Find out what Leviska-Cannault did better than anyone else in 2019 and why you could be excited about him in 2021.

This is Fantasy Football Today in Five, another edition with Jacob Gibbs.

I'm Adam Azer. Jacob writes player profiles at Sportsline.com.

You can hear him on the fantasy football today podcast from time

to time, and he's just got a wealth of stats that are very helpful. So let's talk about

Leviska-Chanal here. And I know you like targets per route run. So tell us about targets per

run with Leviska. Yeah, always going to talk about targets for outrun. And Leviska is one of,

you know, the receivers I'm most excited for this year. He has really encouraging numbers. And I think everything is coming together for him to have a really huge year. So targets per out run is one of the most important stats available for wide receivers. And I've covered in detail in sports. If you haven't read about it, Chanel was targeted on 20% of his routes as a rookie. For reference, that was higher than DJ Chark or Marvin Jones have ever been in any of their single seasons in a career. And not only that, it, I mean, that's just a really, really strong rate for a rookie. It's identical to what we saw from Deonté Johnson, Terry McLaurin, and Chris Godwin, just a few examples in recent years, and their rookie seasons. Then we've seen all those guys kind of ascend and become, you know, really fantasy relevant receivers. And I think we could see a similar trajectory from him. So just starting there at a base level, it's really exciting how often he was able to draw targets as a rookie. And I know you want to see him play in the slot a lot more. Why is that? Yeah, so slot targets in general, for my research, are just like worth more. They're worth about 11% more in fantasy and half-PPR formats than perimeter targets. And so start there. But then also, Chanel was just much better from the slot than he was from the perimeter.

He had a 24% target per route run rate, so he just said it was 20% and that was really good. That was on all his routes. It was all the way up to 24% from the slot. And then his yards per outrun was up from 1.48 on the perimeter to 1.72 on the slot. So he's just more efficient and targeted at a higher rate when running from the slot, and now Jackson has a ton of vacant slot routes available. And I think he's the most logical fit for that role. So that's really exciting. Yeah. And you've already talked on the podcast that we

did yesterday about Trevor Lawrence. Trevor Lawrence was a man coverage destroyer in college. I think you said

35% better than average against man coverage. And what does that mean for Leviska

Chenault? Yeah, this one surprised me a little bit because, you know, Shalda's, when you think

of receivers who are Graver's zone is typically chenault who runs these kind of lower a

dot routes and just settles down the intermediate but he was actually much better against man

last year um when facing zone coverage he was targeting on just 17% of his routes and then that was

way up um when facing man coverage all the way to 28% of his routes and this is on 111 routes so

it's a somewhat small sample size but it's not insignificant. That ranked 16th among qualified players. And then his yards per run was up from 1.39 for zone, all the way to 2.1 when facing man. And so I went back and looked at his college numbers to just kind of verify this because it was just, you know, one season worth of data. And it was the same story at Colorado in 2019.

He averaged 4.8 yards per route run, first man coverage, which, yeah, led the entire

nation.

And his targets per out run, we're up from 30% versus zone to 36% versus man.

And then, you know, just for what it's worth, like DJ Chark, Marvin Jones, have

had basically identical splits versus man in zone. So if anyone stands to benefit from Lawrence, you know, just shredding man coverage, I think it is probably going to be Chanel. I'm really excited for the fit. Yeah, look, there's a lot of Leviska-Chanal buzz. The issue I have is just I don't know who the number one wide receiver is going to be. I don't have a ton of faith in this offense.

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