Fantasy Football Stat of the Day: The tackle-breaking wide receivers

(Leading up to the 2021 NFL season, FTN’s Tyler Loechner will dive into the fantasy football numbers to bring you his Fantasy Stat of the Day, five days a week.)

In Wednesday’s Stat of the Day article, we wrote about the RBs who were able to elude the most tackles per touch. (Not surprisingly, advanced stat king Nick Chubb topped that chart.)

Today’s piece will look at the WRs that cause the most forced missed tackles per touch. A few of the fantasy community’s favorite targets sit atop this list.

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Fan favorites Laviska Shenault, A.J. Brown are the most elusive WRs

The chart below shows last season’s RB leaders sorted by forced missed tackles per touch (minimum 100 total touches).

Player	Touches	Forced Missed Tackles	Forced Missed Tackles Per Touch
Laviska Shenault	76	22	0.29
A.J. Brown	70	17	0.24
Darnell Mooney	65	15	0.23
D.J. Moore	68	15	0.22
Cordarrelle Patterson	84	18	0.21
Brandon Aiyuk	66	14	0.21
Cooper Kupp	96	20	0.21
DK Metcalf	83	16	0.19
DeAndre Hopkins	116	22	0.19
Josh Reynolds	53	10	0.19
Tyreek Hill	100	18	0.18
Jerry Jeudy	52	9	0.17
Terry McLaurin	89	15	0.17
Curtis Samuel	118	19	0.16
Hunter Renfrow	56	9	0.16
Julio Jones	51	8	0.16
Stefon Diggs	128	19	0.15
Chase Claypool	72	10	0.14
Calvin Ridley	95	13	0.14
Russell Gage	74	10	0.14

Fantasy favorite Shenault crushed this study, lapping the field in forced missed tackles per touch. Shenault could be a legitimate fantasy stud as early as 2021 — assuming Trevor Lawrence picks up NFL-level play as fast as he’s expected to. For now, D.J. Chark remains the WR1 in Jacksonville, but Viska is lurking. This visualization helps you see how much better Shenault was than the field:

Behind Shenault is another fantasy fan favorite in A.J. Brown. Brown is viewed as more of a big, dominant WR, so seeing him rank up there with shifty guys like Shenault, Darnell Mooney, D.J. Moore, Cordarrelle Patteron, Brandon Aiyuk, and the like just goes to show how special and unique Brown is. He’s going to be a fantasy WR1 for a long, long time, though that might hit a temporary snag with Julio Jones now in Tennessee as well (Brown is still no less than a solid WR2 with Jones).

Speaking of Aiyuk, the rookie was a fantasy league-winner in 2020 — but his hype isn’t as high as it would be during a normal offseason. That’s because the San Francisco 49ers have a question mark at QB and are expecting the return of Deebo Samuel and George Kittle, both of whom could realistically see more targets than Aiyuk in 2021. At the same time, Aiyuk proved capable of being a WR1 target hog — so it’s plausible he remains the team’s top dog in 2021. Exactly how the target tree shapes up in San Francisco has huge fantasy implications.

An interesting thought when looking at this data: This list shows the top 20 WRs based on forced missed tackles per touch, but the bottom of the list is significantly behind the top of the list. Calvin Ridley and Chase Claypool averaged 0.14 forced missed tackles per touch — good enough to rank in the top 20 among WRs — but still only half as many as the players at the top of the list.