Today’s guest post/contest comes from Adam Harstad, a co-writer of mine at Footballguys.com. You can follow Adam on twitter at @AdamHarstad.

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Regular readers of Football Perspective are well acquainted with the sneaky-greatness of DeAndre Hopkins, who led the NFL in percentage of his team’s receiving yards in 2014 despite not even leading his own team in targets. ^[1]Hopkins had 127 targets in 16 games, or 7.9 per game. Then-teammate Andre Johnson had 146 targets in 15 games, or 9.7 per game. And, indeed, by “percentage of team receiving yards”, Hopkins is having another terrific season; his 37.0% share is slightly above the league-leading 35.0% he posted last year, (though it trails the 38.6% share he carried through his team’s first 14 games in 2014).

But Hopkins is having an even better season by a far less esoteric statistic: receiving first downs. As best as I have been able to determine, the all-time record for receiving first downs in a season is 92, set by Marvin Harrison in 2002 and tied by Calvin Johnson in 2012. ^[2]Obviously play-by-play data is virtually impossible to come by for older seasons. Thanks to frequent guest contributor Bryan Frye, I have complete first-down data going back to 1992; however (a) the … Continue reading Through eight games this year, Hopkins has converted for a new set of downs a remarkable 54 times, putting him on pace for 108, a ridiculous 17.4% more than the previous NFL record. (For context, if a quarterback wanted to break Peyton Manning’s single-season passing yardage record by 17.4%, he would need to throw for 6430 yards.)

How has Hopkins been doing it? The easy answer would be that he’s been racking up huge numbers against prevent defenses. And, indeed, Hopkins has been racking up impressive statistics when his team trails big; Hopkins is on pace for 596 yards earned while his team is trailing by 14 or more points, which would make him just the seventh receiver since 1994 to top even 400 such yards. ^[3]The others are Andre Johnson in 2010, Calvin Johnson in 2008, Anquan Boldin in 2003, Marvin Harrison in 2002, David Boston in 2000, and Rob Moore in 1995. As you might expect, the list is largely a … Continue reading

The problem with the easy answer is that, playing for a bad team like Houston, Hopkins has had fewer opportunities to accrue stats when his team wasn’t down big. Hopkins’ 298 yards while trailing by 14+ points represents 34.3% of his overall total of 870 yards. Houston’s 136 pass attempts while trailing by 14+ points, on the other hand, represents 37.6% of their season-long total. Their 963 passing yards represent 41.0% of their season-long total. Indeed, on a per-pass basis, Hopkins has been proportionally less productive when his team is down big.

While Hopkins has been slightly less productive on a per-pass basis, one could theorize that garbage time skewed the pass:run ratio enough that the extra volume would more than offset. And that’s true to some extent. But over the whole offense, 32.5% of Houston’s plays have come while trailing by 14+ points, which is again right in line with Hopkins’ yardage share while down big.

So Hopkins isn’t feasting on garbage-time defenses so much as he’s playing on a terrible team where he spends a disproportionate amount of his time on the field while the team is down big. It’s not that he’s a garbage-time hero, it’s that he has fewer non-garbage-time opportunities to produce statistics.

So if he’s not padding his receiving totals against uncaring competition, how is Hopkins on pace to demolish the first down record by such a prodigious margin? The old-fashioned way; he’s setting league-best marks in both volume and efficiency. Many know about Hopkins’ targets; his current pace would put him at 224 for a full season, which would also be a likely league record, (albeit not by 17%).

But Hopkins has also been insanely efficient at converting his targets and receptions into first downs. Since 2002, there have been 171 receivers who have received at least 135 targets. Hopkins’ 0.486 first-down rate would stand as the 9th-best mark in that group. Over that same span, there have been 185 receivers with at least 80 receptions; Hopkins’ 0.818 first-down rate would stand as the 5th-best total in that group. (Going back to 1992 only adds one more name above Hopkins.)

This is just raw conversion percentage, too, and makes no adjustment for the quality of the team or the difficulty of the conversion. Given that the Texans currently rank 32nd in the NFL in rushing yards per carry and 29th in the NFL in completion percentage, we would expect many of Hopkins’ targets to come on later downs in obvious passing situations. And, indeed, that’s exactly what we see; 70 of Hopkins 112 targets have come with 10+ yards to go for a new set of downs. Of the 32 receivers with at least 30 such targets, Hopkins’ .471 conversion rate ranks second only to John Brown’s .531. ^[4]The only other receiver converting more than 40% of their long-yardage targets into first downs is Larry Fitzgerald, with 0.447. Carson Palmer is having a heck of a season. On 3rd or 4th down with 10+ yards to go, Hopkins again paces the league with 7 conversions on 12 targets; second place is a 4-way tie of players with 4 conversions each.

Perhaps most amazingly, despite routinely facing long-yardage opportunities and converting at a tremendous rate, Hopkins averages just 13.2 yards per reception. Among all receivers converting at least 75% of their receptions for a first down, the average yards per reception is 15.3. Overall, the profile is of a player who is routinely getting just enough to move the chains; if someone could be said to have a nose for the first-down marker, Hopkins might be it.

How impressive is Hopkins’ combination of volume and efficiency? One way to measure it would be “marginal first downs over average”. So far in 2015, receivers have drawn 4963 targets. They have caught 3011 of those passes for 1868 first downs. Across all NFL receivers, the average is 0.376 first downs per target and 0.620 first downs per reception.

The number of marginal first downs a receiver added, then, would be his rate above (or below) that league average, times his total number of targets or receptions. Here is a chart of how many marginal first downs each receiver has been responsible for through the first half of the season. The table lists all 168 wide receivers who have caught a pass so far this season, although by default, the table lists just the top 20. Note that the table is fully searchable and sortable, and you can change the number of receivers displayed by using the dropdown box on the left.

First downs isn’t as well-known of a stat as receptions or yards, but they are arguably more important to offensive success. And no matter how you look at them, DeAndre Hopkins is having a season for the ages.