Just how good was Malik Nabers in 2024?

You may be among those who feel that New York GIants’ GM Joe Schoen made a mistake not taking a quarterback with the No. 6 draft pick in 2024. Perhaps the well-executed (in the sense of assets surrendered) trade-up to get Jaxson Dart has temporarily put those misgivings to rest.

It’s not exactly news, though, to say that the player they did draft in 2024, Malik Nabers, had a great rookie season. The question for this post is: How good exactly was Nabers’ 2024, and what does he need to work on to take the next step?

Usually we think of Nabers in comparison to the other two “big” wide receivers who were anticipated to go in the top 10, Marvin Harrison Jr. and Rome Odunze. Both of them had nice rookie seasons but Nabers was without a doubt the best of the three. Nabers’ competition for best rookie wide receiver instead came from his LSU teammate Brian Thomas Jr. and from Ladd McConkey:

Courtesy of Pro Football Focus

All five had productive rookie seasons, but Nabers led them in targets and receptions (he was third overall in receptions behind Ja’Marr Chase and Amon-Ra St. Brown). Thomas had more yards, though, and Nabers only finished fourth among the rookies in TDs.

So the question is no longer whether Malik Nabers was a good draft pick. Clearly he was. The bigger question is: How good can he become? For the record, Nabers finished ninth in Pro Football Focus receiving grade among all wide receivers with at least 50 targets last season, behind Puka Nacua, Nico Collins, A.J. Brown, Mike Evans, St. Brown, Drake London, Tee Higgins, and Justin Jefferson. Fans tend to be suspicious of PFF grades, which are subjective, but it’s hard to disagree with that list as the current royalty of NFL receivers. In yards, Nabers was 11th, in yards per reception tied for 32nd, and in TDs tied for 18th.

Fans like hard stats such as yards, TDs, etc. The problem with hard stats for receivers is that there is a QB on the other end of every pass. If you look at the WR names mentioned above, the QBs on the other end included names like Burrow, Goff, Herbert, Stafford, Stroud, and Hurts. For Nabers, the names were Jones, Lock, and DeVito. On at least one occasion last season, the Giants’ loss to Philadelphia in October, Nabers was hardly targeted in the second half and he didn’t like it, saying, “Watch the tape…I was open.” That wasn’t quite true, but no one came out of the 2024 season thinking that the Giants’ QBs had fully tapped Nabers’ potential.

So it would seem that Nabers will have an opportunity to move up these lists in 2025 and beyond with names like Wilson, Winston, or Dart throwing to him. Nabers should also be better with a year of experience under his belt. That said, in which aspects of his game is Nabers already elite, and in what aspects might he try to further improve?

For that, a useful resource is the analysis site Reception Perception, a small group led by Matt Harmon that analyzes every snap of the more prominent NFL wide receivers and classifies their success on every pass play. “Success” is defined as whether the receiver got open, so it is more quarterback-proof than the hard stats, but it does not judge whether the receiver caught passes thrown to him (Nabers did have 8 drops), nor does it try to figure out where the receiver was in the quarterback’s read progression. It just focuses on getting open against coverage. Reception Perception (hereafter “RP”) just began posting their 2024 WR analyses this month, so rankings below are incomplete as of this writing, but there are enough of the top receivers posted already to get a feel for where Nabers stands relative to his peers.

How did Nabers respond to different types of coverage?

Here are Nabers’ stats for his rookie season, compared to his final college season:

Courtesy of Reception Perception

One of the adjustments Nabers had to make in the NFL was that he saw considerably more zone coverage and less man coverage than he did at LSU, and when he did see man, it was press man more often than he’d experienced in college. In absolute terms, the type of coverage didn’t matter – his success rate was in the high 70s for man, zone, and press. Relative to other NFL wide receivers, though, he was only a little better than ordinary against zone (62nd percentile), though that was an improvement from his 46th percentile at LSU. Harmon saw him evolve in-season, though: “The longer Nabers played last season, the better he got against zone coverage.“

The most important number, though, is that he was in the 82nd percentile when seeing man, almost identical to what he saw at LSU, i.e., the NFL’s best cornerbacks were no more of a challenge for him than the ones he faced in college. Harmon says of him, “He just has such an outstanding understanding of how to snap off routes with perfect timing and create miles of separation. If he ever gets paired with an anticipatory quarterback, watch out.”

The only way to really limit Nabers was to double-cover him. He “only” got open 50% of the time when doubled, and he was doubled 24 times. The only WRs in the current RP database to be doubled as much or more were McConkey (24 times, 54% success), Harrison (28 times, 61% success), and Davante Adams (30 times, 57% success). No other wide receiver tracked thus far by RP was doubled any more than 15 times. That’s probably a feature of the database not yet being complete – in 2023 Justin Jefferson led the NFL in being doubled (52 times, 71% success), followed by Adams (42 times, 79% success), Garrett Wilson (41 times, 80% success), and Ja’Marr Chase (40 times, 70% success). Jefferson, Wilson, and Chase have not yet been tracked for 2024.

The bottom line is that Nabers has quickly taken his place among the upper echelon of receivers in the NFL despite being hamstrung by inadequate quarterback play. He is still a notch below the very best the NFL has to offer, though. Finding seams in zone coverage more often and beating double coverage more consistently are what could elevate him to the level of today’s truly elite receivers.

What routes does Nabers like to run?

I say “like to” because, although Nabers doesn’t make that decision on any given play, Brian Daboll almost surely designs plays to exploit the routes that Nabers favors and runs best. Thus, we can expect a large dose of Nabers’ favorite routes. That said, a head coach has to live with the quarterback and offensive line that he’s given, so Nabers’ route tree may have been affected to an indeterminate extent by “external” factors. Here are his success rates (left) and route percentages (right) for Nabers’ rookie NFL season and his final LSU season. The color coding indicates whether he ran or succeeded in getting open on a particular route type more often (green), at an average rate (yellow), or less often (red) than his peers:

Courtesy of Reception Perception

I’m shocked, shocked to find that Nabers is above average among NFL receivers at running nine (i.e., deep go) routes in the NFL, just as he was at LSU. It just so happens that the best deep ball thrower in the NFL in 2024 (97.9 PFF passing grade, 21 big-time throws, 1 turnover-worthy play) is now the Giants’ presumed starting quarterback:

Courtesy of Pro Football Focus

I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship…even if it doesn’t last a full season. And if it doesn’t last a full season, because Brian Daboll feels that Jaxson Dart is ready to play, guess who threw the most deep balls of any college QB in 2024?

Courtesy of Pro Football Focus

Dart’s 90.9 PFF grade, 21 BTTs, and 6 TWPs didn’t lead all college QBs, but they were still really good. Go routes were a staple of Nabers’ diet at LSU, and his quarterback there, Jayden Daniels, led the nation in deep passes in PFF’s metrics his final year.

Nabers was also above average at getting open on corner and post routes last season, though for whatever reason, he ran post patterns less often than other NFL wideouts. That needs to be more of a focus in 2025. Overall, Nabers’ success route tree for 2024 has a lot of green on it, i.e., he was above average in getting open on most of his routes. The only route type that was subpar was the intermediate out route. On the other hand, digs, along with nines, were his bread and butter for explosive plays…although, as we saw last year, even a simple hook route can be an explosive play when Nabers is the recipient of the pass. Harmon says of Nabers:

Where Nabers is already special in the NFL and was ready made to be this guy before he even set foot on the pro field was in the run after catch phase. I called Nabers the best run after catch prospect in Reception Perception’s prospect history and he backed that up in Year 1. Nabers was somehow only “in space” for 48.4% of his sampled catches. Those numbers need to come up next season. He went down on first contact on only 41.9% of those plays. When he gets the ball in his hands, not only is he an athletic freak in the open field, I was blown away with how intelligently and and well-thought-out he plans to gain extra yards by taking advantage of space via advanced study.

Perhaps he was thinking of plays like this against Indianapolis:

The bottom line is that Malik Nabers still has some work to do if he is to reach the level of the Justin Jeffersons, Ja’Marr Chases, etc. of the NFL. The good news is that he is not too far from that already. With QBs who are good at throwing the deep ball on the roster, with an offensive line that will hopefully be good enough to hold the fort long enough to allow such passes to be thrown, and with even short passes a threat to go all the way in this player’s hands if defenses have to start playing off the line of scrimmage, it’s not a stretch to imagine him eventually reaching the top tier of NFL wide receivers.