A lot more goes into football – and fantasy football – than how good each player is. Volume is arguably more important than talent, and that’s where the Utilization Report comes in.
Utilization can be broken down on both a team and player level, and both are essential for predicting fantasy points. For example, a player with a 25% target share on a team with a low pass volume might have the same number of raw targets as a player with a 20% target share on a team with a high pass volume.
The Team Styles section of the Utilization Tool allows you to dive into those team-specific trends.
This is a general outlook on how fast each team is playing every week. It’s not quite as simple as you might think. The number of plays that a team runs each week is largely determined by how often they have the ball. If a team has a lot of possessions, we can expect them to run a lot of plays. That said, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re playing fast.
Comparing the number of plays run to the expected number of plays is a more reliable indicator on pace. For example, if a team is expected to run 60 plays based on their team of possession but only finished with 50, they were operating at a slower pace than expected. Their pace archetype for that contest would be characterized as “slow.”
Teams can fall into three specific categories from a pace perspective – fast, slow, and neutral. For fantasy purposes, fast-paced teams are the best to target. They routinely exceed their number of expected plays, leading to more opportunities to rack up fantasy points. Pairing a fast pace with a strong Dropback Over Expectation (DBOE) is a great formula for fantasy scoring.
This works the same for pace, but it focuses on passing percentage. Once again, it deals with expected pass rates instead of actual ones. You might think that a quarterback who throws the ball 40 times in a game played in a pass-heavy system, but that might not be the case. If his team trailed by 21 points in the first quarter and won the time of possession battle, he might have been expected to throw even more passes.
Determining the Pass Archetype comes down to measuring the number of dropbacks compared to the expected number of dropbacks. If you’re dropping back at a higher frequency than your game script would suggest, it’s going to result in a pass-heavy archetype. Conversely, a team that drops back less than expected would be run-heavy. A neutral archetype means they’re passing at the rate you would expect, given the situation.
Pass-heavy archetypes are going to be the best for fantasy purposes. Passing the ball in general is more efficient than running it, so the best offenses in football tend to throw the ball at the highest frequency. The pass-catchers are the biggest beneficiaries, but even running backs can benefit from a pass-heavy archetype. Running backs are catching more passes than ever before, and it can lead to more red zone opportunities than a run-heavy game script.
This one is pretty straightforward. There are no expected stats, no rates – it’s simply how many points each team scored in a given week. Add it all up, and it gives you a points-per-game average for the entire season.
If you only want to see how many points a team scored during a particular stretch, you can filter the sample by adjusting the “Weekly Range” bar at the top of the page. For example, if you wanted to see how many points per game the Ravens averaged over their last eight games, you could easily accomplish that using this tool.
This is another straightforward stat, measuring how many plays per game each team runs in regulation. It is another pure volume stat, meaning that rates are completely ignored. If you want to see how much raw volume each team is producing from a play standpoint, this would be the spot.
PPMOE stands for Plays Per Minute Over Expectation. This is that stat that directly ties into your Pace Archetype. For this number, a “0” means that a team ran exactly the number of plays per minute that you would expect given their game script. Anything above zero is considered above average, while anything below zero is below average.
A slight deviation from zero in this category can still put you in a neutral pace archetype. The bigger the deviation from zero, the more you fall into the pass- and run-heavy categories.
This is another volume stat. It measures how many times per game a quarterback drops back to pass, regardless of how many passing attempts they actually finish with. It doesn’t measure any sort of expected production.
This stands for Dropback Over Expectation, and it’s closely related to Pass Rate Over Expectation (PROE). However, DBOE goes beyond pass attempts, including scrambles and sacks – capturing all plays where passing was the intent. For some teams, both numbers might be identical. However, for teams with mobile quarterbacks, DBOE is the better indicator of how many opportunities the quarterback has to make a play in a given week.
Like PPMOE, DBOE compares your actual dropback rate to your expected dropback rate. A team with a mark above zero would be considered more pass-heavy, while a team below zero would be on the run-heavy side. A number near zero would be considered neutral, and the bigger differentiation from zero results in a more pass-heavy or run-heavy archetype.