I did this last year to see how Zay Jones compared to his peers as a rookie and thought that it would be fun to update it for this year. I've also analyzed Robert Foster compared to some of his peers to see how he stacks up (albeit on a small sample size at this point in his career).

PlayerProfiler.com is a very cool website, and one of the many things that they do (and what I'm focusing on here) is that they strip out the passes that they believe are "uncatchable", which allows us to see how WRs have performed strictly when they have an actual chance at catching the ball. An example of one of their profiles can be seen at the link below:

https://www.playerprofiler.com/nfl/zay-jones/

What I've done is I've used ProFootballFocus' average depth of target numbers to identify 15-16 peers for each Zay and Foster (for Zay, this is the 8 players directly above and below him in terms of average target depth; for Foster, this is the top 15 since Foster leads the NFL in average target depth...more on that later).

Doing this resulted in the following focus group for each:

Zay Jones' peers:

Michael Crabtree

Devin Funchess

Anthony Miller

Jarvis Landry

Kenny Golladay

Marquez Valdes-Scantling

Tajae Sharpe

Odell Beckham

Chris Godwin

Allen Robinson

Antonio Brown

DeAndre Hopkins

Chris Hogan

Davante Adams

Taylor Gabriel

Keeping in mind again that these numbers remove the "uncatchable" passes, as a rookie, Zay Jones had the following numbers:

Catch Rate: 57.4%

Drop Rate: 14.9%

Target Depth: 13.8 yards This season, Zay's numbers have improved pretty dramatically: Catch Rate: 69.8%

Drop Rate: 6.3%

Target Depth: 11.3 yards Having said that, he improved from being the worst in the NFL to still being pretty bad, with the following rankings compared to his peer group (out of 17): Catch Rate: 17th, 14.8% below the average peer

Drop Rate: 12th, 0.8% below the average peer So all in all, Zay is still pretty bad relative to his peers, which helps to explain his current ranking on PFF of 98th out of 123 qualifying WRs.



Robert Foster's peers:

James Washington

Kelvin Benjamin (lol)

John Ross

Marvin Jones

Kenny Stills

John Brown

David Moore

Mike Williams

Robby Anderson

Marquise Goodwin

DeSean Jackson

Tyreek Hill

Mike Evans

Jaron Brown

Robert Foster's numbers: