Tavarres King’s step up season

Here’s something I posted about Tavarres King a little over a year ago:

King’s numbers are interesting.  His catch rate is barely above 50%, but some of that can be attributed to the number of deep routes he ran.  What’s really noteworthy is the breakdown of his catch rate between standard downs (63.3%) and passing downs (38.5%).  Despite that disparity, he was actually targeted more on passing downs than on standard downs.  For comparison’s sake Charles’ standard down catch rate was 72.7% and passing down catch rate was 56.5%; Mitchell’s respective rates were 71.4% and 78.9%.  Both Charles and Mitchell were targeted less on passing downs than on standard downs.

Of course, I can’t say whether that was by design (i.e., the play call) or the way that Murray let the play develop, but either way, it seems there should be some focus on making the passing game more efficient with the targeting of the big (in terms of numbers) receivers.

There were two ways to accomplish that.  One would have been to throw to receivers with better catch rates.  The other would have been for King to step up his game.

Per Bill Connelly, that’s exactly what happened.  If you click on the link that takes you to Bill’s spreadsheet, you’ll find that King improved his catch rate numbers across the board, with his catch rate percentage on passing downs skyrocketing to 57.7%.

Bill’s come up with a new metric to judge receivers.  Here’s how he describes it:

The idea behind RYPR is to figure out who were the most truly dangerous receivers in the country in a given year. (In this sense, “RYPR” is a pretty good, menacing name, huh?) It combines your yards per target data with a look at the frequency with which your team passed and the quality of the passing game as a whole. It isn’t a measure of pure productivity, necessarily, but pure per-target quality.

In other words, the more your team passed, the more your team passed to you and the more yardage you gained on your catches, the better your RYPR.  King’s 2011 RYPR was 109.9, good for 73rd nationally.  His 2012 number was 184.7, good enough to be eighth best in the country.  That’s what you want out of your #1 receiving option.

King is gone, but if you want some good news for Georgia’s passing game in 2013, check out Malcolm Mitchell’s catch rates last season.  Talk about your heir apparent.