Good hands are a differentiating factor in WR fantasy performance. Matt Waldman delivers RSP film and data insights for 2024 fantasy drafts.
The following feature is a free preview of our content. If you like it, click here to sign up for access to our Footballguys Subscription, and you’ll get all of our content. We’re so sure you’ll love it that we have an industry-leading 30-day MoneyBack Guarantee, so there’s zero risk. I am sharing a portion of it here. You can read it in its entirety at this link.
Good Hands: The Obvious and Not So Obvious
Good hands. Tyreek Hill has them. CeeDee Lambhas them. DeAndre Hopkins has great hands. If basing a wide receiver’s hands solely on outcome, so does Terry McLaurin.
Good hands–the ability to catch the ball–is the most obvious skill required to play wide receiver. If you can’t catch, it’s unlikely you will begin playing the position in the first place.
Good hands in high school and college are a lot different than good hands in the NFL. When you consider the talent gap from high school to professional ball by the numbers, only 1.6 percent of NCAA players make the NFL, and only 0.8 percent of them last four years in the league.
This means that the way we define good hands for a receiver depends on the level of football. The top high school football players are in the 93.5 percentile of all football players. The top NFL prospects are in the 98.4 percentile. The NFL players who make it are in the 99th percentile.
As the level of football rises, the acceptable margin for error narrows significantly, especially in how we judge good hands. Theoretically, if we were to attribute these percentiles of 93.5, 98.4, and 99 to a receiver’s skill as a pass catcher and had them run 1,000 routes, we’d see a huge difference in error rates when measuring good hands based on what appears to be a small difference in percentile of skill:
Good Hands? Depends on the Standard of the Competition
- Top high school WR (93.5 percentile): 65 drops per 1,000 targets.
- Top college WR/NFL prospect (98.4 percentile): 16 drops per 1,000 targets.
- Four-year NFL veteran (99 percentile): 9.4 drops per 1,000 targets.
When assessing NFL-caliber traits and skills like good hands, we must have a reasonable standard to project how well a player will perform at the highest level of football. That’s what we’re doing in Gut Check No.621.
Good Hands: Marrying Film and Data
In the world of football analysis, especially fantasy football, we lean on data. Most football data is heavy on results and light on process. The downside of results-heavy data is that it often doesn’t do a good job of projecting techniques like good hands. Results-heavy data doesn’t help us pinpoint whether these technique flaws are correctable, something a team can live with, or will become a significant developmental obstacle.
This is where film study has immense value. When structured and executed effectively, the act of film study is the acquisition of process-heavy data. Suddenly, the idea of good hands is not whether a receiver made the catch, but whether the techniques they use meet an NFL standard.
Good film study also helps us identify why the techniques fail to meet an NFL standard and what can be done about it. Good coaches, scouts, and trainers know football techniques and concepts.
They can tell you what good hands are when they see them. They can’t tell you why it’s valuable to define this in writing and how it fits within the scope of a scouting report. They aren’t trained in developing methods that reduce unnecessary variation among scouts or encourage ways to continue building on the effectiveness of the process they use.
Scouting is still seen as subjective, and analytics as objective. This can be a fallacy, especially when you have a team of entry-level employees at a stats website charting catches and drops. The process used for measuring things like good hands, yards after contact, and passing accuracy is not a best-practice methodology based on the wide variation I have seen in how they define these concepts.
While the Rookie Scouting Portfolio’s (RSP)evaluation process is far from perfect, it is built on best practices for evaluating performance. I have a background in operations management and quality management, and I earned a certification for developing and implementing best practices for performance evaluation and reporting. I used those practices to create the RSP’s scouting process.
So when I study whether a receiver has good hands, I’m using the RSP’s process for studying film to collect and generate data. The RSP is defining the data in a context that helps us understand not only if the player is getting results, but also gives us insights into whether those results will translate to a higher level of competition.
What Are Good Hands for Fantasy Football?
The RSP defines good hands with these points of criteria:
- The receiver uses the correct technique based on the trajectory of the target.
- The receiver executes the correct techniques with uniform and tight hands to attack the ball.
- The receiver attacks the ball at the earliest window of arrival when possible.
The RSP measures other techniques and concepts for good hands, but I’m going to separate those for other articles. These three techniques and concepts are interrelated and give us a solid understanding of who has good hands in the NFL and fantasy football.
Good Hands: Lapses and Serial Flaws
Not at all. Players with good hands can have lapses with technique. I define lapses as a small minority of targets where there is improper execution of the three techniques listed above (regardless of whether the player catches or drops the ball). Lapses can also be improper execution in isolated scenarios that happen repeatedly.
For example, CeeDee Lamb‘s RSP pre-NFL Draft scouting report noted a lapse in technique in this isolated scenario that happened repeatedly on tape:
“If there’s any potential concern with Lamb as a pass catcher, it will occur when he frames his hands with a low-target [attack] technique for a target [arriving] at chest level or above. When I observed it [for] 11 games, Lamb didn’t drop passes due to this choice of hand position. However, it is a more difficult position to use with high targets against physical coverage. Lamb doesn’t use this position on every high target, but it shows up when he’s working the fade or a chest-high target with a break across the field against tight coverage.”
Lamb was the RSP’s top-ranked receiver in the 202 NFL Draft class.
Lapses are minor technique issues that can hurt performance. I define more significant flaws as serial issues. When a receiver has serial issues with technique, it means he’s using bad habits on a higher number of targets. This ranges from a significant minority of opportunities that can potentially cap on-field production to almost every target that could keep a player on the bench.
Good Hands: Correlating It to Fantasy Production
To determine what good hands are for fantasy receivers, I looked at six seasons of rankings — the top 75 options in 12-team PPR formats:
- WRs 1-3: Elite tier.
- WRs 1-12: WR1s — top starters.
- WRs 13-24: WR2s — weekly starters.
- WRs 25-36: WR3s — flex-plays and/or low-end starters.
- WRs 37-48: WR4s — flex and/or match-up plays.
- WRs 49-60: WR5s — flex, match-up plays, and/or reserves.
- WRs 61-75: WR6s — I rolled with 15 in this tier since it’s usually a cast of reserves/rotating free agents.
For each player ranked in the top 75 for that year, I noted if his pre-NFL Draft RSP scouting report contained lapses and/or serial flaws with the three receiving techniques listed above in the section “What Are Good Hands for Fantasy Football.”
The elite receivers have the lowest incidences of lapses on film and no serial issues. CeeDee Lamb was the only player among the 18 elite producers during a 6-year period with lapses in his profile.
As you would expect, there is a correlation between what the RSP defines as good hands and fantasy production.
The WR1 tier also had no receivers with serial flaws among the 72 tracked in 6 years, but there’s a 12 percent rise in lapses between the elite and WR1 tiers.
As we get into WR2s and WR3s—startable receivers who aren’t true primary options—they have identical percentages for Good Hands and Lapses. The WR3s have twice the number of serial lapses.
While the percentage changes aren’t as neat for WR4s-WR6s, they are worse than the top four tiers, which is expected. I believe the reason the “good hands” data isn’t as uniform as we see with the elite through WR3 tiers is that many of the players in the WR4-WR6 tiers have performances that fall into these two contexts:
- High performers who got injured.
- Young players who haven’t earned a starting role but have performed well with limited volume.
Mix these future starters with good hands into a pool with more mediocre and/or limited producers and the WR4-WR6 tiers are lower than the first four tiers but not as uniform.
Good Hands Fantasy Insights
What does this all mean? How does this help us?