Jefferson drew 19 red-zone targets and scored twice; Goedert drew 15 and scored 11 — we read all 811 receiving TDs

We read every pass thrown in the 2025 NFL regular season — 272 games, all 32 teams, weeks 1 through 18 — from the nflverse play-by-play record. - Of the 811 receiving touchdowns, 577 (71.1%) came on a target thrown from inside the opponent's 20-yard line, the red zone. - The 2,380 red-zone targets converted to touchdowns at 24.2%; the 14,319 targets thrown from beyond the 20 converted at 1.63%. A red-zone target was 14.8 times as likely to produce a score as a target from anywhere else. - Among the 124 pass-catchers who drew 50 or more targets — together 556 of the 811 touchdowns — red-zone target volume tracked receiving touchdowns more closely (Spearman 0.72) than total target volume did (0.59). - 41 of those 124 drew 15 or more red-zone targets. Their touchdown totals ran from 2 to 14. - Amon-Ra St. Brown led the league with 35 red-zone targets and scored 11; Davante Adams turned 32 into a league-high 14. At the other end, Justin Jefferson drew 19 red-zone targets — more than Dallas Goedert (15) or Tee Higgins (16) — and scored 2; CeeDee Lamb drew 17 and scored 3; rookie tight end Tyler Warren drew 23 and scored 4. - The conversion swing among high-volume pass-catchers was the widest split in the data: Goedert scored 11 touchdowns on 15 red-zone targets and Higgins 11 on 16, while Jefferson and Lamb — more looks between them — scored a combined 5.

The following is analysis, not fact. Fantasy drafts on the target column: the alpha gets the targets, and the targets make the points. The full-season read splits that number in two. A target from inside the 20 is the receiving game's scoring currency — worth roughly 15 times a target thrown anywhere else — and it is a far narrower resource than the raw target total suggests. The part that tracks scoring is who commands those looks; the touchdown count sitting on top is the noisier layer, and in 2025 it diverged violently from the opportunity that produced it. Same red-zone volume, opposite scoreboards. Jefferson and Goedert are separated by four red-zone targets and nine touchdowns. The single-team manager, reading the box score, files Goedert as a scorer and Jefferson as a letdown; the usage says the scoring opportunity ran the other way — Jefferson saw more of it and cashed less of it. Which of those two numbers is the more repeatable one — the volume or the conversion rate — is the whole question, and the pool answers it only in aggregate: red-zone target volume correlated with touchdowns more tightly than total volume did, but a single 17-game conversion rate is a thin sample ^mmodeled. Nothing here forecasts who scores more next season. It reports where the touchdowns came from, and who was standing in the right place the weeks they didn't fall.

Red-zone volume is not destiny. Some receivers convert close-range looks at a genuinely higher clip — bigger frames, surer hands in traffic, a role built around the fade and the goal-line slant — and for them a high season count is closer to skill than to luck ^mmodeled. A red-zone target also still depends on the throw and the coverage: a decoy who clears a defender for a teammate collects looks he was never likely to catch. And 17 games is a small denominator for any rate — Jefferson's 2-for-19 could be bad variance, deliberate deployment, or both, and the data alone does not separate them. The gap between the looks and the scores is the finding; the cause of it is not. (Red-zone targets here are counted from the nflverse play-by-play — every target snapped inside the 20; trackers using a tighter cutoff or a different feed will list somewhat different per-player totals.)

From a single roster, a receiving touchdown reads as a trait — a player scores, or he doesn't. Read across all 32 offenses at once and it resolves into a location: 71% of them started on a snap inside the 20, on a resource concentrated among the league's highest-target receivers and rarely touched by the rest. The column that says 'touchdowns' is, underneath, a column about field position run through one season of variance.