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Just when everything was feeling absolutely right. When we had already reached the halfway point of the season and the worst-case scenario had been cleared from the potential endings. When we all had agreed that the XFL was indeed fun, Coronavirus struck and wiped out every single sport from the face of Earth. There's nothing to like about it, but it was a necessary measure to take.
Perhaps when the XFL comes back next year--and it will, be sure of it--the fact that we were left wondering what could have happened would find us anxious for the 2021 season to start. Until that moment arrives, though, we can only look back at what the first season of this new XFL iteration has been.
Although half a season--with just five games per team played--might be a small sample size there is enough data as to build a good enough picture of how each team approached the game of football and find out which traits differentiated the eight franchises that were part of the XFL in 2020.
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XFL Season Recap: Passing vs Rushing
One of the easier things to analyze when it comes to what defines football teams is how their passing/rushing game works, and how they split plays in one or the other way. Instead of looking at individual players, we can take the whole passing and rushing attempts from all of the players of each team to get an overall idea of how they performed while on offense.
This is how each team split its plays in the 2020 season.
In a football era in which rushing is considered much less valuable than passing, it makes sense to find six of the eight teams running more passing plays than rushing ones. In fact, not being too picky, we can consider seven of the eight (if we throw Tampa Bay into that group) running at least a balanced offense scheme without favoring the runs over passes.
The St. Louis BattleHawks came to the XFL as any of the other eight franchises but closed the season as an absolute outlier. Not only did they run the second-most plays, but they also did so favoring running plays over passing ones by a mile with a 40/60 split. Three teams had even more skewed splits on the opposite end of the chart with 64%+ of their plays being passes, but that is nothing surprising these times.
Was it a good idea to run so many rushing plays when it came to fantasy football, though?
Obviously, not so much. Adjusting for the number of plays each team run, St. Louis was the second-worst team in PPR points per play at just 1.2. Only DC fell behind the BattleHawks at 1.1 after having a rather mediocre season in which they couldn't find a working quarterback after the third week of play.
No wonder the three teams with the highest pass rate in the league racked up the most fantasy points per play this season. Although it didn't perfectly align, all of Dallas, LA, and Houston finished the year averaging 1.4+ PPR/Play with the Roughnecks posting a monster 1.95 mark.
Even more telling are the receiving/rushing PPR splits of each team. Not good for St. Louis again, over the season the finished with the second-most rushing PPR points even with the largest of splits favoring those plays. Only the BattleHawks and the Vipers crossed the 100-ruPPR mark with no other team even reaching 80 PPR on the ground, while on the other hand almost seven of the eight teams reached 200-rePPR points on the year, with two of the three most pass-heavy teams breaking the 300-rePPR barrier and Dallas falling just three rePPR points short.
XFL Season Recap: Positional Production
Another interesting way of looking at fantasy production is by position. We already know how each team split its plays, but we have not yet covered how the players at each position affected the outcomes.
Here is how every team distributed its fantasy points among the different four (WR and TEs are bunched into the "WR" label) offensive positions this season.
One of the most interesting takeaways from the chart above is the one regarding Dallas' positional breakdown. If you remember, the Renegades had one of the most pass-heavy schemes, which would have made us thought of their receivers racking up a lot of fantasy points. That wasn't the case, as the team's WR/TEs only logged 50.5% of Dallas PPR points (second-lowest mark at the position). What the Renegades did, though, was using their running backs in the passing game as no other team did in the XFL.
Dallas featured the two most-targeted rushers in the XFL, Lance Dunbar (29) and Cameron Artis-Payne (27), who also finished the season as RB3 and RB1 respectively. Again, always favor passing over rushing, folks.
One last note on the positional breakdown: Houston was the only team to play just one quarterback on the full five-game season, and P.J. Walker racked up the highest percentage of PPR points (25.6%) for a team at the position. All by himself. Seattle finished second in the positional leaderboard at the QB spot, but the Dragons needed the contributions of both Brandon Silvers and BJ Daniels to reach that point.
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