It hasn’t been difficult to see that the predicted ascension for 49ers wide receiver Brandon Aiyuk has arrived. San Francisco’s fourth-year WR started the year with 129 yards and two touchdowns on eight catches. He hasn’t looked back since then, posting 927 yards and six touchdowns on 50 receptions in 12 games. The wild thing is his numbers could be substantially better.
Aiyuk’s 927 receiving yards rank 12th in the NFL through Week 13, but his productivity is ridiculous given how low his volume is. While he sits at No. 12 in receiving yards, he ranks 45th in receptions with 50 and 46th in targets with 72.
The low number of targets makes sense. Not only does Aiyuk share a field with Deebo Samuel, Christian McCaffrey and George Kittle, the 49ers also rank last in the NFL in pass attempts. Aiyuk actually holds a team-high 21.4 percent target share, but the target volume just isn’t there in a 49ers offense that relies so heavily on its run game.
Pro Football Focus has Aiyuk with the second-highest receiving grade among NFL WRs, and his 3.8 percent drop rate is the 12th-lowest mark in the league.
Extrapolating out his 21.4 percent target share to somewhere near the middle of the league shows just how productive he’s been. We used target share to help account for the fact that even in a higher-volume passing offense he’d still be sharing the ball with McCaffrey, Samuel and Kittle.
The Jaguars are No. 17 in the NFL at 416 pass attempts. Aiyuk in that instance would have received 89 targets. The math for Aiyuk’s efficiency with this workload shakes out to some elite numbers.
With 89 targets, Aiyuk would be sitting at 62 catches, 1,144 yards and seven touchdowns. This would rank him 20th in receptions, No. 5 in yards and tied for No. 5 in touchdown catches.
While having weapons around him and a quarterback who is accurate in the intermediate and deep areas of the field, Aiyuk is an elite route runner and separator who creates space in all three areas of the field. If it looks like he’s wide open every time he makes a catch, it’s because he typically is.
Aiyuk said before the year he was about to take off. He was right, and he’s done so emphatically enough that even a volume issue isn’t holding him back.
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