Signal vs Noise

Touchdowns Win Your Week and Lie About Next Season

For running backs, yards per game repeats from year to year at r = 0.598. Touchdown rate repeats at 0.187. One of those is a skill and one is mostly weather.

Touchdowns are the whole point of football and one of the worst things you can build a projection on. Both of those are true at once, and holding them together is most of what separates a good fantasy season from a frustrating one.

Look at the running back row. Yards per game repeats at 0.598, which for a year-over-year sports statistic is genuinely strong. Touchdown rate repeats at 0.187, which is barely distinguishable from noise. The same player, the same offense, one year apart, and his scoring rate has almost no memory.

A back who scored on 6% of his touches last year had a 6% season. That is not the same as being a 6% touchdown back.

What a touchdown actually depends on

Almost everything except the player. How often his offense reaches the red zone, which is a team property. Whether the coach prefers to throw a fade or hand it off from the two, which is a staff property. Whether the goal-line back that week is him or a 250-pound specialist, which is a depth chart property. Whether a linebacker slipped.

Yardage, by contrast, accumulates across a hundred and fifty carries and dozens of targets. It is a large sample by the end of a season, and large samples remember. Touchdowns arrive maybe eight or ten times a year. That is a small sample by any standard, and small samples are mostly variance wearing a costume.

Receivers are a different case

At receiver the two numbers are nearly identical, 0.408 and 0.404, and the touchdown rate holds up considerably better than it does for backs. Receiver touchdowns are no less random; the rate simply encodes something durable: red zone role, size, and whether a quarterback looks for you when the field shortens. A big-bodied receiver who is the designated red zone target keeps being that, in a way that a goal-line running back committee does not guarantee.

So the usual advice, "never chase touchdowns," is again a bit too broad. Never chase running back touchdown rate. Treat receiver touchdown rate as real but noisy, and check whether the underlying red zone role is actually his.

The practical move

When you are looking at a back coming off a monster season, separate the two halves of it. Ask what he did per game in yardage, and treat that as roughly repeatable. Then ask how many touchdowns he scored and treat that as a number that will regress hard toward whatever his opportunity implies. A back with 1,300 yards and 14 touchdowns is being drafted on both. Only one of them is coming back.

The inverse is where the money is. A back with 1,300 yards and four touchdowns had the same season, minus the luck, and he will be available two rounds later. Nothing about his workload says he will fall short of eight or nine touchdowns next year. Draft rooms pay for the touchdowns. The data says pay for the yards.