Yesterday, I noted that the average height of all wide receivers — weighted by receiving yards — declined steadily during the ’80s, and then reverted by steadily rising during the 1990s. There is no natural way to measure something like “wide receiver height” because it involves taking an average. And taking an average means you need a numerator and a denominator, and there’s no clear answer as to what the denominator should be.

Should “average wide receiver height” be an average of all wide receivers in the NFL? Maybe, but what does “all” mean? Does it include only players who made it to the final 53 man roster? Only players who played in a single NFL game that year? Only starters?

Should a wide receiver who played in zero games but be on the roster be counted exactly the same as Jerry Rice? I don’t think so, and one easy and neat way to deal with all of these questions is to take a weighted average, and to use receiving yards as the weighing mechanism. So if Rice was responsible for 2% of all NFL receiving yards, and a 6’7 backup who never made it into a game was responsible for 0% of all receiving yards, then the “average height of all wide receivers” is comprised of 2% Rice and 0% of the backup.

This works well, in my opinion, but there is a potential drawback to this approach. If the structure of the league changes — say, the introduction of three-WR sets with smaller slot receivers — that would change the average by a noticeable amount. Teams may have always had a 5’10 player as their third receiver, but they could jump from 200 yards to 700 yards just by moving to an offense that gets them on the field.

That may in fact be what we saw in the late 1980s. Or, maybe not.  We saw stars emerge during that era like 5’9 Dolphins stars Mark Duper and Mark Clayton, 5’9 Gary Clark, and Houston Oilers 5’9 receivers Drew Hill and Ernest Givins. Dominant receivers like Steve Largent, Anthony Carter, and Henry Ellard were all 5-foot-11, as was deep threat extraordinaire Stanley Morgan.

So were shorter receivers more likely to see the field in the ’80s than the ’70s, or were more shorter receivers just entering the NFL? One way to try to answer that question is to look at the NFL Draft, which is what happened in the comments yesterday.

So today, I looked at all NFL Drafts since 1970, and noted the heights for all players drafted that wound up playing in the NFL (I don’t have height data for players who never made a roster).  Then, I took a weighted average of those heights, based on the percentage of draft capital (using my draft value chart) used on that wide receiver relative to the amount of total draft capital (in that draft) used on all wide receivers.  So when the Jets used the 2nd overall pick on Johnny Lam Jones in a draft where only 6 wide receivers went in the first three rounds, the 5’11 Jones has a large impact on the 1980 Draft. Which, I think, is the only way to conduct this analysis.

So what are the results? Well, they are somewhat consistent with what we saw yesterday:

The 1988 Draft stands out as the shortest in history.  That year, there were 6 wide receivers taken in the first round, and 5 of them were six feet tall or shorter. Meanwhile, the 2004 Draft, 5 of the first 6 wide receivers taken were all 6’3 or taller! At a high level, this graph — in particular, the smoothed best-fit line — does seem to match the graph from yesterday.

What do you think?