I notice that receivers seem to be harder to stop nowadays. More of them are catching more passes than ever before. Even if a defense goes into a game wanting to stop a player like Antonio Brown or Julio Jones, it’s still very difficult to do.
And this seems to be a league-wide trend. In each of the last two years, five wide receivers have been targeted over 100 times and also caught over 70 percent of the passes thrown to them. That’s happened only 20 times in the last 10 years, and half of those occurrences have happened in the last two years.
Here they are (with the 2015 players in bold).
| HIGHEST CATCH RATES, LAST 10 YEARS | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rk | Player | Year | Tgt | Rec | Pct |
| 1. | Wes Welker | 2007 | 145 | 112 | 77.2% |
| 2. | Randall Cobb | 2012 | 104 | 80 | 76.9% |
| 3. | Wes Welker | 2009 | 162 | 123 | 75.9% |
| 4. | Doug Baldwin | 2015 | 103 | 78 | 75.7% |
| 5. | Larry Fitzgerald | 2015 | 145 | 109 | 75.2% |
| 6. | Jarvis Landry | 2014 | 112 | 84 | 75.0% |
| 7. | Marques Colston | 2011 | 107 | 80 | 74.8% |
| 8. | Wes Welker | 2008 | 149 | 111 | 74.5% |
| 9. | Percy Harvin | 2011 | 121 | 87 | 71.9% |
| 10. | Randall Cobb | 2014 | 127 | 91 | 71.7% |
| 11. | Emmanuel Sanders | 2014 | 141 | 101 | 71.6% |
| 12. | Antonio Brown | 2014 | 181 | 129 | 71.3% |
| 13. | Antonio Brown | 2015 | 193 | 136 | 70.5% |
| 14. | Wes Welker | 2011 | 173 | 122 | 70.5% |
| 15. | Eddie Royal | 2008 | 129 | 91 | 70.5% |
| 16. | Golden Tate | 2015 | 128 | 90 | 70.3% |
| 17. | Jeremy Maclin | 2015 | 124 | 87 | 70.2% |
| 18. | Anquan Boldin | 2008 | 127 | 89 | 70.1% |
| 19. | Bobby Engram | 2007 | 134 | 94 | 70.1% |
| 20. | Odell Beckham Jr. | 2014 | 130 | 91 | 70.0% |
Also note that while wide receivers tend to be a coveted commodity in drafts nowadays, only four of these 20 receivers were guys who were selected in the first round – Harvin, Maclin, Beckham and Fitzgerald.
Eight of the 20 were what you might call second-tier receivers – originally selected in the second or third round. That includes Randall Cobb twice.
And the remaining eight (40 percent of the group) were guys who weren’t really wanted back when they eligible to be drafted. Antonio Brown and Marques Colston were selected late, and Doug Baldwin and Wes Welker weren’t drafted at all. (Welker shows up four times on this list, so he represents half of the eight.)
—Ian Allan