Among players with at least 8,000 career receiving yards, there are just seven players who averaged fewer than one receiving touchdown per 200 receiving yards: Jeff Graham was by far the biggest outlier, with just one touchdown catch per 272 receiving yards. Henry Ellard is the second biggest outlier because (1) he’s Ellard, a borderline Hall of Famer and (2) he had just one touchdown per 212 receiving yards. Next up is Julio Jones at one score for every 211 receiving yards, followed by Eric Moulds, Johnnie Morton, another HOF candidate in Andre Johnson, and finally Terry Glenn.

So why does Jones have so few touchdowns as a percentage of his astronomical receiving yardage? To dig in a little deeper, I wanted to compare the length of his touchdowns to that of the other best receivers in today’s game. Who are the top 10 wide receivers of this current era? That’s subjective, of course, but in addition to Jones, a pretty good list would include Antonio Brown, Odell Beckham, DeAndre Hopkins, Mike Evans, A.J. Green, Larry Fitzgerald, Demaryius Thomas, Dez Bryant, and T.Y. Hilton.

Where Jones really falters is in short touchdowns. When it comes to long scores, Jones is still his typical outstanding self: he has 13 touchdown receptions of 40+ yards, the 5th-most of any receiver since 2001.  In fact, Jones has more touchdowns of 40+ yards than of less than 11 yards!  He has just 12 touchdown catches inside of 10 yards in his career, the 48th most since 2001.  Hilton has a similar issue, and in fact has just one receiving touchdown for every 201 receiving yards in his career.

The table below shows the number of touchdowns at each distance for these ten receivers, along with their percentage of touchdowns at each distance.  The final row shows Jones’ numbers divided by the average: he’s above average at long touchdowns, but it’s picking up touchdowns inside of 10 yards where he has struggled.

I’ll let you speculate on why that is.