As I said in the July column, target totals tell part of the story. They leave out a bit of context, however, especially when all the players from all 32 teams are lumped together. For instance, seven targets is a good number for a receiver to hit most weeks. On a day in which the quarterback drops back 55 times, it is much less impressive. This is where target shares are helpful.

Target shares refer to the percentage of the "target pie" a player receives on his own team. Ideally, target shares allow us to get a handle on just how much of a "go-to guy" a particular player is. Most of the time (at least during the preseason), target shares are utilized from a broader point of view, such as a half of a season or all 16 games. As I did in July, I want to look at it from a weekly perspective. I'm not trying to confirm Antonio Brown, Julio Jones and Odell Beckham Jr. are great - no one needs me to tell them how dominant they are. I'm more interested in providing information that allows owners to make smarter trades and waiver-wire adds.

For the sake of keeping the chart as useful as possible, I have eliminated any non-receiver (quarterback, offensive lineman, etc.). Injured players are included to highlight how much of the "pie" teammates will have to pick up in their absence.

Note: You can sort each column as you wish. The numbers highlighted in green are weeks in which a player achieved at least a 30 percent target share. Blue numbers indicate a player finishing between 25-29.9 percent in that week.

** All target totals used in this piece courtesy of Pro Football Reference.

Most of us knew that A.J. Green was set up for a huge percentage of the targets in Cincinnati this year, at least as long as Tyler Eifert was sidelined. It's safe to say his owners have not felt neglected in that regard, as Green as enjoyed a target share of at least 38.7 percent in three of his four games. Generally speaking, 30 percent is an elite target rate, so Green commanding nearly 40 percent is incredible. With Eifert likely sidelined at least one more week as a result of a back issue, Green should be in line for two or three more weeks of otherworldly target shares. Suffice it to say Green should expect pretty substantial regression around midseason assuming Eifert can return and actually stay on the field, so it may not be a bad idea for Green's owners to see if he be included in a trade to get Antonio Brown. Green is going to remain a target monster regardless - like we expected - so owners are certainly justified in holding on to him as well. Just don't expect him to continue receiving 38.7 percent of his team's targets every week.

Three players have enjoyed a target share of at least 25 percent in every game so far this season: The first two aren't terribly surprising: T.Y. Hilton and Jarvis Landry, the latter of which had 12 such games last season. Landry's floor is ridiculously in PPR leagues despite a relative lack of touchdowns, but we already knew that. Hilton is already one such game shy of matching his 2015 output, but the loss of Donte Moncrief has something to do with that. And let's not forget Andrew Luck missed almost half of last season, which is another huge contributing factor.

The second might come as a shock: Kevin White. Considering White just went on IR this week, this has huge implications for fantasy owners. Alshon Jeffery hasn't eclipsed seven targets or a 16.3 percent share yet this season, so he seems likely to see at least a five percent bump going forward. (He was over 25 percent in seven of nine games last year, albeit under a different offensive coordinator.) The player most likely to benefit - and we saw a glimpse of this last week - is Eddie Royal, who shockingly already has three games with a target share of higher than 22.3 percent. (Again, Jeffery has no such efforts yet.) Now before we get too crazy on Royal, please understand the Bears have yet to accumulate 40 "true targets" in a game yet, so Royal has yet to exceed the seven targets he managed last week. With that said, Royal will be the natural choice to replace White as a starter and a pretty good bet to exceed the 52.8 percent catch rate White had on his 36 targets this season (Royal has caught 81.8 percent of his targets through four games).

Jordy Nelson has enjoyed no less than a 27.3 percent target share thus far, which is roughly on the same pace he was on during his monstrous 2014 season and pretty incredible considering he did not play in the preseason and was limited throughout camp. The biggest difference between pre-ACL injury and now? Nelson is averaging 12.1 YPC, which is more than three yards per catch lower than any mark he has posted since 2010. We started seeing a little bit more of his big-play ability in Week 3 against Detroit, but the whole offense is still in a bit of a funk. (Aaron Rodgers is completing a career-low - at least since he became a full-time starter - 58.5 percent of his passes, has yet to attempt more than 36 throws or pass for more than 213 yards.) What does it mean? I believe it could mean several things, including the possibility Green Bay is starting to buy into more of a small-ball mentality on offense. (It is a possibility, although I'm not ready to buy into it quite yet. The sample size is very small as well.) One observation I feel safe in making is that Nelson is playing at his ceiling given the current environment, and I tend to believe the Packers have made a conscious effort to feed him the ball early in order to open up the rest of the passing game going forward.

While Will Fuller is shaping up to be the late-round steal owners love to brag about, DeAndre Hopkins hasn't come close to returning the value owners believed he had when they spent a mid-first round pick on him this summer. Last year, Hopkins had 12 games in which he at least a 25-percent target share and nine with at least 30 percent. Although it was unrealistic to expect a repeat given Houston's investment into the wide receiver position during the draft this spring, I'm fairly certain owners weren't expecting three games of eight or fewer targets through one quarter of the season from "Nuk". There's no doubt defenses are still in the mode of making someone else besides Hopkins beat them, but I'm not sure owners are going to get the kind of market correction they are hoping for.

Doug Baldwin is off to a fast start after his career year in 2015 … or is he? The numbers say he's averaging 17.2 fantasy points per game, which is better than last year's 16.8. However, through a quarter of the season, he's seen a target share below 18 percent twice and over 26 percent twice. Over 79 percent of his fantasy points and 67.7 percent of his targets have come in two games, meaning he's been a WR1 in half of his games (both at home) and a WR4 in the other two (both on the road). It's way too early and much too small of a sample size to suggest Baldwin is going to be a home/road receiver or if his early tendency to follow a big game with a dud is going to be a trend, but the fact of the matter is Seattle's passing-game schedule has been pretty favorable so far, so owners might want to pay special attention to him over the next two weeks. If Jimmy Graham continues to shine like he has recently, it might be wise to sell high on Baldwin after another big game.

Jeremy Kerley has run 115 routes this season and been targeted on 32 of them. Perhaps more surprisingly, he has seen at least 30 percent of his team's targets in half of their games so far, which is not surprising when you consider the rest of the roster and amazing when you really understand what it means when one player is receiving nearly a third of his team's targets. Relatively speaking, "average" players rarely go over 30 percent target share in a game once in a season - much less twice in a month - so when a player does reach that mark, he is going to be fantasy-relevant almost regardless of how average his quarterback might be. Torrey Smith and Quinton Patton aren't going to miraculously evolve into quality short and intermediate targets and Blaine Gabbert isn't going to turn into a deep-ball thrower, meaning about the only thing that will keep Kerley from performing at a WR3 level going forward is just how much Vance McDonald and Garrett Celek get involved.

Trending Upward

John Brown scared all of us just a bit when he was slow to recover from his concussion in late July, but he could be making up for lost time. After combining for seven targets over the first two weeks on a limited snap count, "Smokey" has totaled 27 targets over his last two. He had a 22 percent snap target share in Week 3 and a highly impressive 36.4 percent mark in a four-point loss in Week 4. I'm not here to suggest to 16 targets or that astronomical target share is going to become a common occurrence, but I think we should expect Brown and Larry Fitzgerald to lead the Cardinals in target-share percentage on a regular basis going forward. Brown is a borderline WR3 with Drew Stanton at the controls but has WR2 upside if Carson Palmer shows any hint of recapturing his 2015 form at some point this season.

Fantasy football rarely ever makes perfect sense and Oakland's offense is an example of that. HC Jack Del Rio was either completely untruthful about his plans for the backfield in the preseason or could care less about alienating his best running back. OC Bill Musgrave isn't doing much better, perhaps trying to shed his reputation as an ultraconservative play-caller by allowing Derek Carr to air it out 40 times per game. I have no problem with him doing that given the talent on the team, but the use of Amari Cooper as primarily a big-play receiver and Michael Crabtree as the primary red-zone option - and Seth Roberts as the second option - is baffling to me. Let's give credit where credit is due: Crabtree is as trusty as they come, but it is hard to defend his seeing 30-plus percent of the team's target share when Cooper is struggling to get over 25 percent. Perhaps this is a Carr problem and not a Musgrave problem, but given the chaos in the backfield and Musgrave's history, I'm more inclined to believe it's the latter. Perhaps after receiving only nine red-zone targets through 20 games as a Raider, we should conclude Cooper is going to be an afterthought inside the 20 until further notice. So while we cannot definitively say that Cooper is not the No. 1 receiver in Oakland, we also cannot say that Crabtree is the No. 2. With at least seven catches and nine targets in three of his first four games, Crabtree is probably here to stay … again.

(Shockingly, I'm not a Cooper owner, so this wasn't a rant about a second-round receiver I want to do better than WR32 after four weeks.)

Do you remember the time when Buffalo only had one receiver worth caring about? It's still the case, but just not the one we all expected it to be a month ago. Robert Woods has been written off roughly as often by his own coaching staff as he has by fantasy owners, yet here we are. Since Sammy Watkins was placed on IR before Week 3, Woods has seen at least a quarter of the Bills' targets in both games against rather high-quality competition. He has converted 13 of the 18 targets he's seen over that time into catches, so he's not really giving Tyrod Taylor much of a reason to look for other options. With the perpetually banged-up Charles Clay, Greg Salas, Marquise Goodwin and Walter Powell serving as his stiffest competition for targets - aside from LeSean McCoy - there's really no reason to expect Wood's target share to decrease anytime soon.

Others trending in the right direction: Steve Smith, Jimmy Graham, Emmanuel Sanders, Brandon Marshall, Terrelle Pryor, Michael Thomas, Bilal Powell

Trending Downward

Whereas Greg Olsen has been very steady, the combined target share percentages for Kelvin Benjamin over the last three weeks barely exceed his Week 1 output. What is most interesting here is that Benjamin enjoyed one of his finer games against Denver (at least in the first half), so the typical "the matchup was too tough" line of thinking may not applicable here. As we saw on Monday night versus the Giants, Minnesota has been very stingy against receivers, which explains Benjamin's goose egg in Week 3. Desmond Trufant has emerged as one of the better corners in the league, so it shouldn't have been a shock to see KB have another slow day last week. The upside here is Benjamin is still scoring touchdowns and probably will continue to do so at a fairly high rate. The matchups are going to get easier, so don't let a pair of somewhat lackluster performances change your opinion of him. If an owner in your league has a different view, don't be afraid to test his market.

Tavon Austin has come under some fire for his ridiculously low 4.5 yards per target as well as his 45.7 percent catch rate - both of which are abysmal considering his talent (especially for the former) and how often he is targeted at or behind the line of scrimmage (especially for the latter) - and he isn't helping his case with a league-high four drops. However, those drops really are only a small part of the problem with his relative lack of production. Last week marked the first time this season Austin saw fewer than 30 percent of his team's targets, which means owners need to hang on to him in hopes No. 1 overall pick Jared Goff can eventually enjoy the same kind of success other rookies quarterbacks have enjoyed around the league so far. The Rams' success to this point is a double-edged sword for Austin, however, as they have no reason to move away from Case Keenum when they are winning 75 percent of their games. Conversely, Austin probably has no shot of maximizing his mammoth target share with Keenum under center.

The Tajae Sharpe we thought we knew a month ago really hasn't changed, but the situation has. His target share has held steady - between 21.2 and 26.8 percent - but Marcus Mariota is struggling. Sure, HC Mike Mularkey called out Sharpe a bit after a Week 3 loss, but the rookie has seen at least seven targets in every game, which is enough for most receivers to maintain WR3 value. The problem is his catch rate is currently at 50 percent after going 7-for-11 in the opener and DeMarco Murray is monopolizing all of the Titans' scoring opportunities. It's almost unheard of in this day and age for a running back to see more red-zone targets and have more catches than the team's top receiver, but such is the case in Tennessee. Until Mariota picks up his play and/or the Titans learn that one-score losses do not count as victories, we can't expect much to change.

Others trending in the wrong direction (although panic is not warranted in most of the cases): Jeremy Maclin, Travis Benjamin, Matt Forte, Derrick Henry, Davante Adams, Golden Tate, Philip Dorsett