Week 1 of the NFL season is in the books, and now it’s time for everyone to jump into the stats.

Everyone knows Tyler Shough leads the league in passing yards, Chris Olave leads in receiving yards, and Kenneth Walker leads in rushing yards, but basic stats tell just a fraction of the full picture. If you really want to take a deep dive into the week to see how players performed, you have to get into the advanced analytics. They usually tell the whole story.

With Week 1 behind us, here’s who leads the league in some advanced metrics.

Big Time Throws: Tyler Shough (6)

What is a big time throw? According to PFF, a big time throw is a high-difficulty, high-value pass that receives a top grade (+1.0, +1.5, or +2.0) on the PFF quarterback grading scale. After Week 1, only one quarterback in football has more than three, and that’s Tyler Shough, who has six.

After a first half where Shough really struggled, he looked like one of the best quarterbacks in the league in the second half, where he threw for 325 yards and three touchdowns, and as PFF proved, made multiple huge throws to help New Orleans crawl back into their game against Detroit.

To put into perspective how impressive six big-time throws in one game is, Matthew Stafford led the league with 47 big-time throws last season, which is an average of 2.7 per game. Second place was Dak Prescott with 31, who averaged fewer than two per game. Pretty impressive second half for Shough.

Average Depth of Target: Josh Allen (12.8)

Week 1 of the NFL season was full of deep passes, as a whopping 10 quarterbacks had an average depth of target of 10+ yards. For reference, last year only one quarterback had an average depth of target of 10+ yards over the course of the entire season (minimum of 100 attempts), so to have 10 in Week 1 is quite ridiculous.

But the one man who stood above them all was Josh Allen, who had an ADOT of 12.8 yards, narrowly edging out Malik Willis, who had an ADOT of 12.4 yards. And to make it even crazier, Allen ranked 34th in ADOT last season, with an average depth of 7.6.

I doubt we’ll see 10 guys have an ADOT of 10+ yards every week, but at least it made for an entertaining Week 1.

Adjusted Completion Percentage: Baker Mayfield (92.6%)

Baker Mayfield led the NFL in completion percentage in Week 1 at 82.1 percent, so it only makes sense that he led the league in adjusted completion percentage – which removes throwaways, spikes, batted balls, and other passes that are outside of the quarterback’s control. Mayfield did fumble three times, losing them all, but nobody has to know that…Let’s just focus on his completion rate.

Mayfield’s 92.6 percent completion rate is well clear of the field, with second place being Geno Smith at 87 percent and third place being Trevor Lawrence at 85.7 percent. Only four other quarterbacks finished within 10 percentage points of Mayfield last week.

Much like Josh Allen with ADOT, Mayfield finished 2025 with a 72.3 percent adjusted completion percentage, which ranked 34th in the league. So to see him leading after Week 1 is quite surprising.

Yards Per Route Run: Zay Flowers (13.6)

Moving on to the receiver stats, Zay Flowers is the runaway winner for yards per route run – and when I say runaway, I mean it. His 13.6 yards per route run is nearly eight yards higher than the second-place finisher, Dalton Kincaid, who averaged 5.94 YPRR.

Flowers caught five passes for 150 yards and a touchdown on just 11 routes before he left the game with an injury. Had he played the entire game, his number likely would’ve gone down, but I think it’s safe to say he still would’ve been leading the league in this statistic.

Just to show how impressive 13 YPRR truly is, last year, Puka Nacua led the league in YPRR at 3.71. That was obviously a much larger sample size, but still, 13.6 in a week is absolutely ridiculous and won’t be matched again this year.

Average Depth of Target: Rome Odunze (29.7)

Receivers also have an ADOT stat, and the leader after Week 1 is Rome Odunze, who had an ADOT of nearly 30 yards. He was targeted three times, meaning Caleb Williams threw the ball 89 yards through the air when targeting Odunze this past week.

Somewhat surprisingly, we had another receiver nearly top Odunze’s mark in Week 1. Denzel Boston, who was targeted four times, had an ADOT of 29.0 yards. After those two, there was a pretty big drop-off to Tee Higgins (25.2) and Marvin Harrison (24.7) in third and fourth.

Last year’s ADOT leader was Davante Adams at 13.6, and there were only 18 receivers who finished with an average depth above 10 yards, so expect to see these numbers drop significantly in the coming weeks.

Contested Catches: Nico Collins (5)

There are few better contested catch threats in the league than Nico Collins, so it only makes sense that he would be No. 1 on this list following the first week of the season. Last year, Collins finished 6th in the league with 17 contested catches, and he’s already nearly a third of the way to that total in 2026 with five of them in one week.

Mike Evans currently sits in second place in this stat with three contested catches, and then there are about 10 other receivers sitting with two, so they have a long way to go to catch Collins. He’s already almost 20 percent of the way to Puka Nacua’s total of 27, which led the league last year.

Yards After Contact: Kenneth Walker (179)

Was this any surprise to anyone? Kenneth Walker was the most dominant running back in football last week, rushing for 173 yards, but what makes it even more impressive is that he had more yards after contact than yards in general. And yes, that is possible, given that a running back can be hit behind the line of scrimmage and start accruing yards after contact from there. I mean, the guy averaged 7.78 yards after contact, which actually was the second-most in the league this week behind Kyle Monangai.

Derrick Henry currently sits in second place on this list with 104 yards after contact, meaning Walker leads the league by 75 yards, which is utterly absurd. He’s already over 10 percent of the way to Jonathan Taylor’s 1,136 yards after contact, which led the league last year.

Missed Tackles Forced: Kenneth Walker (14)

A big reason Walker was able to finish with so many yards after contact is that he forced 14 missed tackles, and no, that is not a typo. Last year, Bijan Robinson led the league with 86 missed tackles forced (5.05 per game), winning by nearly 20 MTF.

Walker is currently on pace to break 238 tackles this season. He won’t come close to hitting that number, but man, 14 missed tackles in a single week is just crazy. The most ever recorded by PFF was 17 by Dameon Pierce back in 2022.

Bhayshul Tuten and Jahmyr Gibbs are in second place with seven missed tackles forced in Week 1. Walker forced twice as many missed tackles as second place. What a week for the Chiefs’ new running back.