How Much Does Shadow Coverage Impact Wide Receivers?

4 years ago by Antonio Losada

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If you only play redraft fantasy football, you know that no matter what you have to play your studs week in and week out. That is non-negotiable, and your lineup decisions mostly come down to who to play at lower-level spots such as WR3 or FLEX. If you play DFS contests, though, you know that you have the whole NFL roster available for you to pick within a budget, and therefore your top-tier "replacements" are also going to be studs. That is why paying attention to WR/CB matchups is much more important in DFS than redraft leagues.

While most of the time cornerbacks don't track receivers all around the field--which we come to call "Shadow Coverage"--it happens from time to time, and a wide receiver finds himself facing strong competition for a full match instead of going against different corners on a fairly balanced basis.

Today, in keeping with my exploration of the WR vs. CB world and its data, I will be taking a look at the games in which a cornerback has shadowed a wideout through Week 7 of the 2020 season. I will try to come up with some takeaways useful for fantasy contests, and paint a picture of how impactful shadow coverages are (or not) in wide receiver performances and outcomes. With so many questions to solve and numbers to crunch, I went and put on some work. Let me walk you through it!

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Shadow Coverages in 2020

We're already halfway through the 2020 season, and entering Week 8 there have been 70 instances of shadow coverages between corners and receivers this year. That isn't a low number, as it comes out as an average of exactly ten WR/CB shadows per week. That average hasn't been reached every week, obviously. The lowest amount of shadows came in Week 3 when there were just six of them, while the highest number came in Week 2 with 15 such matchups.

As far as individual players, there have been 42 different cornerbacks to shadow a receiver at least once this season, compared to 51 wide receivers that have been shadowed at least once through Week 7. Here is some more detailed breakdown:

Only one cornerback has been used in shadow coverage five times this season, leading the league: Bradley Roby (HOU)
No wide receiver has been shadowed more than three times
The most-shadowed (three times) wide receivers through Week 7 have been Adam Thielen, DK Metcalf, Sammy Watkins, and Terry McLaurin

Shadow Coverages in the Fantasy Football Realm

Moving onto fantasy numbers, here are some nuggets that I have been able to extract from the numbers coming from those shadow-matchups.

For this analysis, I will be using data related to the performance of the wide receivers exclusively against their assigned shadow cover corner.

That means that the targets the receiver logged against other players won't be factored into the numbers. For example, Tyler Lockett scored 53 PPR points in Week 7, but only 26.1 of those came against his shadow-corner that game, Dre Kirkpatrick. I'll be looking strictly at the numbers against the latter, not the overall game performance.

Here are some of the best and worst performances by WRs facing shadow coverage this year:

Best overall WR performance facing shadow coverage: Stefon Diggs (27.8 PPR, vs. Noah Igbinoghene)
Worst overall WR performance: eight players with 0.0 PPR; only Mike Evans has two performances without scoring any point against shadow coverages.
Best PPR/Target WR performance: Nelson Agholor (1 target, 7.7 PPR/T, vs. Josh Norman)
Worst PPR/Target WR performance: Calvin Ridley (4 targets, 0.0 PPR/T, vs. Jaire Alexander)
Most PPR points over the season PPG average: Stefon Diggs (average of 18.0 PPG, a score of 27.8 PPR, vs. Noah Igbinoghene)
Most PPR points below the season PPG average: Davante Adams (average of 26.2, a score of 6.3, vs. Carlton Davis)

How Impactful is Shadow Coverage on WRs Fantasy Scores?

The numbers and stat lines presented above are just one-off curiosities. The same as we can't expect Diggs to drop 27.8 PPR points every week--shadowed or not--we can't expect Stephon Gilmore to put on 0.0 PPR-allowed games each match he plays, whether he shadows a receiver or covers different ones.

This is a little breakdown of the 70 shadow coverages this season in terms of which position got favored at the end of the game (ie: "Advantage WR" means that the WR scored more PPR points against his shadow-corner than his season PPG average):

As you see, shadow coverages tended to kill the WRs upside more often than not (71% of the time) this season through W7. In the 70 times a WR has been shadowed, more than two of each three matches he came out on the losing side of things scoring fewer PPR points that he had through the year on average.

The receivers that were able to "beat" the shadow and score over their season PPG did so with an average score of 14.0 PPR on those 20 matches. When the CBs won their matchups on shadow coverage, they were able to limit receivers to average PPR scores of just 5.2 fantasy points.

On average, the receivers beating their shadow corners only scored 3.0 PPR points over their season PPG marks, while corners that limited WRs did so with an average of -6.8 PPR advantage below those WRs season-long PPG marks, more than twice the advantage of WRs' in their favor.

* * *

We can look at the information above in a different way, getting another perspective of how WRs are performing against shadow corners. I have plotted each of the 70 games in the dataset, using both the PPR scored against the SC (shadow coverage) by the WRs and the PPG they have averaged through Week 7.

The best WR-performance against shadow coverage came from Diggs when he posted +9.8 PPR points over his season PPG, and the worst happened when Ridley went for 0.0 PPR points, thus finishing -26.5 below his season PPG.

As we saw in the chart at the start of this section, and as we'll see next in more detail, even those WRs who "beat" their shadow corners tend to do so in tight margins with most just scoring around +2.0 PPR points over their PPG averages.

* * *

This is how those 70 games have finished in terms of PPR scored by the WRs (or allowed by the shadow corners, looking at it from the opposite angle). I've bunched the scores in buckets of five fantasy points:

When facing shadow corners, almost half of the population of WRs (44%) have fallen below 5 PPR points. More than two-thirds of them (70%) couldn't reach 10 PPR points in those games. Only 17 WRs scored above 10 PPR points, and so far there have been only four "explosive" performances against shadow corners (a paltry 6% of cases).

* * *

Finally, I wanted to tackle the data from a finer analysis angle, looking at PPR points per target instead of the macro-level of per-game scores.

As a rule of thumb, a top-tier WR averages near 2.0 PPR per target (this season, the top-24 WRs are at 2.05 PPR/T). On the other hand, a top-tier CB gives up below 1.5 PPR per target (this season, the top-48 CBs targeted 20+ times are at 1.3 PPR/T allowed).

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Through Week 7, these are some takeaways from shadow coverages on a per-target basis:

Among the 70 shadow-games, 43 times (61%) has the WR put up fewer PPR/T than his season average
27 times (39%) WRs have bested their PPR/T season average

In games in which WRs have scored fewer PPR/T than their season averages, they finished with -0.97 PPR/T below their averages
In games in which WRs have scored more PPR/T than their season averages, they finished with 1.05 PPR/T above their averages

28 times (40%) has a WR scored 2.0+ PPR/T when facing shadow coverage
11 times (16%) has a WR scored 3.0+ PPR against SC
20 WRs (29%) were limited to 1.0 or fewer PPR/T when facing shadow coverage

21 CBs have allowed 2.0+ PPR/T at least once this season when shadowing a receiver
6 CBs have allowed 2.0+ PPR/T at least twice: Bradley Roby, Noah Igbinoghene, Jaire Alexander, Josh Norman, Noah Igbinoghene, Vernon Hargreaves III, and Xavien Howard
Only Josh Norman has three games shadowing a WR in which he allowed him to finish with 2.0+ PPR/T

18 CBs have limited shadowed WRs to 1.0 PPR/T or fewer once this season
Only Jaire Alexander and James Bradberry have done so in two different games/against two different receivers

* * *

I've plotted three bar charts for every WR who has faced shadow coverage at least two times this season. In order, the charts show the PPR per target they got on average in their shadowed games, the average total PPR points they scored in those contests, and the average difference with their season PPG averages.

No wonder, Mike Evans and Chase Claypool are in a league of their own when it comes to suffering against shadow corners. Both have been shadowed two times this season, and both have averaged fewer than 1.0 PPR points total against their assignments.

Evans has faced Jaire Alexander and Marshon Lattimore, finishing both games without scoring any fraction of a fantasy point at all. Claypool laid an egg against Bradley Roby and could only score 0.8 PPR against Malcolm Butler.

Only two WRs have beaten their shadows on average this season, scoring above their PPG marks in their four games (two each). The truth is, perhaps only Demarcus Robinson should be truly considered as a "shadow-beater". Robinson has faced two of the best corners in the league (Johsn Norman and Casey Heyward, both giving up 12.1 or fewer PPR points per game and fewer than 2.0 PPR per target) while Valdez-Scantling has faced two of the worst (Cameron Dantzler and Kendall Sheffield; both giving up 17+ PPR per game and 2.0+ PPR per target).

Fantasy Relevance

Even if you feel overwhelmed by the data analyzed above because you're not familiar with how WR/CB matchups work in fantasy on the finer level of detail, the main takeaway should be clear: shadow coverage can (and most often does) turn the best of WRs into mush.

There seems to be an impact on WR fantasy performances when facing shadow coverage, and on average that means that a shadowed WR will finish below 10 PPR points two of each three times he's shadowed, and above 15 PPR points fewer than one of each six games in which he faces shadow coverage.

PPR scores from shadowed WRs through Week 7 have ranged from 0.0 (nine times, eight players) to 27.8 (Stefon Diggs).

More importantly, and again on average, wide receivers have performed to an average of -4.0 PPR points below their PPG season-average marks against shadow corners this season. You read that right, folks. The impact is real.

Splitting the WRs in tiers, though, we get the following results:

WR1 (17+ PPG this season) have scored -6.6 PPR points per game below their PPG season marks against shadow coverages
WR2 (14 to 17 PPG) have scored -6.1 PPR points per game
WR3 (10 to 14 PPG) have scored -5.6 PPR points per game
Lower-tier WR (0 to 10 PPG) have scored -1.1 PPR points per game

Don't get too lost in those numbers. There is a correlation between the season PPG and the odds to beat them: the biggest the PPG, the hardest it is to score above that mark, or at least, to score many fewer points below that number. In fact, looking at raw PPR scores:

WR1 (17+ PPG this season) have scored an average of 18.1 PPR in the games they've been shadowed
WR2 (14 to 17 PPG) have scored 15.1 PPR
WR3 (10 to 14 PPG) have scored 10.9 PPR
Lower-tier WR (0 to 10 PPG) have scored 7.5 PPR

The main takeaway is that while "normal" WR/CB matchups don't have much impact on WR performance (-0.12 to +0.12 PPR per target on average), shadow coverage does in fact greatly impact WRs.

As we have seen, shadowed WRs score an average of -4.0 PPR points per game below their season average PPG, and an average of near -0.35 PPR per target below their season average PPR/T.

That being said, though, nobody should sit WR1 DK Metcalf because he's facing Stephon Gilmore in redraft leagues (he cooked the matchup to score 19.2 PPR points, 1.9 above his season PPG) in order to start some WR2 or WR3 in a better matchup, as the latter won't probably even reach a good fantasy-baseline even on the sweetest of matchups/coverages.

In the same way, nobody should believe that DK Metcalf is going to put up a dud such as he did against Patrick Peterson's shadow in Week 7 (4.3 PPR; -13.0 below his season PPG), as that was most probably an extremely unique outlier.

Those differences in performance can be critical in certain DFS contests, but as far as redraft leagues go, you would end in a much better place in the long run if you always play your studs and believe in their abilities to overcome shadow corners and "bad" matchups.

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