Way back in the simpler days of 2013, Chase introduced a Neil Paine creation called True Receiving Yards (TRY). It was a great look at receiving production ^[1]As measured by adjusted catch yards (ACY), which you’ll read about in less than a minute. in the context of both the team’s passing environment relative to the rest of the league and that year’s league’s passing environment relative to the average passing environment since 1970.

I wanted to revisit TRY, this time using my version of the metric (sorry Stuart-Paine loyalists). I will do so in a short series of brief posts. ^[2]Unless I fall prey to ennui and decide to stop without further explanation, which is a very real possibility. In today’s article, I plan to explain my methodology and present an abridged version of the results for single seasons.

Methodology

1. The first step in finding TRY is finding each receiver’s adjusted catch yards. In the original post, Neil used receiving yards and 5 and 20 yard bonuses for catches and touchdowns, respectively. I decided to forego the reception bonus and simply use receptions and a 20 yard touchdown bonus. The 5 yard coefficient for catches isn’t bad, but it’s just not the way I prefer to calculate it. If you would like to see this study done with the original methodology, Pro Football Reference has all the information you need to run the numbers through the gamut. ^[3]You will notice I did not do the subsequent conversion for ACY that Neil did. The reason is simple: I didn’t find it necessary. We can then prorate these numbers to a 16-game league schedule. Using Lance Alworth‘s glorious 1965 campaign as an example: he had 1602 yards and 14 touchdowns, which translates to 1882 ACY. Using 16/14 to prorate to a modern league schedule, that comes to 2151.
2. Next, we find the number of pass attempts for each team in the league, as well as for the league as a whole. The original version used dropbacks, whereas my version uses passes attempts. This is because it allows me to go back to 1932 rather than stopping at 1949. ^[4]Or 1947 if you want to use estimated sacks based on sack yardage numbers. By doing this, we can see how often a team passed the ball relative to the rest of the league. For example, the 1965 Chargers threw the ball 28.6 times per game. The AFL average was 32.6. That means the San Diegans passed 88% as often as the average team that league season. Thus, Bambi’s 1965 season gets an adjustment: 2151/0.88 = 2449. Because such steep adjustments can seem a bit too much, we can soften the adjustment by dividing 2151 by the average of 0.88 and 1: 2151/0.94 = 2290.
3. Now, we find the number of pass attempts per game in each season, as well as the historical average for passes per game. Like the second step allowed us to compare a receiver’s team pass-happiness to contemporary teams, this step allows us to compare his league’s pass propensity to all teams “in NFL (and AAFC and AFL) history.” Since 1932, the first season for which official and mostly-reliable statistics are widely recorded, the average team has thrown the ball 30.35 times per game. Continuing with our Alworth ’65 magnum opus, the 1965 AFL passes 32.61 times per bout. A little back of the envelope math tells us that’s 107% of the historical average. If we soften that the same way we did the adjustment in step two, it drops to 104%.
4. There are a few paths we can take from here. We can combine the two hardest adjustments like so: 2449/1.07 = 2279. Alternatively, we can combine the soft adjustment from step two with the hard adjustment from step three: 2290/1.07 = 2132. Last, and my preferred method, we can combine the two soft adjustments: 2290/1.04 = 2208.

I hope to all that is pure and true that I have adequately explained this to the FP Faithful. If I have failed to do so, I’m happy to have offseason banter in the comments. For now, let’s look at some tables.

The Boring Table

The first table contains the sausage making data that informs the more interesting tables to follow and is sorted by greatest total adjustment. ^[5]The combined statistical adjustments of the soft team passing ratio and the soft year adjustment. Read it thus: Bill Smith, playing in the 1935 NFL, caught 24 passes for 318 yards and 2 touchdowns, worth 358 adjusted catch yards. his team played 12 games and passed 10.6 times per contest. The league averaged 15.4 passes per game, so Smith’s squad sported a ratio of 0.69 and a soft ratio of 0.84. The 1935 NFL league year usage rate factor is 0.51, and the soft factor is 0.75. With a league adjustment of 1.18 (1/0.84) and a year adjustment of 1.33 (1/0.75), Smith’s final adjustment is 1.57.

If you are the type who is interested in the nuts and bolts rather than just the results, you may like this one. It shows all the little background modifications outlined in the methodology section, as well as the combination of the two soft adjustments, which will be the basis for what I write about this going forward.

You can see Bill Smith gets the most help from adjustments, with a whopping 57% boost to his ACY. I like this, in part, because it highlights the problems we encounter when we go back too far when trying to compare passing and receiving across eras. The same thing happens when you apply Chase’s RANY and VAL to Sid Luckman‘s 1943. Is it fair that some of these antediluvian fellows get such a large bump? I can’t answer that, but I think it’s important to think about. ^[6]Important in the NFL stats history sense of the word. Not actual important. We’re all wasting our time with this nonsense anyway.

On the flip side, Calvin Johnson sees the biggest decrease, losing about 20% of his ACY. he doesn’t get any help from prorating, since he already played in a 16-game league. His team was so pass happy that it made people think Matthew Stafford was a future Hall of Famer. And his league was so pass happy that several Hall of Average passers had rapidly ascended career leaderboards. One could argue that it is specifically because Megatron was so talented that his team passed so frequently, and that is a reasonable position to hold. Again, I don’t know that there are definite answers to debates like this, and I’m not here to provide them even if there are. I just want to facilitate (hopefully) friendly discussion.

The Table You Really Want

The table below contains several different versions of True Receiving Yards, based on regular season production, and is sorted by my favorite version – TRYSoft. Here’s how to decipher the information: The famous Crazy Legs 1951 season saw him haul in 66 passes for 1495 yards and 17 touchdowns. That’s good for 1835 adjusted catch yards. That prorates to 2447 ACY in a 16 game schedule. Hirsch played for a pass-happy team, so his team adjustment brings that down to 2121. When we soften that a bit, the number increases to 2272. TRYMax is based on the full team adjustment and the full league adjustment. In Hirsch’s case, that means we divide 2121 by the 1951 NFL factor of 0.888, giving us 2389. TRYMid is based on the soft team adjustment with the full league adjustment, so we divide 2272 by the 0.888 factor, arriving at 2559. My preferred method, TRYSoft, uses softened factors for both the team and the league. For Crazy Legs, that means dividing 2272 by 1951’s soft factor of 0.944, finally landing on 2407.

I think if most regular readers here were to guess prior to seeing the table, they would have correctly picked out the top season (and easily five of the top ten) without giving it much thought. Hopefully this suggests face validity and not mass stupidity on our parts.

The list contains 3090 seasons from 937 players. Only seasons that saw a player gain at least 750 TRYSoft are included. ^[7]That is combined regular season and postseason TRYSoft. Ranks are with respect to combined numbers, though those numbers aren’t in the tables presented today. The playoff princess is in another … Continue reading Obviously, Jerry Rice leads all receivers in appearances with 18. Larry Fitzgerald backs him up with 16, while Terrell Owens and Tony Gonzalez boast 14 apiece. The GOAT’s top season (playoffs included) is 1989, which ranks sixth. He also sports top-100 seasons ranking 13th, 16th, 17th, 41st, 73rd, and 76th. His seven top-100 seasons leads all receivers.

Underrated-by-modern-box-score-scouts-receiver Michael Irvin has five seasons in the top 100, as does the receiver with arguably the best highlight reel of them all, Randy Moss. Don Hutson, perhaps surprisingly, only has four. Lance Alworth, Steve Smith Sr., and Antonio Brown have three.

I’m sure there are plenty more interesting observations to be made, but I’ll leave that to the good people in the comments.