Football Outsiders (NFL) takes WR screens to the woodshed.

Football Outsiders looks at successes for each type of route run by the NFL WRs in 2018. Here's their write-up on the screen route (go to the link to see the chart of the best individuals). I am hoping we rarely see the WR screen from Notre Dame but we have hoped this every year...

Screen
No route causes more gnashing of teeth and tearing of hair than the wide receiver screen. It's basically a guaranteed completion -- just over 90 percent, by far the highest completion rate we're looking at today -- and generates the most YAC, but it has, by far, the lowest DYAR (-969) and DVOA (-25.7%), in large part thanks to the lowest aDOT (-1.9). And yet teams still threw 1,003 receiver screens last season. Aggravating.

For the record, those totals do not include screens from players lined up in the backfield. Running back screens had a DVOA of -3.8% (on 738 attempts), with 375 DYAR; Kareem Hunt led the league with 84 DYAR. The following table lists the 23 players with at least 11 screen targets out wide, in the slot, or as a tight end.

T.Y. Hilton joins Robert Woods and Vance McDonald as the only players to manage a double-digit positive DVOA on screens with double-digit targets. This is a boom-or-bust play, and three of Hilton's targets boomed for 20 or more yards. Of this list, only Hilton and George Kittle would still have a positive DYAR if you took away their biggest play -- this is really a list of one-hit wonders.

This is the third straight season Antonio Brown has qualified for the leaderboards here, and he now has -36, -34, and -26 DYAR. Todd Haley was blamed for a lot of Pittsburgh's screen-happy ways, but he apparently didn't take his playbook with him when he left the Steelers last season. For the record, no Raiders player had more than nine wide receiver screens, so maybe Brown's days of catching negative-air yard passes are a thing of the past.

Dede Westbrook's numbers are almost obscenely bad. He did generate four first downs in his 17 targets, but he fumbled on one of them, and his most successful play was listed with 5 air yards in what I suspect was more likely a charting error than a successful receiver screen -- and it only gained 15 yards in total, so it wasn't one of those huge boom plays that make the screen enticing. Nelson Agholor was worse. His 11 screens produced just one first down, and that was thanks to an unnecessary roughness penalty rather than anything Agholor actually did. The Eagles only threw to him 11 times, or else he surely would have taken the bottom spot on this leaderboard.

You can see that the Packers had two qualified players with negative DYAR in Randall Cobb and Davante Adams, but it doesn't stop there -- the Packers had eight different players targeted with at least one WR screen. All of them had a negative DVOA, and only Marquez Valdes-Scantling emerged with a positive DYAR, with 3. Stop throwing wideout screens!

They won't, of course. We can put up all these numbers every year, but coaches will just remember the few successes, like this 59-yard touchdown scamper from Christian Kirk worth 31 DYAR. That was the only screen all of last season with more than 50 yards after the catch, by the by.

Click here for link at https://www.footballoutsiders.com/stat-analysis/2019/2018-dv