“Volume is king” is a saying many in the fantasy industry like to use when outlining who we should target in our drafts, on the waivers, or via trade. It makes sense – how can you score fantasy points if you don’t touch the ball? Efficiency helps, but is generally pretty volatile to project. Everybody agrees Will Fuller won’t score a touchdown on 25% of his receptions. Alvin Kamara won’t run for 6.1 yards per carry again (… he can’t, right?). But how do we quantify this? Simply screaming “regression” and leaving it at that doesn’t help anybody, which brings us back to volume. It’s why someone like Melvin Gordon can be extremely inefficient (3.8 career YPC) yet be a first-round pick. His 21 touches per game in a good offense have led him to RB5 and RB8 finishes the last two seasons. Jarvis Landry has gotten extreme volume in Miami the last three years that has turned in to WR5, WR13, and WR9 finishes in full PPR leagues.

Knowing that we want volume, we need to know what to look for to identify incoming volume. If we can reasonably project some target data, you have to be thrown the ball to catch the ball, we can then try to find who is undervalued or overvalued in the drafts. Pulling five years worth of target data off of our target distribution page and target share data from Player Profiler I’ve identified a handful of wide receivers who we can expect to get a bump in targets and some others who we can expect to see their target numbers come down.

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T.Y. Hilton (IND)
2017 targets: 109

If Andrew Luck is the biggest offseason wild card, Hilton is, by extension, the second biggest. Despite Luck’s up-in-the-air status going in to last season, Hilton had an ADP of 31. Unsurprisingly once Luck was shut down he was looked at a measly 109 times by Jacoby Brissett in-route to a WR25 finish. It may seem obvious that Hilton would do better with Luck under center but, as I said in the opener, screaming “regression” and walking away doesn’t help.

So what can we realistically expect out of Hilton if Luck is healthy? Well, the Colts had 472 targets to go around last season. Their receivers grabbed 243 of them, good for 51.5%. This is a stark contrast to the average of 599 attempts with 59.1% going to receivers the previous four years with Luck at the helm. In those four years, Hilton grabbed 39.4% of all targets thrown at receivers. If we can realistically project another 575 attempts out of Luck, with a rate of 59.1% going to receivers and Hilton grabbing his normal share, we should see Hilton drawing upwards of 135 targets again.

Davante Adams (GB)
2017 targets: 117

The number of passes the Green Bay Packers attempt without Rodgers: 537 per 16 games

The number of passes the Green Bay Packers attempt with Rodgers: 581 per 16 games

The number of passes the Green Bay Packers were on pace to throw were Rodgers to stay healthy last year: 624

Adams’s 117 targets over 14 games prorates to 134 over the full 16 game slate, but even that seems low if both he and Rodgers stay healthy. If we take Rodgers average 16 game pace of 581 and Adams receiving an equal share of that ~8% increase, we see Adams receive about 11 more targets to put him up to 145. With Jordy Nelson, who managed to snag 151 and 152 targets in his last two healthy seasons with Rodgers, in Oakland, there are more targets gone which could easily push him into that 150 range that Nelson had occupied so well.

Michael Thomas (NO)
2017 targets: 149

I’ll full out say this feels insane to project an increase of targets for someone that saw 149 last season, but something has to give. Let’s start by reviewing some Drew Brees trivia.

Brees threw the ball only 536 times last season, his lowest 16 game mark in his 12 years in New Orleans (he had 514 in 15 games in 2009, which comes out to 548 over 16 games). His next lowest was his first season, 2006, in which he threw 554. After that? A whopping 627. His two-season average after he failed to crack 560 passing attempts he averaged 655 attempts. Over 12 seasons in New Orleans, he’s averaged 630 attempts per 16 games. Brees is 39 and coming off the lowest passing total in a decade but he was as efficient as ever in 2017, pacing the league with 8.1 yards per attempt and posting the lowest interception rate of his career.

Basically, I’m refusing to believe the 2017 Saints is the new normal for Brees. He’s simply too good of a quarterback to not put the ball in his hands. I’m sure I’ll hear “but the defense is so much better now!” and I’ll stop you right there – the 2010 Saints had a better defense than the 2017 Saints and he still threw the ball 658 times. I’m expecting, on the low end, 70 more pass attempts out of the Saints next season. The Brandon Coleman and Willie Snead departures open up another 53. By my estimation, the standard second receiver sees roughly 90 targets per season. If we give the newly acquired Cameron Meredith all 90 and keep Ted Ginn the same there’s still 33 to go around. It’s not unreasonable to expect the 4th and 5th receivers to see some of these.

Now that we have all that out of the way, where does Michael Thomas and his absurd amount of targets come in? From the crazy amount of targets their stellar running back tandem saw last season. 34% of all the New Orleans targets to running backs, significantly higher than the league average of 21.6%. The 34% was the second highest over the last five years, and only the third time a team saw over 30% of its targets go to their running backs. If we up the total pass attempts to 605 and drop the running back numbers down to a still high 27% (remember, Mark Ingram, who totaled 70 last season, is suspended for the first four games) there are another 18 targets up for grabs. Don’t be surprised to see Thomas grab the majority of these to push his total into the 160-165 range.

DeVante Parker (MIA)
2017 targets: 96

Since Adam Gase took over as the Dolphins head coach at the beginning of the 2016 season the Dolphins have sent the ball to their wide receivers a whopping 66.7% of the time. Jarvis Landry, who is now on the Browns, has consistently taken roughly 42% of those. The targets left behind (161 last season) are absolutely massive and Parker should be a huge beneficiary of this. I’m not exactly sure to make of their overall passing game. In 2016 they had the second-fewest attempts in the league while having the fifth most in 2017. With Gase being an offensive minded coach I tend to lean towards the 2017 version being the one to go with. Even if they fall back to the middle in attempts the loss of Landry should add at least 30 or so targets to his total.

I’d be shocked if a healthy Parker didn’t receive 130 targets or more, and is a surprisingly high floor, high ceiling player available late in the middle rounds of most drafts at this point.

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Every NFL season is fluid with injuries, under-performance, and sometimes straight up buffoonery from coaches affecting workloads of our fantasy players. Seeing the volume a player gets is helpful, but if you can use tools like target distribution trends and historical data to get ahead of the curve and find the guy to get it before he ever does you’ll have a massive edge on our opponents because, after all, volume is king.

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Ryan Melosi is a correspondent at FantasyPros. For more from Ryan, check out his archive and follow him @RTMelosi.