NFL DFS: Five Advanced Stats You Need to Know This Season
By Dan Palyo
NFL DFS: Hog Rate
This is my favorite name of any of the metrics in this article. It describes what is being measured here pretty accurately and also is just fun to say as it conjures up images in my brain of how much pigs are being sold for on the open market.
Anyway, “hog rate” attempts to capture the rate of passing game utilization of any given player on a per-play basis. In layman’s terms, how often is a player being targeted when they are on the field.
Why Does It Matter?
We usually want to target players who are going to be on the field for as many snaps as possible, whether its running backs, receivers or tight ends. But efficiency is also important in DFS (as we discussed with juke rate) and there are certain players who have carved out very important roles in their offenses that we can isolate. The top 5 below is a group of receivers who were heavily utilized by their teams last season and most of them were on the field for a large percentage of their teams’ offensive snaps (with Tate being the lone outlier with a 65% snap share due to his changing role with Philadelphia after a mid-season trade).
Ted Ginn is a nice example of a guy who isn’t a full-time player, playing only 60% of the snaps for the Saints last season who still had a sizeable role in the passing game. His 15.7% hog rate is top 40 among receivers with at least 50 targets last year. Calvin Ridley is another solid example of a guy who was heavily utilized with a 14.6% hog rate on only 65% of the offensive snaps.
Top 5 Last Season (minimum 100 targets)
- Julio Jones (21.2%)
- Golden Tate (19.1%)
- Davante Adams (18.6%)
- Keenan Allen (18.4%)
- JuJu Smith-Schuster (18.2%)