How to Use Red zone Targets in Fantasy Football

Fantasy football is all about predicting how well players are going to do in the future. Using red zone targets is a common tool that people use to find which receivers might be underperforming relative to their actual talent level.

We want to take a look at red zone targets as a stat. First we’ll look at the data behind red zone targets. How many red zone targets is a lot? Then we’ll look at the theory behind why red zone targets might be a beneficial stat to look at.

At the end of the day, red zone targets are just another tool to use in making fantasy decisions, kind of like our fantasy football four factors system. How valuable they are, though, is what we’re trying to answer here.

How Many Red Zone Targets is a Lot?

First, we want to start off by looking at how many red zone targets is a lot. This is a stat that is so infrequently looked at that a lot of people don’t know how many the best players get in a typical year. Do the best guys get 2 a game? One every other game?

To figure out how many red zone targets is a lot, we looked back over the last 6 years to find out who had the most. To do this, we also had to normalize the seasons by number of games played. Before 2020, the regular season was 16 games instead of the 17 it is now. In the 2020 season itself, there were even fewer games due to the shortened season. We normalized all the data to show the number of targets inside the 20 that the top guys got.

The plot below shows the most, 10th most, and 20th most red zone targets over the last 6 years adjusted to a 17 game schedule.

In a typical year, the most heavily utilized red zone weapons see about 2 targets per game in that part of the field. To reach top 10 levels you need just over 1 per game. The 20th best in the league has been just under 1 per game.

One other interesting thing is that the 10th and 20th most red zone targets in a given year has been very consistent. Each year, the 10th most targets has been between 17 and 19 while the 20th most has been between 14.5 and 16.

This tells us how many red zone targets is a lot when we’re evaluating players, but it doesn’t yet tell us how to use red zone targets or if it is valuable at all!

Red Zone Targets and Predicting Touchdowns

One idea behind using red zone targets is that it is a more consistent stat to use than touchdowns. Touchdowns are inherently rarer so can be swingier from year to year. However, red zone targets often lead to touchdowns and come at a more consistent pace. The idea is that this consistency can help us predict the future.

The best receivers year in, year out get something like 10 touchdowns over the course of the season. A lot of games they score 2 in a few games meaning that zero touchdowns probably happens in more than half their overall games. And this is for the best receivers, never mind the guys that only get 4 or 5 on the season. Touchdowns can be very inconsistent.

There are roughly 4 times as many red zone targets as there are red zone touchdowns in a given year (more on this later). Because they happen so much more often, they are more consistent!

Using redzone targets is one way to predict which players overperformed and which players underperformed in a given year. In the next section we’ll give an example of how to do this type of analysis.

Using Red Zone Targets to Predict Regression

I want to use Diontae Johnson as a prime example of how to use redzone targets.

In the 2022 fantasy football season, Diontae Johnson notably got ZERO touchdown catches. While he did have the worst season of his career in 2022, the lack of touchdowns made this fact more dramatic.

However, Diontae Johnson did have 16 red zone targets last year. 16 red zone targets was the 13th most of any receiver last year! Nearly everyone else that had roughly 16 redzone targets turned those opportunities into 4 or more touchdowns.

We can use this information to infer that while Diontae Johnson did have a down year last year, it probably shouldn’t have been as bad as the numbers said. If nothing changes this year and everything “regresses to the mean”, then we would expect Johnson to have 5+ touchdowns this year.

Red Zone Target Touchdown Rate

We talked above about how red zone targets are predictive of touchdowns. But how often do red zone targets turn into touchdowns? Understanding the touchdown rate that comes from red zone targets is the best way to understand who might be over or underperforming.

We looked back at the data to understand the conversion rate from targets in the red zone to touchdowns. Across the entire league, a total of 23% of redzone targets turned into touchdowns over the entire year in 2022. This means that roughly every 4 redzone targets you would expect a touchdown.

Elite players actually fared a bit better. We looked at a subset of the data corresponding to the top 25 pass catchers in the red zone last year. These players were able to convert 29.5% of redzone targets into touchdowns in 2022. This is equivalent to a TD every 3.4 targets.

To make it even clearer why red zone targets are so valuable. Think of things this way. A touchdown every 4 targets roughly means that every target inside the opponents’ 20 is worth about 1.5 fantasy points. Just for a target.

Compare this to a normal, every day target from anywhere on the field. Last year, of all targets anywhere on the field, only 4.5% turned into touchdowns, one in every 22 catches. Even restricting to the best players, a touchdown only came one in every 17 targets. Red zone targets drive a ton of fantasy value.

Why Redzone Targets Aren’t Everything

While redzone targets are a valuable tool to help predict regression and under performance, they aren’t the only thing to look at! They can be a bit misleading if you place too much value on them.

For example, last year Mecole Hardman finished 12th in red zone targets! He had 10 of them. He only had 25 catches the entire season! That is a ridiculous rate and if you only looked at red zone targets, you would vastly over rate his performance.

This might feel like a cherry picked example. But this happens constantly. Very weird players show up in the top 12 in red zone targets without it translating to being an overall good player.

Last year near the top were Zay Jones, Russell Gage, and Diontae Johnson (!). The year before, Hunter Renfrow and Van Jefferson. In 2020, Russell Gage again, Tyler Boyd, and Zach Pascal were all in the top 15. Every year, some random players end up near the top of the leaderboards in redzone targets.

Because these things are counting stats where a relatively small number can lead the league, it isn’t terribly difficult to over perform and end up near the top.

So, while redzone targets are useful for understanding touchdown over and under performance, they can also falsely give confidence for players who don’t deserve it. It is kind of like how in small sample sizes, it can be easy to perform better than you actually are. Red zone targets are best used to contextualize the performance of certain players.

Final Thoughts

Overall, I think red zone targets are just “yet another tool” for fantasy analysts to use. I don’t think that they are a magic stat. In fact, I don’t think there is a magic stat that is going to tell you who is going to be good and who isn’t. That is part of why fantasy football is fun.

To me, red zone targets are kind of like the football equivalent of BABIP. BABIP is a baseball stat that is only interesting for one reason. BABIP stands for batting average on balls in play and it is used to estimate when players have been lucky or unlucky. The theory is that once the ball is in play, everything that happens after that is luck based. A player with a low BABIP has been unlucky and should “bounce back”. A player with a high BABIP has been lucky and should come back down to earth.

Red zone targets do kind of a similar thing. Sometimes players are unlucky, the breaks don’t go right, and they don’t end up with many or any touchdowns (like Diontae Johnson in 2022). But looking at RZ targets can help determine whether they were actually playing badly or just unlucky.

Lots of targets with few TDs means a player was unlucky and should bounce back. Few targets with a lot of TDs (Jahan Dotson in 2022, hello!!) might indicate over-performance of a player.

Other than this, I don’t think there is much else to do with red zone targets. But, being able to identify over and underperformance is pretty valuable in and of itself.