Wednesday, November 10, 2021

FBS Wide Receiver Efficiency Based on Return on Investment

 Back in Business

After a long "summer" off, we're back to give you a different kind of angle on college football and the NFL Draft.   There is no better way to get back on track than with an update on our exclusive "Return on Investment" (ROI)  efficiency measure for wide receivers.  

Briefly, ROI is a simple efficiency metric that screens out receiver volume to find players who do more with less and may be under the radar because they lack eye popping statistics.  ROI provides efficiency in context that allowed us to identify non-household name college football players like Kenny Golladay (NYG), Tim Patrick (DEN), Cedrick Wilson (DAL), Darnell Mooney (CHI) and many others who are now contributors in the NFL despite not being widely broadcast by the main sports outlets who get stuck on certain candidates.  Using ROI could help teams get solid players at great value.

Here are the Top 10 FBS receivers as of 11/10/21 in terms of ROI:













  • BMI= Body Mass Index using height (inches) and weight (pounds). 
  • ROI = Return on Investment metric which represents receivers additional output vs. the average of the Top 150 receivers to the season to date in terms of yards. 
  • ROI Z-Score = Number of standard deviations from the mean (anything greater than 1 is above average). 
  • Dominator Rating = Classic WR evaluation metric that is based on volume and does not necessarily provide context as to what the player does with their opportunities.
  • Dominator Rating Z-Score= Yellow highlight indicates below average Z-Score.  This player would fly under the radar as their Dominator Rating was not high enough to get picked up.  ROI indicates these players are highly efficient and the low DOM indicates they are likely being under utilized. 
Qualifying number of receptions for the table above is 31 at this point in the season. 

Will be back next week with an update and FCS ROI numbers as well. 

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If this was interesting check out my last article taking a look at this look at NFL QBs using ESPN NextGen stats.