Overlooked Stats: Six Chunk-Play Artists Who Could Be a Life Raft if You Miss Out on the Top-Tier Quarterbacks
In fantasy football, gaining an edge means going beyond rankings and uncovering predictive stats that go overlooked. Legacy stats like receptions, yards, and past PPR output are solid but are also low-hanging fruit. Every bushy-haired grandpa with a fantasy football magazine who enters your draft room uses these. That means they make poor tools for beating your league despite excellent signal.
The real advantage comes from digging deeper and identifying underused metrics that point to future scoring spikes. The trick is spotting trends others miss—finding what actually predicts fantasy points before the rest of your league catches on.
PEARSON CORRELATION COEFFICIENTS
Pearson correlation coefficients are simple to calculate and measure the relationship between two variables, ranging from +1 to -1. In fantasy football, values over 0.4 indicate a meaningful signal; over 0.5 is highly significant. With tools from sites like RotoViz, PFF, or Fantasy Points, it’s easy to export large datasets and run correlations on hundreds of stats in just a few days.
A five to ten-year window strikes the right balance, as it is modern enough to reflect today’s game but deep enough for a stable dataset. I filter out players with low usage or those who missed the following season and anchor to PPR +N1 to identify forward-looking stats. Still, these parameters can vary depending on how an individual analyst sets the variables.
Correlation has limits. Stats don’t always rank in the same order from study to study, but the general strength of a stat’s signal tends to persist. We should remember to focus less on the exact sequence of the correlations’ strengths and instead on whether a stat is consistently predictive from year to year.
Today, we’ll take a look at completed air yards among quarterbacks.
COMPLETED AIR YARDS AS A PREDICTIVE STAT
For this study, I tested 225 QB stats from RotoViz, PFF, Fantasy Points, ESPN, and NextGen Stats. Many of the most correlated stats overlapped across sources; for instance, fantasy points, passing yards, and touchdowns appeared on multiple platforms, sometimes with slight discrepancies depending on how they were accumulated.
Legacy stats and fantasy points comprised many of the most predictive QB stats. However, two of the strongest underlying metrics came from the RotoViz Advanced Stat Explorer: attempted air yards (17th) and completed air yards (13th). These stats are intuitively related, with the slight edge in favor of finished production over attempted production, as we might expect.
Completed air yards return a correlation coefficient of .514, indicating an excellent correlation to PPR +N1. Completed air yards likely correlate well to future PPR because they isolate meaningful and effective vertical passing from checkdowns and screens, which can be more volatile. that
A NOTE ABOUT CORRELATING A QUARTERBACK’S RUSHING PRODUCTION WITH PPR +N1
As I compiled these results, one detail stood out: the QBs topping the charts in completed air yards are pocket passers. Most experienced fantasy managers today recognize the advantage that rushing QBs provide in fantasy football scoring, but completed air yards correlate better to QB scoring than rushing stats. So, how do we reconcile that?
Ultimately, because a decisive majority of fantasy quarterbacks score a high percentage of their fantasy points based on what they do in the passing game, rushing traits become diluted in broad correlation studies to PPR +N1. Advanced passing stats, by contrast, are more prominently represented, so correlation coefficients read them as steadier indicators.
That doesn’t mean rushing should be overlooked. Josh Allen, Lamar Jackson, Jalen Hurts, and likely Jayden Daniels deserve to be considered stronger bets than any other QB on this list. This is certainly tied to their running ability, but not because of it alone. They are genuinely skilled passers as well as gifted runners. Good fantasy production can come from great passers who are limited rushers or great rushers who are limited passers. However, true, reliable upside comes from the unique duality of both.
Picture this: we're measuring how high bunnies can leap into the air (for some reason). Imagine the bunny’s leaping ability as a symbol for a QB’s passing acumen. Some bunnies start on the ground (immobile—Matthew Stafford), others on an apple box (somewhat mobile—Patrick Mahomes), and a few begin on a four-step ladder (very mobile—Lamar Jackson). By changing the platform from which a bunny begins its jump, we guarantee that certain ones won’t finish among the bottom results, even if they can’t jump as well as those who started from a lower platform. But the bunnies starting on the ladder who also have strong leaps will soar high above the rest.
Players like Anthony Richardson or Justin Fields begin from the elevated platform of a higher rushing floor, but, unreliably, if ever, reach high heights because they can’t fully take advantage of the headstart their rushing ability gives them.
Meanwhile, pure pocket passers like Jared Goff and Matthew Stafford rely on hitting the high end of statistical variance in TDs and explosives. The stats they rely upon are more volatile than rushing production, so this archetype consequently dips in and out of the positional apex depending on naturally occurring fluctuations.
We can still take sharp bets on players like Fields or Richardson—or perhaps better, Kyler Murray or Bo Nix, knowing that they’ve got a shortcut to the positional apex and a reliable, bust-proof downside as long as they remain in the lineup. But we should still hunt for predictive signals among pocket passers to better contextualize them as well, especially since there are so many more of them and they are more cost-effective buys in fantasy football. We should prioritize knowing which ones are hitting the advanced stats that repeat and predict fantasy production, because in a sharp league, we may realistically be shopping from this aisle, especially in superflex or two-QB leagues.
Completed air yards are one of the advanced passing stats we want to pay heed to. Here are a few QBs who may be slightly undervalued based on their ADP relative to their 2024 completed air yards.
