5 NFL Red Zone Trends to Monitor for Week 7

Top Tier Receivers

There are 28 players with a red zone opportunity market share north of 25% this season. Of that group, 24 are running backs. One is a quarterback (who I touched on last week), and only three -- JuJu Smith-Schuster, Davante Adams and Adam Thielen -- are receivers.

Smith-Schuster leads the group at 28.6%, Adams sits close behind at 28.3%, and Thielen rounds out the group at 25.7%. Their raw target numbers follow the same order, with 16 for Smith-Schuster, 15 for Adams and 9 for Thielen.

To get into the top rankings for opportunity market share, they not only need to see big targets, but to play in a pass-heavy offense. Smith-Schuster does indeed lead the NFL in red zone target market share (44.4%), but Adams sits back in third (41.7%) and Thielen is in sixth (37.5%).

That gap does leave some additional variance in the workload we can expect for these guys week-to-week, but with only three other wideouts boasting an opportunity market share above even 19%, this is rare company.

Thielen and Smith-Schuster may not be the type of receivers that first come to mind when you think "red zone threat", and while Adams looks the part and is tied for the league lead with six receiving touchdowns, we can expect Thielen (four touchdowns) and Smith-Schuster (two) to pick up their scoring pace moving forward.