passing game through him would keep the team on the news. And there were rarely diamonds in the rough to uncover with DR...the players were widely know because they were at the top of the stats columns.  A guy could be responsible for 50% of his teams receiving yards and receiving TDs but maybe they were force feeding him and there were other, more efficient options available who were outside the limelight. But how would you find those guys?

Return on Investment

Return on Investment or "ROI" seeks to uncover just what the name implies...if I invest a passing target in getting the ball to a receiver, what kind of output in terms of production am I going to get from him?  Starting with the basic concept of the DR, the percentage of his team's receiving yards a player generates, ROI goes deeper,  comparing also the percentage of his team's receptions the receiver converts from his targets.  The player's Return on Investment is compared to other players and, unlike DR, the players are tiered based on distribution using standard deviation; therefore, there is no fixed ranking scale.  The number is absolute in that it tells us exactly how much more production a player generated from his opportunities compared to the average receiver. 

As an efficiency measure,  the impact of high volume receivers is eliminated because ROI is based on rates.  However, to weed out one dimensional deep threat players, only receivers with reception totals greater than 1 standard deviation below the mean are included (the "Sammy Coates rule").   

Unlike DR, this metric ignores touchdowns because there are many factors contributing to a score that may not be directly influenced by the receiver (play design, downfield blocks, blown coverages, etc).  Not that touchdowns are considered useless, as Reception to Touchdown ratio is also monitored in overall receiver evaluation.  

DR vs ROI

So let's compare receivers drafted in the 2019 NFL Player Draft based on these two measures.  First let's look at the top DR players (the numbers below exclude RB statistics which is a requirement for ROI).

Round = NFL Draft Round selected; Overall = Overall Pick. DR=Dominator Rating; ROI = Return on Investment

The players are ranked based on the distribution with the color code key, below:

The table above shows the top-ranked receivers by DR starting with Andy Isabella at 52.1% going to the bottom tier of the range of 30% (held by undrafted Terren Encalade of Tulane).

From the above, there were 32 FBS players in the 2019 draft with DRs > 30%.  

1. Of those, 13 were drafted with an average draft position of 135.1 (40.6%).
2.  Twelve were offered contracts as Undrafted Free Agents (37.5%).
3.  Seven are still awaiting NFL opportunities (21.9%)

• Isabella projects to be of superstar ilk, based on DR alone. 
• Of course, many factors go into player selection, but when it came to mapping DR to draft position, Marquise Brown nailed it by going late 1st rounder with a DR of 35.2%.
• Jamarius Way, who has good size at 6'3" 215 lbs was the highest DR player (39.1% for late 1st/early 2nd round consideration) to go undrafted, possibly hindered by a less than spectacular Combine and coming out of a small program.
• Players who were consistent in terms of tier ranking for both DR and ROI are:
•  Outstanding:  Hakeem Butler
• Above Average: Antoine Wesley, Marquise Brown, Travis Fulgham, Marcus Green and Johnathan Boone. 

Now let's take a look at this from an ROI perspective:

Per the Sammie Coates Rule, the list above excludes players with less than 42 receptions, so some of your favorites may be missing. 

The table above shows the top-ranked receivers by ROI starting with Damion Willis (6'3" 204 lbs)  formerly of Troy who provided a return of 58.1% more production than expected based on his share of targets, receptions and yards. ROI considers all receivers greater than 1 deviation above the mean (compared to the 30% cutoff for DR)  so Marquise Brown rounds out the list with 15.1% ROI.

From the above, there were 25 FBS players in the 2019 draft with above-average or better ROI .  

1. Of those, 11 were drafted with an average draft position of 147.2 (44%).
2.  Eleven were offered contracts as Undrafted Free Agents (44%).
3.  Three are still awaiting NFL opportunities (12%)

• CIN also picked a high ROI and DR players in Tyler Boyd and Josh Malone so it's no surprise they went with Willis. 
•  The highest ROI guy not on the DR list is Olabisi Johnson who was drafted in the 7th round.
• Interestingly, the three who are not currently on teams qualified for both the DR and ROI recognition tiers (Campbell Jr, M. Williams and Boone) - maybe one will get a shot to latch on somewhere. 
•  There are eight ROI players who did not make the DR list:
• Drafted: Johnson (#247), Jennings Jr (#120) and Arcega-Whiteside (#57).
• UDFA: Custis, Richardson, Poindexter (a poor man's Arcega-Whiteside given development), Ratliff-Williams and Murray.
• Two of my personal favorite prospects, Miller and Butler, were the only two to generate Outstanding of better tier rankings for both DR and ROI. Looking forward to see if they show and prove this year. 

What's the Difference?

The table above shows the players who have at least a two tier difference between their DR and ROI that carries then over the mean.  There is nothing scientific about this table but it will be interesting to see who succeeds and who fails when it is all said and done.  The guys in orange background are favored by DR but below average in ROI while the opposite is true for green.

Conclusion

The point of this comparison is not to prove any metric "right" or "wrong" but to set a basis to track results that could lead to fine tuning both these metrics for better predictive results.  It will be a lot of fun comparing the two over the years and I hope you will come along for the ride.

***********************************************************************

Shameless Self-Promotion!

Follow me on social media at @Boombearjr on Twitter  and Facebook