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Inconsistency of Touchdown Numbers - Summary

Draft Recommendation: Touchdowns vary a lot from year to year and players who had fewer touchdowns the previous year are generally undervalued while players with more touchdowns are generally overvalued.

As you have probably read quite a few times on this website, touchdown numbers are very unpredictable and fantasy owners tend to overvalue players who had a lot of touchdowns and undervalue players who had few touchdowns. This is pretty simple since owners often look at fantasy points scored in the previous season without looking at specific statistics. The following article will show you how much of an advantage you can gain over your opponents simply by understanding this.

Instead of looking only at touchdowns and seeing the average change at each position based on the number of touchdowns, I used alternate statistics which in my opinion are much more meaningful. For quarterbacks I looked at touchdowns per pass attempt, for running backs I used touchdowns per touch (carries + receptions) and finally for wide receivers I looked at touchdowns per reception.

For every position I made six groups of players based on their touchdown numbers from the previous season. For quarterbacks, the top group averaged 0.063 touchdowns per pass attempt while the worst group averaged 0.025 touchdowns per pass attempt but in the following season they averaged 0.049 and 0.037 respectively. Therefore, the difference between the two went from 0.038 (0.063 – 0.025) to 0.012 (0.049 – 0.037). To put this in more concrete terms, a quarterback who attempted 550 passes and had 35 touchdown passes (0.063 per attempt) would be expected to have only 27 in the next season. On the other hand, a quarterback who had only 14 touchdown passes would be expected to have 20 in the following season. In a league that awards four points per touchdown pass, that means the gap between two quarterbacks could close by 56 fantasy points. Based on last season, that would mean a quarterback who was outside the top 20 could be expected to be better than a quarterback who finished in the top 10 simply by looking at this ratio.

After calculating similar statistics for running backs and wide receivers, I came to the conclusion that the players with the most inconsistent touchdown numbers are the wide receivers followed by quarterbacks and running backs. In order to predict how many touchdowns a player will score, here are three simple formulas that you can use:

QB:  0.027 + 0.339 x previous year’s ratio (TDs per pass attempt)

RB:  0.018 + 0.364 x previous year’s ratio (TDs per touch)

WR: 0.062 + 0.271 x previous year’s ratio (TDs per reception)

These formulas are based on what other players have done in the past 25 seasons. You do however need to be careful with certain players. Tony Romo has averaged 0.062 touchdowns per pass attempt over the last three seasons so he probably won’t drop as much as the formula says he should. Make sure you look at how each player has done in the past few seasons. For example, here are Philip Rivers’s ratios over his last three NFL seasons: 0.048, 0.046 and 0.071. He should be slightly better than he was in the two previous seasons but last season was an anomaly and that is why in our projections we have him at around 0.050 touchdowns per pass attempt.

In conclusion I hope this article has made you understand that players with a lot of touchdowns will not necessarily be able to repeat those numbers in the following season and you should not assume that they will.  When you are studying a player and deciding whether or not to draft him, take a look at his touchdown number and keep in mind that it will likely vary much more than his other statistics.

See the complete analysis