Using Vacated Targets to Identify Opportunity

Apr 22, 2019
Using Vacated Targets to Identify Opportunity

Opportunity is one of the major factors I consider as I evaluate free agent signings and trades, and attempt to identify impact rookies in any given season. Typically, I’ll gauge this opportunity holistically—e.g. Antonio Brown left Pittsburgh so there’s huge opportunity there—but this season I thought I’d go through the process of calculating vacated targets to see if it would identify opportunity that wasn’t readily apparent.

Others have studied this in the past and I’d just leverage their work to double-check my aforementioned holistic findings, but I thought I’d do the legwork this season to see if there was anything I could add to the process. Given injuries, trades and Week 17 weirdness, I realized that it’s a little tricky to calculate total vacated targets, but I think the numbers below provide a good roadmap to find 2019 opportunity in the passing game.

Included are targets through Week 16, though I made the exception for one team, the Cowboys, due to the midseason trade of Amari Cooper. More on that below the table.

Vacated Targets (2018)
Team Vacated Tgts/G Vacated Tgts % Key Additions
OAK 23.3 70.3% Antonio Brown, Tyrell Williams
BAL 19.2 55.8% Mark Ingram
JAX 16.7 50.4% Chris Conley, Geoff Swaim
PIT 15.0 35.7% Donte Moncrief
TB 14.9 38.0% Breshad Perriman
NE 14.4 41.2% Demaryius Thomas, Bruce Ellington, Maurice Harris, Austin Seferian-Jenkins, Matt LaCosse
DET 12.3 35.0% Danny Amendola, Jesse James
BUF 12.2 40.1% Cole Beasley, John Brown, Andre Roberts, Tyler Kroft
NYJ 11.6 36.6% Jamison Crowder, LeVeon Bell, Josh Bellamy
KC 9.6 26.8%
IND 9.5 23.7% Devin Funchess
WAS 9.0 29.2%
NYG 8.8 24.7% Golden Tate
DAL 7.1 20.3% Randall Cobb
GB 7.0 18.1%
LAC 7.0 21.8%
PHI 7.0 18.8% DeSean Jackson, Charles Johnson
MIA 6.7 24.7% Ricardo Louis, Dwayne Allen, Clive Walford
DEN 6.4 18.6%
CAR 5.7 16.5% Chris Hogan
HOU 4.9 16.1%
NO 4.8 14.7%
SEA 4.4 17.4%
SF 4.2 13.1% Tevin Coleman, Jordan Matthews
ATL 4.1 10.9%
CHI 3.9 12.2% Cordarrelle Patterson, Marvin Hall
MIN 3.9 10.3%
CLE 2.9 8.5% Odell Beckham
ARI 2.3 8.0% Kevin White, Charles Clay
TEN 1.9 7.1% Adam Humphries
CIN 1.5 4.3%
LAR 0.5 1.4%

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