Average Separation Score: Breakouts and Sleepers

When we first released Average Separation Score (ASS) last offseason, we knew we had something special on our hands. But after an offseason of further research and number-crunching, ASS has proven to be even more useful for fantasy football than we could have imagined.

The “raw” version of ASS is great as a skill-check metric that filters out many environmental factors (offensive efficiency, QB quality, target competition, team pass volume, etc.). This makes it useful for evaluating players switching teams or entering a new situation, just as one might use a stat such as yards per route run (YPRR).

And when we adjust for route participation rate — creating Playing time-Adjusted Separation Score (PASS) — it becomes straight-up more predictive of next season’s fantasy scoring than YPRR, despite solely relying on film-based observations. (I wrote an entire article outlining how PASS was created here.)

In other words, we now have a wholly “film-based” stat created independently of results or actual production, yet it’s just as predictive. From here, possibilities abound. Perhaps PASS will reveal breakout candidates that YPRR wouldn’t? Alternatively, it could show us which receivers suffer most from poor QB play or target competition, leaving it up to us to decide whether those factors will change. Finally, perhaps we should gain extra confidence in WRs who’ve proven elite by both PASS and YPRR, or raise our eyebrows at ones who’ve been great in one and not the other within a small sample.

This article will be all about extracting everything we can from both raw ASS and PASS to help you in the 2025 fantasy football season. By the end, you’ll know who this year’s top sleepers and breakouts are, according to each.

THE TOP 15 SEPARATORS (BY RAW, UNADJUSTED ASS)

1. Mike Evans had the best ASS in football last year. Once Chris Godwin’s PPR scam was out of the way — in which he averaged a league-leading 4.8 FPG on designed targets, which are excluded from ASS — Evans averaged 20.7 FPG from Week 8 on, ranking behind only Ja’Marr Chase. This is a perfect example of how ASS can tell us what will happen when situations change, and it suggests Evans was nowhere close to washed last year. Still, it’s fair to wonder if Evans can repeat the magic trick this year, with Godwin back and former OC Liam Coen — who had Evans run an atypically high rate of horizontally-breaking routes, a separation and efficiency cheat code — leaving for Jacksonville.

2. Why do the Ravens — Rashod Bateman (2nd), Zay Flowers (3rd), and Mark Andrews (6th) — all rank so highly in ASS? I asked a group of our lead charters, wondering if the pull of Lamar Jackson and Derrick Henry on opposing defenses could be the culprit. But according to Brett Whitefield, this isn’t the case: the charting process accounts for how defenses play, measuring only “earned” separation on the part of the receiver. Instead, the Ravens seem to have prioritized elite separation as the most important trait in their scouting, and we’ve seen that play out with or without Henry; Andrews led all TEs in ASS in 2023 as well, while Flowers and Bateman each ranked top-13 among all players. Does this hint at elite fantasy football upside for these players? If one were on a different team that were more pass-heavy and had fewer separators to compete with, perhaps it would; the Ravens have attempted the fewest passes in the NFL over the past two seasons (971) and threw the ball just 42.2% of the time while leading in 2024 (2nd-least). Through the first 10 weeks of 2024 (before the Ravens’ defense began leading the NFL in every category), Flowers exceeded 18.0 PPR points a whopping five times, fewer than only Justin Jefferson and Amon-Ra St. Brown. This has compelled me to keep Flowers ranked highly in dynasty as he enters the final season of his rookie contract, but in the near-term, it’s hard to say his or the rest of this offense’s elite separation skills will translate to elite fantasy production for any individual receiver.

3. A.J. Brown ranked 4th-best in unadjusted ASS (0.163), 2nd-best in YPRR (3.22), and 2nd-best in 1D/RR (0.152), yet just 72nd in routes per game (25.8) and 11th in FPG (16.7) in 2024. Had he run as many routes as Ja’Marr Chase, he’d have averaged nearly 26.7 FPG at that level of efficiency, the most by any WR in NFL history. If the Eagles throw somewhat more in 2025 than the league-low 448 times they did in 2024, Brown will easily finish as a top-8 WR. In a world where they rank top-10 in pass volume, Brown might well finish as the overall WR1. I doubt we’re in that world, but I do expect things to improve; the Eagles have one of the top-6 most difficult schedules, and new OC Kevin Patullo is willing to play up-tempo should the team fall behind in games.

4. Nico Collins defies logic and physics. He followed up his top-10 finish by ASS in 2023 with a top-5 finish (0.161) in 2024, while ranking behind only Puka Nacua and A.J. Brown in YPRR (2.94). Collins averaged 19.0 FPG (~WR2) across nine fully healthy games, and returns to a Texans offense that suddenly lacks clear answers in the backfield, with Joe Mixon yet to practice while nursing a mysterious foot injury. Perhaps this will lead to an even more pass-heavy approach, with former OC Bobby Slowik — who most frustratingly ranked top-3 in run rate on 2nd down and 7+ yards last year — now out of town. New OC Nick Caley comes from a play-action-heavy Rams offense and could give Collins an even further boost in that department.

5. Ladd McConkey’s 8th-place finish in ASS (0.150) underscores the insanity of his rookie campaign. In the WR class that gave us arguably the best collection of rookie seasons of the past decade, McConkey’s separation outshone that of both Brian Thomas Jr. and Malik Nabers. McConkey was a phenom from both the slot and out wide, with the only remaining question — not unlike the one A.J. Brown faces — being whether this Greg Roman-led offense will continue to throw enough to support him in his ascent to fantasy stardom. Early signs are promising; The Athletic’s Daniel Popper projects Najee Harris will remain on the NFI list at the start of the year, which would force him to miss the first four games of the season and leave this team shorthanded in the backfield. Roman doesn’t even know who would split carries with rookie Omarion Hampton in that scenario. When backfield injuries struck last year (combined with QB Justin Herbert’s better health coming out of the bye), the team simply went pass-heavy; they notably averaged a +4.1% PROE (~7th-most pass-heavy) in games that one of J.K. Dobbins or Gus Edwards missed in 2024, with McConkey averaging 17.5 FPG in that split. This early-season opening could be all McConkey needs to cement himself as the engine of this offense.

6. Amon-Ra St. Brown and Jameson Williams ranked 10th and 14th in ASS last year, respectively, both career-best marks. Perhaps this adds fuel to the fire of speculation that new OC John Morton will look to feature Williams more heavily as a co-equal part of this passing game with St. Brown. However, it’s worth considering that despite similar separation scores, St. Brown has long been a superior target-commander to Williams, not unlike how A.J. Brown has always fended off another excellent separator in Devonta Smith.

7. Ja’Marr Chase continued his dominance in 2024, posting a career-best 0.137 separation score while moving all over the field, ranking top-20 by ASS from both out wide (0.148) and in the slot (0.120). And all of the outside forces that result in fantasy points worked in his favor as well; he led the NFL in routes run (686) — more than any other player over the past four seasons — thanks to a dreadful Bengals’ defense that could be without its best player in Trey Hendrickson this year thanks to an ongoing contract dispute. Chase is the clear and deserving 1.01.

8. Josh Palmer has been an unlikely poster-boy for ASS; he’s ranked top-20 in the metric over each of the past two seasons despite never exceeding a 17% target share or 11.0 FPG over that timeframe. Has he simply broken the system? I wouldn’t go that far, but he is a perfect example of a player ASS will always love more than it probably should, given his fantasy results. He combines a high aDOT and a relatively low route share (he hasn’t cracked a 75.0% route participation rate over either of the past two years) with separation skills tilted greatly toward downfield routes, which has never been a recipe for consistency in fantasy football. Instead, the best two takeaways from Palmer’s ASS are that 1) he could make Bills second-year WR Keon Coleman redundant in this area of the field and 2) he could be an interesting GPP play in weekly DFS contests alongside Josh Allen.

9. It’s pretty clear that if not for A.J. Brown, we’d be viewing DeVonta Smith as one of the best WRs in the league. Every season, his ASS has been excellent, but slightly behind Brown’s; in 2024, his 0.131 ASS (13th) compared to Brown’s 0.163 (4th). In the only two games he’s played without Brown since 2022, Smith averages 17.8 FPG (~WR7) on a 29.4% target share (~WR3). He fared similarly (17.5 FPG) across seven contests with Brown but without Dallas Goedert last season. All of the same pass rate-related considerations we discussed with Brown apply to Smith as well, making him an intriguing mid-round selection with several outs to beating his ADP by a wide margin; he’s a bet on both a return to relative normalcy in passing volume and a contingent bet on one of two players missing time.

10. Most advanced metrics weren’t particularly impressed by Terry McLaurin last year; he didn’t even hit a career-best in YPRR or target share, with much of his fantasy success being carried by a historically and unsusustainably high TD rate on end zone targets. His ongoing contract holdout adds more uncertainty. His top-15 ASS (0.110) would ordinarily be a reminder of how important he is to this Commanders’ offense, but after reducing the route minimum, we can observe that Noah Brown (0.140) actually beat him out while commanding the exact same TPRR (0.22). Brown has never been more than a role player in the NFL over an extended period, but perhaps the Commanders’ estimation of Brown outstripping the public’s is why no deal has gotten done through mid-August.

COMPARING PLAYING TIME-ADJUSTED SEPARATION SCORE (PASS) AND YPRR

Here’s what I teased in the intro. By adjusting ASS for playing time, we penalize players who succeed on small samples in specific roles that their coaches hand-pick for them, while rewarding players who earn consistent separation across a wider variety of game situations and deployments. I dive more into PASS and its top performers here, but in this space, I want to explore what we can learn by directly comparing a film-based metric in PASS to a production-based metric like YPRR.

1. Four teams stick out in the above chart for generating worse actual efficiency (YPRR) than the separation their receivers gain (PASS) would imply. One is the Ravens, whom we discussed at length at the top of this article. The others are the Giants, Bears, and Cardinals. All of D.J. Moore, Keenan Allen, Rome Odunze, Malik Nabers, Wan’Dale Robinson, Darius Slayton, Marvin Harrison Jr., and Michael Wilson fall far above the trendline, meaning they were less efficient than they “should” have been based solely on their separation. And from digging into these teams’ advanced metrics, it’s pretty easy to see why: