RADIO
Time's up! The 2020 fantasy season is done and gone for good. Whether you play in a redraft league or are part of a dynasty format, the days of sitting at the edge of your couch and biting your nails are over. We have a tough eight-month desert to walk through ahead of us, but hey, the real NFL players are this close to kick-off and we will still enjoy football for another month and change, so you better get to it while it lasts! With the numbers in place and the games finished, it's time to wrap up the series and take a final look at who was who during this 2020 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 just-completed 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 preseason primer. Now, let's get to the data!
2020 Best and Worst Rushers - NextGenStats
The season, at least for us fantasy nuts, is finally over. That is nothing good for our enjoyment of the fantasy game, but it is a time of calm and peace to enjoy the real NFL playoffs that we're also invested in. With all of the regular season numbers now in place, it is time to wrap up the NextGenStats series position by position.
Today I will go through the running back position and will provide a final update on how the league's rushers have done in the different metrics we've already tackled during the season. I will only show a small number of names for each category, present the correlation with the fantasy points averaged by the player, skip the gory details, and instead provide a new "combined" leaderboard at the end of the column.
Keep in mind also that 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 this time, "ruFP/15At", 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.
Note: The cutoff is set at 85 rushing attempts.
Efficiency
Correlation with Rushing Fantasy Points: negative-32%
Leaders and Trailers:
Percentage of Stacked Boxes Faced
Correlation with Rushing Fantasy Points: 16%
Leaders and Trailers:
Average Time Behind The Line Of Scrimmage
Correlation with Rushing Fantasy Points: 27%
Leaders and Trailers:
ATT & YDS & Y/A & TD
Correlation with Rushing Fantasy Points: 84% / 90% / 53% / 87%
Leaders and Trailers:
RYOE & RYOE/A & ROE%
Correlation with Rushing Fantasy Points: 73% / 58% / 42%
Leaders and Trailers:
Combined NextGenStats Leaderboard
To build this leaderboard I used every metric that is part of the NGS site and put everything together in a combined score I labeled "NGS" in the following table. The calculation of each player's NGS score is simple. I calculated where each player ranked for each metric, and then multiplied that rank for the correlation between that metric and my ruFP/G metric. Players ranked higher (closer to one) in each category will have lower scores for those categories. At the end, I added up each player's scores from all of the categories getting a single NGS score.
The lower the NGS, the better the player for fantasy as each category was already weighted given its correlation with the ruFP/G metric. Here are the results:
NGS Leaderboard Notes:
- Even after putting together a monster season, Derrick Henry had to surrender the throne to Dalvin Cook in 2020 as the best NGS-rusher of the season.
- Cook ranked as a top-5 player in five NGS cats compared to Henry's seven top-5 finishes. The problem for Henry is that he led in cats not so relevant for fantasy purposes, thus not entirely edging Cook.
- The main cats killing Henry's chances at getting the no. 1 spot were his low ranks in EFF, 8+D%, and TLOS, all at-or-above 12th.
- The correlation between ruFP/G and NGS scores is at a very strong 77% for the 2020 season.
- That 23-percentage-point gap explains the small differences in both ranks:
- Top-5 NGS players: Cook, Henry, Chubb, Taylor, Aaron Jones
- Top-5 ruFP/G players: Henry, Cook, Taylor, Kamara, Jacobs
- Bottom-5 NGS players: Edmonds, McKissic, Barber, Ballage, Kelley
- Bottom-5 ruFP/G players: Mattison, Edmonds, Hill, Kelley, McKissic
- No. 11 Ronald Jones II is the first rusher to have a bottom-5 rank (in stacked boxes faced) and one of only two (the other being No. 13 Miles Sanders) with such a rank in an NGS cat among the top-22 NGS players of the year.
- On the other end, No. 53 overall Barber was No. 1 in stacked boxes while No. 46 overall Lindsay was No. 2 in TLOS.
- No other rusher ranked as a top-5 player in any cat outside of the top-33 NGS performers.
