Target share is a receiver's slice of the team's targets; WOPR combines it with air-yards share into one opportunity number that describes how central a receiver is to the passing game.
By The NFL Analytics Editorial Team · Published June 14, 2026
Receiving yards and catches tell you what a pass-catcher produced. They do not tell you how central he was to the passing game - whether he was the focal point the offense ran through or a complementary piece feeding off the attention paid to someone else. Opportunity metrics fill that gap. Target share and WOPR (Weighted Opportunity Rating) measure not how much a receiver did, but how big and important his role was, by asking what fraction of the offense's passing opportunity flowed through him.
The distinction matters because opportunity is more stable and more predictive than the production it generates. A receiver's efficiency on a given week swings on a few bounces, a defensive scheme, or a quarterback's accuracy; the size of his role - how many targets and how many of the team's downfield yards are aimed at him - changes more slowly and tells you what to expect going forward. A receiver commanding a large, well-rounded share of the offense's passing opportunity is the one a team is building around, and that is information no yardage total carries on its own.
Target share is the simplest opportunity stat and the building block for the rest:
Target share = Player targets ÷ Team targets
If an offense throws 35 passes in a game and a receiver is the intended target on 9 of them, his target share is about 26%. Over a season, target share smooths into a stable description of how much of the passing game runs through a player. The reason it beats raw target counts is that it adjusts for pace and volume: a receiver on a run-heavy, low-volume offense might command a huge share of a small pie, which says more about his role than his modest target total would suggest. Share normalizes for how often his team throws at all.
As a rough field guide, a target share in the mid-20s percent and above marks a clear number-one receiver - the player the offense leans on - while complementary and rotational receivers sit lower. But target share alone has a blind spot: it counts a checkdown to a back the same as a deep target to a boundary receiver. Both are one target. That is the gap air-yards share and WOPR are built to close.
To weigh where a receiver is targeted, not just how often, opportunity metrics bring in air yards - the distance the ball travels in the air to the point of the target, whether or not it is caught. (See the air yards explainer for the full breakdown.) A receiver's air-yards share is his portion of all the air yards the offense pushed downfield:
Air-yards share = Player air yards ÷ Team air yards
Air-yards share captures the depth and value of a receiver's targets. A player who soaks up a large share of the team's air yards is being trusted with the high-value downfield work, not just the short, safe throws. WOPR - Weighted Opportunity Rating, introduced in the public analytics community - rolls target share and air-yards share into one number with a fixed weighting:
WOPR = 1.5 × (target share) + 0.7 × (air-yards share)
The weights are a deliberate design choice, not a law of nature. Target share gets the heavier coefficient because the sheer volume of looks is the foundation of opportunity; air-yards share is added at a smaller weight to reward receivers entrusted with the deeper, higher-value targets. The result is a single index of total passing-game opportunity that rises both when a receiver is targeted often and when he is targeted deep.
Because the two inputs are correlated but not identical, WOPR rewards the receiver who is strong on both axes and gently penalizes one-dimensional roles. A volume slot receiver with a huge target share but shallow targets, and a field-stretcher with big air yards but few looks, can land at similar WOPR by different routes - which is itself informative about how each is used.
The value of combining the two shares is that target share and air-yards share can disagree, and the disagreement is exactly where the insight lives. A clearly hypothetical contrast shows the pattern:
Hypothetical figures for illustration only - not any real player's stats.
Read this way, WOPR is a compact answer to "how big and how important is this receiver's role in the passing game?" A high WOPR means a player is commanding both the volume and the downfield value of the offense - the signature of a true alpha receiver. Two receivers with similar production but different WOPR are being used differently, and the higher-WOPR player generally has the more durable role, because he is less dependent on efficiency spiking on a small slice of targets.
WOPR also sits naturally alongside the efficiency and usage metrics. Where yards per route run measures how efficient a receiver is per opportunity and snap counts and route participation measure how often he is on the field, WOPR measures how much of the passing-game opportunity is actually aimed at him. Role, efficiency, and field presence are three different questions, and a full evaluation wants all three.
Opportunity metrics are powerful, but they describe role, not value, and several limits keep them from being a grade:
Target share is a receiver's fraction of his team's targets, and air-yards share is his fraction of the team's downfield air yards; WOPR (Weighted Opportunity Rating) fuses them as 1.5 times target share plus 0.7 times air-yards share into one index of passing-game opportunity. Together they measure a receiver's role - how big and how central he is to the offense - rather than his raw production, and because opportunity is steadier than week-to-week efficiency, they tend to be more stable and forward-looking than yardage totals. The combination matters because volume and depth can diverge: two receivers with identical target share can have very different WOPR, and that gap reveals who the real downfield focal point is. But these are opportunity inputs, not value verdicts, with charted air-yards noise and convention-based weights - so read them alongside an efficiency metric, and treat role and results as two halves of the same evaluation.
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