Week 11 Quick Reads

by Vincent Verhei

Jonas Gray entered Sunday night's game against Indianapolis with just 131 career rushing yards and no touchdowns. He then ripped the Colts for 199 yards on the ground and four trips into the red zone. He was by far the top fantasy scorer of the week (which is unfortunate, since he probably wasn't on very many fantasy rosters), but the advanced numbers say his performance was historically great -- and at the same time, they say it really wasn't anything special.

Let's start with a caveat, a shadow that hangs over everything you're about to read: it's the Colts, and they stink. They entered the weekend ranked 22nd in run defense DVOA, and after Gray trampled them, only the Giants and Chiefs are giving up more yards per carry. And because of that, we must take Gray's big day with multiple grains of salt. Without opponent adjustments, this was one of the ten best rushing days we have ever measured; with them, it doesn't even make the top 100.

Here are the top ten unadjusted rushing games since 1989. Remember, this does not include opponent adjustments or receiving data. Most of these names will be very familiar. The name at the top probably won't be.

(Let's take a quick sidetrack to revisit the tale of Jerome Harrison. In 2009, the Browns were coached by Eric Mangini, they were quarterbacked by Brady Quinn and Derek Anderson, and they sucked, getting off to a 2-11 start. At the end of the year, with Jamal Lewis on the shelf, Harrison, a 26-year-old journeyman, stampeded Kansas City for 286 yards in a 41-34 win. At that point Mangini decided "Harrison is my best player and I am going to use him on every play." Harrison ran 39 times in a 23-9 win over Oakland in Week 16 and then 33 times in a season-ending win 23-17 win over Jacksonville, but averaged less than 4 yards per carry in both games. Harrison played in the league until 2012, but only had one other 100-yard game in his career.)

So how did Gray make the top ten with a relatively meager 5.24-yard average? Gray became just the 16th player with 150 rushing yards and four scores in a game, a list that includes six Hall of Famers, seven if you count LaDainian Tomlinson, who will be eligible for the Hall in 2017. Nobody has done it more than once, so of course we shouldn't expect this kind of production every week.

Gray averaged 5.2 yards on a whopping 38 carries. Only four other men have had a higher average with such a heavy workload. More impressive than the totals, however, was Gray's consistency. There were no 90-yard carries skewing that average; his longest run gained only 20 yards. Gray's yeoman-like effort produced a whopping 15 first downs on the ground. That's the most for any player in a game this year, and only the sixth time a player has hit double digits in this category. (Coincidentally, two of the other players with ten first downs in a game also did it in Week 11. Jamaal Charles had 11 first downs against Seattle, while Alfred Blue had the same number against Cleveland.) It was Gray's ability to move the chains in short- and even medium-yardage that really stood out. He had 16 carries with 5 yards or less to go for a first down, and he picked up that first down 13 times.

That's why Gray's game was so much more valuable than, for example, Jeremy Hill's. Hill gained 152 yards on 27 carries for Cincinnati against New Orleans, an average of 5.6 yards per rush which is better than Gray's average against Indianapolis. Hill, though, gained more than half of his yards came on just two carries, gains of 21 and 62 yards in the second quarter. He only gained five first downs on the ground, but he was stuffed for no gain or a loss five times.

We have other stats to account for this kind of thing, metrics like Success Rate and Open Field Yards, but I want to try something new. Honestly, this is an idea that's been kicking around in my head for a while now, and this has been the first time it's really made sense to bring it up. The idea is simple: rather than measure each player's overall average per carry, let's sort his carries into three equal groups as determined by distance, then measure the average of that player's shortest carries, his longest carries, and those in the middle. That will give us a better idea of the "shape" of each player's production, and not just its size. And unlike Success Rate and Open Field Yards, there are no plays that "don't count." Every play and every yard is measured in one of the three categories.

For example, Hill's nine shortest carries (one-third of his 27 total) gained a total of -1 yard, an average of -0.1 yards each. Gray's 12 shortest carries (one-third of his 38 total, rounding down) gained 18 yards, or 1.5 yards each. So Gray's shortest carries were better than Hill's shortest carries. It was the same story for middle-distance runs, where Gray's average (4.2) was clearly better than Hill's (2.6). Only in long runs does Hill's average (14.4) beat Gray's (9.8). And that's largely why Hill, despite the superior overall average, was the less valuable player this week.

Let's apply that same methodology to examine all running backs with at least 70 carries this year. Players are listed with total carries and sorted by overall average, with ranks listed for average gain on short, middle, and long runs. Can we find any trends?

The most interesting guys here, obviously, are those who rank drastically differently in one category than they do in the other two. Jamaal Charles ranks second in overall average, so it's no surprise that he is in the top seven in shortest, middle, and longest carries. But consider the case of Matt Asiata, who ranks 10th in shortest runs but 42nd, dead last, in longest runs. So he very rarely loses yardage, but he has very little home-run ability. Other players who fit this slow-but-steady mold include Bishop Sankey, Rashad Jennings, Steven Jackson, and two surprises, Chris Johnson and Darren McFadden.

At the opposite end of the spectrum are the boom-and-bust guys, led by Cleveland's Isaiah Crowell, who ranks sixth in longest runs but next to last in shortest runs. He's followed by Justin Forsett, Jerick McKinnon, Bobby Rainey, and Knile Davis.

And then there's the strange case of Jeremy Hill. The Bengals runner ranks third in shortest runs, so he doesn't get stuffed very often. And he's seventh in longest runs, so he's got plenty of pop. But somehow he ranks just 20th in middle distance runs. That paints the profile of a guy who gets a lot of 2- and 3- yard runs, but on the rare instances he does make it into the clear, takes it a long way.

Are any of these splits more important than the others? Well, the correlation between average gain on short runs and overall average is 0.430. That correlation climbs to 0.775 when comparing overall average to middle runs, and a whopping 0.927 when comparing overall average to long average. In other words, when you're evaluating runners by yards per carry, it's helpful to remember that realistically, you're looking at what they do about one-third of the time.

Comparing these splits to VOA paints a different picture, though. (I'm using VOA instead of DVOA because we don't want to use opponent adjustments for some numbers and not others. The correlation between VOA and either shortest runs or longest runs come out to 0.638, while the correlation between VOA and middle runs is 0.813. So, in this case, it's the middle of the pack that actually has the most influence on the outcome.