Learning More About Wide Receiver Usage by Studying Alignment

There are significant “what” and “how” components to everything a player does on a football field. What a guy does on a particular play, over the course of a game, or even in an entire season can be neatly, if incompletely, encapsulated by traditional stats. Even if they don’t tell the whole story, a “bigger numbers = good” understanding of the game will help you in a lot of circumstances.

But if you’re looking for the whole story, examining how a player gets his stats is crucial. Film analysis helps with that a lot, and so do advanced stats. Along those lines, understanding how a player does what he does can often be at least partially explained by just looking at where he stands.

That’s the case with wide receivers more than most. Where a player is lining up on a given play will tell you a lot about his responsibilities, skills, and how he performs on the field.

Pro Football Focus identifies four places a wide receiver will line up on most plays: out wide, in the slot, inline, and in the backfield. The “wide” alignment is easy to understand; it’s what you think of when you picture a typical wide receiver. The same goes for the “slot” designation. In 2024, most people know what a slot receiver is. “Inline” is a bit trickier, but just think of where tight ends typically line up when they’re close to the formation, either when they’re in a three-point stance or as a wing or H-back, and you’re on the right track. The “backfield” designation, finally, means anywhere off the line of scrimmage that isn’t inline or in the slot.

Here’s where the Packers wide receivers spent their snaps over the course of the 2023 season, including the playoffs.

The raw numbers show us a few things. Romeo Doubs was a wide receiver in the truest sense, lining up outside the vast majority of the time. Jayden Reed was his inverse, lining up in the slot for most of his snaps. Dontayvion Wicks and Christian Watson played pretty comparable hybrid roles, and Malik Heath, Samori Toure, and Bo Melton all filled in wherever they were needed.

We can learn a little bit more by looking at these numbers broken down by percentage.

Here, you can see even more clearly how Doubs and Watson had the most clearly defined roles. Doubs lined up outside on more than 85% of his snaps, while Reed was in the slot for nearly three-quarters of his plays. 

Further down the list, we see how similar Wicks, Watson, and Heath were. All got noteworthy snaps inline, likely doing the insert blocking we saw from Allen Lazard during his time in Green Bay. Toure also did a little of that, while also playing a higher percentage of slot snaps than any receiver other than Reed. Melton, with his diminutive stature, didn’t have a meaningful percentage of his snaps as an inline blocker, but filled in for Reed in the Packers’ gadget role.

What does this mean for what we think of the wide receiver room? A couple of things. First, as far as 2023 went, Doubs and Reed were the offense’s fixed points, and everyone else filled in around them. If the Packers were on offense, Doubs would be out wide, Reed would be in the slot, and the rest of the formation would be constructed accordingly.

Second, as far as 2024 goes, the Packers probably need someone from the hybrid group to distinguish himself, and that will probably have to come at the expense of snaps for Romeo Doubs. Wicks and Watson, in particular, seemed destined to keep pushing each other off the field in their current roles, and if the Packers want both on the field together without taking one of their talented young tight ends off the field, that means Doubs is probably the one that’s going to have to give up some playing time.

Is that a good idea? Wicks and Watson are probably more explosive, but Doubs is a favorite of Jordan Love’s and is the only thing the Packers have resembling a contested-catch artist. There would be tradeoffs, for sure.

But exploring those tradeoffs is the curse of a talented roster, and the Packers certainly aren’t short of offensive playmakers, regardless of where they want to put them on the field. This is a good problem to have, one that becomes all the more clear when you dig past the box score for a deeper look at how the Packers use their wide receivers.