NextGen Stats - Week 5: RB Breakdowns and Takeaways

October 12, 2022

Antonio Losada provides key fantasy football updates for running backs after Week 5, using Next Gen data to help fantasy owners make the best lineup and waiver wire decisions.

With five weeks of play in the books and things starting to settle a bit, it's time to get back to studying some of the rushers around the league and see how they have performed through (almost) the first third of the season.

To gain the biggest edge in your fantasy football league, it's necessary to understand how to apply the advanced statistics being used in sports nowadays. Back in the day, it was all about wins and losses, passing yards, and touchdowns scored. It's not that those stats are now worthless, they just don't offer enough information to savvy analysts. While football is still in its infancy compared to baseball in terms of analytics, the evolution the sport has seen lately in those terms is notable.

Each week, I'll be tackling NFL's Next Gen Stats, bringing you data from the previous week's games with notable takeaways you should consider when assessing fantasy players for the upcoming week. In case you're new to the series, or Next Gen Stats altogether, I recommend you read our NGS-primer. Now, let's get to the data!

Week 5 - The Running Game Is Alive!

I have mentioned one of the most important concepts to consider when analyzing players through this series of articles: Air Yards. The metrics around it are key to know who is really over-performing or under-performing among receivers and passers, but it doesn't have much to do with rushers. For this last group, which mostly features on the ground, we can look at time, speed, and efficiency metrics.

Today, I'll present each of the stats from the NFL's advanced metrics site, its correlation with rushers-fantasy points, and a list of leaders and trailers in each category along with some notes and takeaways on both the players' and the metrics' impact on fantasy football as a whole.

Last season, the NFL introduced the concepts of:

• Expected Rushing Yards (xRY; How many rushing yards is a ball-carrier expected to gain on a given carry based on the relative location, speed, and direction of blockers and defenders?)
• Rushing Yards Over Expectation (RYOE; The difference between actual rushing yards and expected rushing yards on an individual play or series of plays)
• Rush Pct Over Expected (ROE%; The percentage of runs where a ball-carrier gained more yards than expected)

I will only focus on fantasy production as pure rushers, eliminating the pass-catching element from their game. This will concentrate entirely on their total rushing yardage and rushing touchdowns in terms of the fantasy points per game numbers shown (labeled ruFP/G). I will also include an extra column, "ruFP/15Att", which is accounts for the fantasy points a rusher is getting per 15 rushing attempts, which would be considered an RB1 workload on average and allows us to know how different players in different roles would be doing if given the same opportunities.

So let's dive in. Note: The cutoff is set at 25 rushing attempts.

Running Backs Efficiency

Correlation with Rushing Fantasy Points (based on the 2021 season): negative-22%

Leaders and Trailers:

Leaderboard Notes:

Remember, the more "efficient" a rusher is, the lower amount of yards he "wastes" going headfirst toward the opposite goal line in a straight route.

With five games in the books and with at least 25+ carries to qualify, only two rushers are still below a 3.0-EFF mark: D'Andre Swift and Khalil Herbert. One has been out for extended periods and the other can only be considered a backup in his team.

Josh Jacobs can be considered the only "reliably efficient" rusher of the early season as he's carried the rock 91 times while still very close to that 3.00 EFF figure at 3.02. Watch out for Saquon Barkley (3.11) aiming at catching Jacobs, though, with a very similar EFF on a rather bulky workload too.

At the other end of the spectrum there is Cam Akers with a monster 5.37 EFF wasting the most yardage among qualified rushers this week. Edmonds (5.15) has been similarly wasteful, but at least he's been on a pitch count in Miami's backfield.

Joe Mixon (4.88), one of the better rushers of the NFL these days, is wasting tons of yards and so is Derrick Henry (4.40). The problem for the former is that his 7.2 rushing FPPG mark through Week 5 is absolutely disastrous compared to Henry's 14.2.

One thing helping King Henry's numbers: he's one of only three rushers with five-plus touchdowns so far this season. Remove those scoring carries from his averages and he goes all the way down to 5.9 FP/15att, the 16th-worst mark among all 49 qualified rushers when not factoring in their TDs.

Among all the 49 qualified RBs for Week 5, the average EFF is at 3.81 yards, a much more efficient than last year's figure at this time (4.00).

• Rushers with EFF marks below 3.80 are averaging 9.0 ruFPPG
• Rushers with EFF marks above 3.80 are averaging 6.2 ruFPPG

Of 10 rushers with averages of  10+ ruFPPG through Week 5, the average EFF for them sits at 3.46. There are, actually, 12 RBs with EFF marks below that 3.46 figure, and only one of them (Tony Pollard) is averaging fewer than 8.6 ruFPPG.

The more efficient a rusher is (the lower his EFF), the more touchdowns he scores. That's the current relationship between both metrics, although it is not that strong at an r-squared of just negative-0.23.

• Rushers with 3+ touchdowns through Week 5: Average 3.48 EFF
• Rushers with 2 TDs: 3.89 EFF
• Rushers with 1 TD: 3.97 EFF
• Rushers with 0 TDs: 3.82 EFF

With the above said, of the players with no touchdowns qualified for this week's leaderboard (six of them) no one has more than 47 carries, only two have more than 44 rushing attempts, and two have fewer than 40.

Percentage of Stacked Boxes Faced

Correlation with Rushing Fantasy Points (based on the 2021 season): 20%

Leaders and Trailers:

Leaderboard Notes:

The correlation between stacked boxes and fantasy points is so minimal that it doesn't make much sense to be overly worried about it if anything at all.

Don't throw away stacked boxes completely given that almost non-existent relation, but keep in mind that it is heavily related to the role a player has on his offense and to what teams expect from him.

One and only one thing is very clear: defenses are absolutely swarming rookie Isiah Pacheco, who has actually been rather overwhelmed by the stacked boxes. Pacheco is averaging a measly 4.0 ruFPPG over the first five weeks of play, tied for the fifth-lowest mark among qualified rushers.

Proving how unuseful this metric is for fantasy purposes, Darrell Henderson Jr.'s zero percent stacked boxes (SB) faced are at the total opposite end of Pacheco's yet both rushers are averaging the exact 4.0 ruFPPG.

Only nine of the 49 qualified rushers have faced SB in fewer than 10% of all of their carries. On a counting basis, Swift is the only rusher not named Darrell Henderson who has only one SB faced so far, followed by Travis Etienne, Alexander Mattison, and Aaron Jones with two SB faced each.

Pacheco's low 29 rushing attempts have him ranked 16th on the total SB-faced leaderboard. The actual leader on that front is Nick Chubb with 30 SB faced trhough 98 carries. Henry is second with 29 in 104, and Jamaal Williams ranks third with 21 in 77. No other rusher has faced more than 19 SB through Week 5.

The three rushers with more than three touchdowns scored this season (Chubb, Williams, and Henry) have all faced SB in at least 27% of their total carries. Only one (Tyler Allgeier) of the six qualified RBs without a single touchdown has faced SB at such a rate.

Among rushers with at least 50 carries through Week 5, Aaron Jones (3.3%) is the only one averaging 11.0+ ruFP/15att while facing SB in fewer than 14% of his attempts. He's only dealt with two such schemes in his total 61 carries.

Although it might not be apparent, there is virtually no relation between a rusher EFF and the rate at which he faces SB, with an r-squared value of negative-0.09 between both metrics.

Looking at the metric from a pure FPPG perspective, the top-12 per-game scorers at the position have faced 8+D an average of 20.8% of their attempts. Among those, oOnly Dalvin Cook (8.6%) is below 14.4%.

On the other hand, the bottom-12 FPPG rushers are facing stacked boxes 16.2% of the time on average. Among those, only Pacheco, Allgeier, and Mark Ingram II (26.3%) are above 17.5% through Week 5.

Average Time Behind The Line Of Scrimmage

Correlation with Rushing Fantasy Points (based on the 2020 season): negative-1%

Leaders and Trailers:

Leaderboard Notes:

You might think that TLOS and EFF are related, as a north-south rusher should spend less time behind the line of scrimmage. With five weeks on the books already, the relation sits at a ridiculous negative-0.6%. I mean... Nothing linked between these two things, I'm afraid.

The relation between TLOS and actual fantasy points is also pretty much nonexistent, so this metric can be discarded when analyzing players in fantasy leagues and trying to predict their outcomes.

That said, James Conner and Chase Edmonds have definitely had their buttocks on fire through Week 5 clocking in at 2.55 and 2.58 TLOS respectively, the only two rushers under 2.61 seconds.

Chubb and teammate Kareem Hunt, both playing for the Cleveland Molasses this season, trail everybody in the TLOS leaderboard. Javonte Williams, now done for the season, was the closes one to their marks and the only other rusher spending more than three seconds behind the LOS.

Both Browns are making the most of that patience, though, with the two rushers averaging nearly 9.7+ ruFP/15Att so far. On a per-game basis, though, Chubb is putting up 20.3 FPPG compared to Hunt's measly 7.3 FPPG.

None of the eight quickest rushers (all of the below 2.69 TLOS) are averaging double-digit FPPG with Aaron Jones boasting the best mark at just 9.0 followed by Damien Harris's 8.7 figure.

• The top-12 running backs in FPPG (9.7+) are averaging a 2.82 TLOS
• The bottom-12 (<5.2 FPPG) players are averaging 2.79 seconds behind the LOS.

As stated earlier, there might be a little something to this, but it's ridiculously insignificant to give it any importance at all for fantasy purposes.

ATT & YDS & Y/A & TD

Correlation with Rushing Fantasy Points (based on the 2021 season): 70% / 78% / 33% / 74%

Leaders and Trailers:

Leaderboard Notes:

There was a clear outlier in YPC at this point through the season last year: Tony Pollard with an average of 6.4 YPC. I guess D'Andre Swift must be reading this and laughing at that figure compared to his staggering 8.6 YPC mark through Week 5 of the 2022 campaign.

Aaron Jones would have actually tied Pollard's lead last year with his current yards-per-carry average, but Swift has been incredible this season. Of course, Jones (61) has more than twice the number of carries than Swift through W5 and the Packers' rusher has accrued 159 more yards than his divisional foe.

Chubb (15.5) is the only rusher other than Swift (16.2) averaging more than 13.6 ruFP/15Att through Week 5. As is always the case with Swift, we'll have to wait and see if he can keep his current pace (no pun intended) up for the full season once he starts to accumulate more and more carries as games start pilling on everybody.

There is a nice race for the rushing yardage leaderboard involving Chubb (593) and a phenomenal Saquon Barkley (533) that seems to have lost not a single step after the injuries suffered in years past.

Josh Jacobs (490) could still have a chance at ending the year with the largest rushing yardage of all RBs, but Las Vegas simply suck too much as to give him many touches while always playing on negative game scripts for rushers. Jacobs has the production and the efficiency, but volume might not be on his side ROS.

Back to Joe Mixon, he's simply underperformed heavily this season. The 3.1 YPC is a disaster and only Najee Harris (3.2) can be put (almost, not quite there) on par with his terrible start to the year. That is because Mixon is the only rusher with 70+ carries averaging fewer than 3.8 YPC and one of just four (Ezekiel Elliott, Leonard Fournette, Derrick Henry) below the 4.0-YPC barrier.

King Henry (14.2) is the only rusher averaging more than 7.3 FPPG while averaging fewer than 4.0 YPC. Fournette is the worst of them all with a putrid average of 6.8 FPPG among the four rushers in that lowest-YPC/high-volume-carries group.

In fact, on a per-15-carries basis, Mixon is the absolute worst RB of the NFL putting up just 5.7 ruFP/15Att. The next-worst player is Najee Harris (6.1) already past the six-point barrier.

YDS & RYOE & Y/A & RYOE/A & ROE%

Correlation with Rushing Fantasy Points (based on the 2020 season): 78% / 51% / 33% / 40% / 22%

Leaders and Trailers:

Leaderboard Notes:

Starting last year, the NFL introduced the concept of Rushing Yards Over Expectation. Basically, it comes down to the extra yards a rusher gained (or lost) in a given play given the context of that play (down, distance, defender positional data, etc...).

• The RYOE metric indicates how many extra yards the rusher gained/lost on his carries over/under those he actually rushed for. Ex: YDS = 100, RYOE = 10, then the rusher was expected to rush for 90 yards, but overperformed that mark by 10 (RYOE) thus getting to 100.
• The RYOE/A metric indicates the average extra yards gained/lost per rushing attempt. Ex: Y/A = 0.5, RYOE/A = -1.5, then the rusher was expected to rush for 2.0 Y/A but underperformed that mark by -1.5 (RYOE) thus getting 0.5 Y/A.
• The ROE% metric indicates the percentage of rushing attempts the rusher exceeded the expected yards (gained more yards than expected). Ex: ATT = 10, ROE% = 50.0, then the rusher gained more yards than expected in 5 of 10 (50.0%) of his carries.

I shouldn't even be writing about this because I guess it was predictable enough to think Swift would, obviously, lead everybody in the RYOE leaderboard. There are close players, yes, but Swift is in a league of his own and nearly at three full RYOE per carry with an actual 2.9 RYOE figure through Week 5.

Truth be told, things have gone totally out of hand this season. Last year, at this point, nobody was above an average RYOE of 0.8 yards. This season, through five games, as many as 15 rushers are above that mark!

Even if you want to leave Swift and Tony Pollard a little bit on the side because of their low-volume usage (27 and 44 carries respectively) you'd still have Nick Chubb with a ridiculous 2.2 RYOE over 98 carries and Saquon Barkley close enough to Chubb overperforming the expectations by 1.7 yards on 97 touches.

Although things are a bit more reasonable when it comes to the ROE% figures through Week 5, it's still impressive to have five players overperforming on more than half of their total carries. All of those have at least 56 rushing attempts, which yields an average of around 11+ carries per game.

Considering the number of touches and the rate at which a rusher is outperforming the expected yardage, Chubb leads everybody having rushed the ball for more yards than expected in 47 of his 98 times rushing the rock. Nobody else has done so more than Barkley's 44 times.

Jones leads the way in ROE% but given his "low" number of touches (61) he's "only" outperformed the expectations 36 times. I typed "only" because that's already tied for the sixth-largest mark among all 49 qualified rushers.

ROE% is the deciding metric separating Joe Mixon from Najee Harris when it comes to underperformers this season. Mixon's 32.6 ROE% is sky-high compared to Harris' league-trailing 23.5 ROE%.

On a counting basis, Mixon's 31 carries outperforming the expectations are almost double Harris' 16 through five games this season.

Harris is, also, the second-worst player on a per-carry basis with a negative-1.1 RYOE (compared to Mixon's also-bad negative-0.5).

Chase Edmonds is the only player underperforming the expectations by more than 1.1 yards at a nonsensical negative-2.1 RYOE through five games and 29 carries. That should positively regress, but even then it'd take a miracle for Edmonds to escape the league-trailing position when we check the NGS rushing leaderboards again in three weeks.

Only two rushers posting averages of 10.0+ FPPG have underperformed with negative RYOE marks (Henry at -0.4 and Cook at -0.2). The other eight such rushers are overperforming to an average of +1.2 yards per carry.

At the opposite end, of the 24 rushers with averages of <7.0 FPPG only four (17%) of them are on the positive side of the RYOE leaderboard (somehow, Isiah Pacheco has an RYOE of 1.3 while belonging to this group).

That's it for today. Until we meet again next week, I hope you can crush your waiver wire, set up the best possible lineup, and get ready for another weekend full of fireworks!

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