What Is Yards Per Route Run (YPRR)?

Yards per route run (YPRR) is a receiver's receiving yards divided by the number of pass routes he ran, not by his targets or catches. It measures production per opportunity to get open, so it credits a player whether or not the quarterback looked his way. Puka Nacua led 2025 at 3.57.

How yards per route run is calculated

The formula is one line: receiving yards divided by routes run. A receiver who runs 500 routes and finishes with 1,100 receiving yards has a YPRR of 2.20.

What makes it different from every other receiving rate is the denominator. Yards per catch divides by receptions, so it only counts the plays that worked. Yards per target divides by targets, so it only counts the plays where the quarterback threw his way. YPRR divides by every route: the ones where he was blanketed, the ones where he was open and ignored, and the ones where the quarterback went down before anyone got open. The player is charged for every snap he was part of the passing game, not just the ones that produced a box score line.

That is also the reason it travels well between players on different offenses. A receiver on a team that throws 40 times a game and a receiver on a team that throws 25 are not comparable on raw yardage, and barely comparable on yards per game. Per route, they are on the same scale.

One caveat before any number below. Routes run is a charted stat. It is not a column in the official box score, so YPRR leaderboards come from providers that chart every pass play rather than from the league's own tables. The figures here come from PFF, which created the metric. Charters can disagree at the margins on what counts as a route (a back who chips an edge rusher then leaks out, a receiver on a designed screen), so do not mix providers inside a single comparison.

What the 2025 leaderboard looked like

PFF's top 10 qualifying wide receivers for 2025, minimum 40 targets, covering the regular season plus the playoffs:

• Puka Nacua, LAR: 3.57. 574 routes turned into 2,047 receiving yards, 153 catches and 12 touchdowns on a league-high 200 targets.
• Jaxon Smith-Njigba, SEA: 3.42. 136 catches, 1,992 yards and 12 touchdowns on 182 targets.
• Zay Flowers, BAL: 2.53. 86 catches for 1,211 yards.
• Amon-Ra St. Brown, DET: 2.48. 1,401 yards on the shallowest target diet in the group, an 8.4 yard average depth.
• CeeDee Lamb, DAL: 2.37. 1,077 yards in 14 games.
• George Pickens, DAL: 2.35. 1,429 yards at 15.4 per catch, the highest in the group.
• Drake London, ATL and Luther Burden III, CHI: 2.34, tied for seventh.
• Christian Watson, GB: 2.28. A 17.4 yard average target depth, by far the deepest role here.
• Nico Collins, HOU: 2.27. 1,138 yards on 124 targets.

Two things worth taking from the shape of that list. The top two are a long way clear: the drop from Smith-Njigba at 3.42 to Flowers at 2.53 is bigger than the drop from Flowers all the way down to tenth. And the entire top 10 fits between 2.27 and 3.57, which is the practical range for elite in a single season.

Notice also how little the list cares about style. St. Brown at an 8.4 yard average depth and Watson at 17.4 are four spots apart. Pickens averaged 15.4 yards a catch and still ranked below St. Brown at 12.0, because Pickens needed more routes to get there. YPRR does not ask how the yards arrived, only how many routes it took.

What counts as a good YPRR

The leaderboard gives you the ceiling. The floor takes arithmetic, because no public source publishes a league-wide route count.

Start with what is verified. NFL offenses produced 122,413 receiving yards in 2025 across 18,726 dropbacks (17,439 pass attempts plus 1,287 sacks), per NFL.com's team passing and receiving tables. That is 6.54 receiving yards per dropback, or 225 receiving yards per team per game.

Now split it among the players running the routes. Somewhere between four and five eligible receivers release on a typical dropback, depending on protection and personnel. Divide 6.54 by that range and the average NFL route is worth roughly 1.3 to 1.6 yards. Treat that as an estimate rather than a sourced figure: the league totals are verified, but the routes-per-dropback input is an assumption, and it is the whole reason the range is a range.

Against that backdrop the tiers read about like this. Around 1.4 is an ordinary route runner. From 1.8 to 2.0 is a clear number one receiver. Above 2.2 is the league's top handful in a given year. Nacua's 3.57 was worth more than double an average route, every route, for a full season.

Volume and efficiency are not the same bet

The clearest lesson from 2025 is in who the leaderboard left out and who it let in.

Ja'Marr Chase led the NFL with 185 targets in the regular season and turned them into 125 catches for 1,412 yards, per Pro Football Reference. He did not make the YPRR top 10, which means he finished under 2.27.

Luther Burden III, a rookie in Chicago, saw 60 targets for 652 regular-season yards. He did make it, at 2.34, on 307 routes, the fewest of anyone in that top 10.

Chase saw three times the targets and produced more than twice the yards. Burden was the more efficient player per opportunity. Both statements are true at the same time, and they point at completely different bets. Chase is the steadier side of a receptions or receiving yards line, because target volume is the most stable input in the whole market. Burden is the player whose number has room to move, but only if his route count rises, and that depends on the depth chart and the snap count rather than on anything he does once the ball is snapped.

This is the entire argument for YPRR. It separates what a player does from how often he is asked to do it. It is a complement to snap share and target share, not a replacement for them: those two tell you how many routes are coming, YPRR tells you what each one is worth.

How to use YPRR on a receiving yards prop

YPRR is a yards metric, so it maps onto a yardage line without any conversion:

Projected receiving yards = projected routes times YPRR.

A full-time outside receiver on a team running about 34 dropbacks a game, the 2025 league average, will be out on a route for most of them. Put him at 30 routes and a 2.3 YPRR and the projection is roughly 69 yards, which tells you how a posted line of 62.5 feels different from one at 74.5 before you look at anything else. Move either input and the number moves with it: a game script that puts the offense ahead early cuts the dropbacks, and a rotation that trims him to 20 routes cuts the projection by a third without his efficiency changing at all.

The trap is using it on the wrong market. YPRR says nothing about catches. A receiver can post a strong YPRR on five deep targets a game and still miss an over 4.5 receptions line most weeks, while a slot receiver with an ordinary YPRR clears it routinely. For receptions props you want targets per route and catch rate. For yardage, YPRR is the better lens, and air yards plus yards after catch then tell you which way that yardage is likely to arrive.

Where YPRR misleads

• It is a rate, so small route counts are noisy. A receiver with 120 routes and one 60 yard catch carries half a yard per route of pure variance. Qualifying thresholds exist for a reason, and even 300 routes is a modest sample by rate-stat standards.
• It credits the quarterback too. A receiver cannot run a route into yardage if nobody throws it. Some of every YPRR figure belongs to accuracy, protection and play design, which is why the number can move sharply when a quarterback changes without the receiver changing at all.
• Role sets the range. Backs and blocking tight ends run fewer routes and shallower ones, so their YPRR is structurally lower. Compare players used the same way, not players at the same position.
• Regular season and playoff numbers get mixed. The 2025 list above includes playoff games, which is why Smith-Njigba shows 1,992 yards here and 1,793 in Pro Football Reference's regular-season table. Check the scope of any leaderboard before you compare it to a season stat line.
• It describes, it does not forecast. YPRR is more stable year to year than most receiving rates, which is its real selling point, but it still tells you what happened. The route count, which is the thing that converts efficiency into yards, is decided by the depth chart and the game plan every single week.

How BetLogic helps

Our NFL receptions sheet covers the volume half of the equation: targets per game, catch rate, target share, the opponent's rank against the position and the Vegas derived team implied total, with each player's last five games of receptions and targets beside his name. Our NFL yards sheet handles the yardage markets, where routes times efficiency is the frame that matters, and our NFL slate flags which games project to run enough plays to feed any of it. We do not publish a projected YPRR, because routes run is charted data we do not own and we would rather show you the usage we can verify than dress up a licensed number as our own. For the wider map of these markets, start with the NFL player props overview.

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