QR Week 4: Patterson Punishes Washington

Cordarrelle Patterson, our top running back of the week, is a man of many talents—and that makes him hard to evaluate. A multi-purpose threat in college, he began his NFL career as a wide receiver before making a transition into the backfield. Along the way, he returned eight kickoffs for touchdowns and became the greatest kickoff return man in league history. On Sunday, he had three touchdowns as a receiver while also leading the Falcons in rushing yards.

At Football Outsiders, our individual statistics are based on positional adjustments, so running backs are only compared to other running backs, and wide receivers are only compared to other wideouts. Gray-area players such as Patterson complicate things, however, because it can be hard to determine which bucket they fall into. Just look at Patterson's touchdowns against Washington. Two came when he was split wide:

#MattyIce❄️ goes DEEP to CP!

📺: FOX | @ceeflashpee84 pic.twitter.com/trfhmdU0i8

— Atlanta Falcons (@AtlantaFalcons) October 3, 2021

Make that THREE touchdowns for SCOREDARRELLE PATTERSON!

📺: FOX | @ceeflashpee84 pic.twitter.com/6iOYZjp3Yy

— Atlanta Falcons (@AtlantaFalcons) October 3, 2021

But he also had one out of the backfield:

FLASH punches it in from the 12-yard line ⚡️

📺: FOX | @ceeflashpee84 pic.twitter.com/05ycWJFQLI

— Atlanta Falcons (@AtlantaFalcons) October 3, 2021

So is Patterson a running back or a wide receiver? It's a tricky but important distinction for our numbers. He's listed as a running back this year on the Falcons roster, in our database, and in most fantasy football leagues. (It's amusing to think about how many fantasy football leagues are going to be won by managers who grabbed Patterson as an RB off the waiver wire. It's also amusing—to me, anyway—that Patterson was on my opponent's bench in one of my leagues this week.) And as a running back, he is second among all players in receiving DYAR behind only Kansas City's Tyreek Hill going into Monday Night. However, that's partly because he is being held to a lower standard than Hill. On 21 targets, Patterson has a 61.9% success rate and is averaging 11.2 yards per play. Those numbers blow away the combined stats for running backs in 2021 (48.5%, 6.3), but are more in line with what the typical wide receiver is doing this year (52.9%, 8.6). We can somewhat remove positional adjustments by looking at quarterback's passing DYAR on throws to each receiver. By that metric, Patterson falls from second in the league to 10th behind Hill and nine other wide receivers.

Patterson has been difficult to label since his days as an amateur. He played high school ball in Rock Hill, South Carolina, where he led Northwestern (go Trojans!) to the Class 4A Division II championship game. He then started his collegiate football career at Hutchinson Community College (go Blue Dragons!), where he got to wear this unbelievably cool helmet and logo:

Blue Dragon Fans ... purchase your tickets now for No. 1 Hutchinson's football game vs. No. 3 Garden City at 1 p.m. Sunday at Gowans Stadium.

The Garden City ticket link is: https://t.co/x83mLr5GOD pic.twitter.com/s1nTP5ITa2

— Blue Dragon Sports (@bluedragonsport) April 20, 2021

In two years at Hutchinson, Patterson averaged 10.2 yards on 39 runs, 16.2 yards on 113 catches, and 36.4 yards (with a half-dozen touchdowns!) on 31 kickoff returns. He then moved from Gowans Stadium (seating capacity: 5,500) to Neyland Stadium (seating capacity: 102,455) at the University of Tennessee. Patterson was also versatile with the Volunteers, averaging 12.3 yards on 25 runs, 16.9 yards on 46 catches, and 26.6 yards on 29 kickoff returns.

After just one year of major college football, Patterson skipped his senior season to enter the 2013 NFL draft. The version of Playmaker Score we were using at the time (which looks quite rudimentary in hindsight) was not optimistic about his chances of success:

Patterson, in particular, is a polarizing case. His big-play ability is tantalizing, but he often disappeared from games. He didn't crack the SEC's top 10 in receiving yards, despite playing for a team that had the second-most pass attempts in the conference. He had just one 100-yard game with the Volunteers, and that came against Troy. Against SEC competition, he never gained more than 88 receiving yards, and averaged less than 50 yards per game on a pass-heavy team. For all his gifts, Patterson has done very little as a receiver to show he can play in the NFL.

Scouting expert Matt Waldman disagreed both with Playmaker's methodology and its evaluation of Patterson:

Combine Patterson's capacity to become a better route-runner with his uncommon skill to integrate strength, quickness, and vision as a ballcarrier, then add his ability to catch the ball with his hands, and I see a promising wide receiver. Go one step further and add the fact that Patterson can make receptions against physical coverage, and I see a potential playmaker of the highest order.

The Minnesota Vikings agreed with Waldman and traded up into the end of the first round to draft Patterson 29th overall in 2013. Patterson's receiving statline as a rookie (45 catches, 469 yards, four touchdowns) was modest, but considering that A) Minnesota's quarterbacks that year were Matt Cassel and Christian Ponder, and B) Patterson added two more scores as a kickoff returner and three (with a 13.2-yard average!) as a runner, there was optimism that brighter days would be ahead. Those brighter days never arrived though—those 469 receiving yards and 627 yards from scrimmage remain the best of his career. He did catch 52 passes in 2016, but averaged just 8.7 yards per catch and finished 70th in DVOA.

Patterson's rookie contract with Minnesota expired after that season, and he has been bouncing from team to team ever since. The Raiders gave him one year as a receiver, but then the Patriots made him more of a runner in 2018. That was the first time as a pro that he finished with more runs than receptions, a pattern that has continued in two years in Chicago and now in Atlanta, though the Falcons are giving him a heavier workload than he has ever seen before. Through four weeks, Patterson is averaging 4.5 catches and 6.8 runs per game; both would be the highest marks of his career.

Patterson is on pace to top 1,500 yards from scrimmage if he can stay healthy for 17 games, but it's interesting to see how his usage has changed in his career. In 2016, Patterson had 45 more receptions than rushes; last year with Chicago, he had 43 more rushes than receptions. That makes Patterson one of 18 players in our database to have a 40-play margin in both directions in his career. The king of this category is Eric Metcalf, who started his career as a running back with the Browns in the early 1990s before transitioning to receiver for the Falcons, Chargers, Cardinals, Panthers, Washington, and Packers. In 1989, his first year in Cleveland, he had 187 runs and 54 catches; in 1995, his first year out of Cleveland, he had 104 catches but only 28 runs. That makes Metcalf the only player we have on record to have one season with at least 76 more runs than receptions, and another with at least 76 more receptions than runs. Metcalf, like Patterson, was also an electric special teamer; only Devin Hester returned more punts for touchdowns in his career.

Other notable players who saw significant shifts from being primarily receivers to primarily runners (or vice versa):

• Johnny Morris: Morris joined Chicago as a halfback in 1958, but he never accomplished much there, maxing out at 417 rushing yards in 1960. In 1959, he ran 87 times while catching only 13 passes. He moved to flanker (the early version of the position we now call wide receiver) in 1961 and fared much better; his 93 catches, 1,200 yards, and 10 touchdowns in 1964 were all best in the NFL that season, but he didn't take a handoff one time all year.

• Bobby Mitchell: Mitchell is a Hall of Famer who is perhaps best known for integrating the Washington NFL franchise in 1962. Mitchell spent his first four years as a change-of-pace halfback behind Jim Brown in Cleveland. In 1959 he had 131 runs but just 35 catches; in his first year in Washington, he ran only one time while leading the NFL in both catches (72) and receiving yards (1,384). He finished first in receiving yards again in 1962, then first with 10 touchdown catches in 1963. He also scored on eight punt and kickoff returns in his career.

• Charley Taylor: Another Hall of Famer, Taylor actually played alongside Mitchell for five years in Washington. (With so many runners who could catch and receivers who could run, those Washington teams must have looked somewhat similar to Kyle Shanahan's 49ers.) In his first two seasons, Taylor had 344 runs with only 93 catches. In 1966, he led the NFL with 72 receptions, but was still primarily a runner, taking 87 handoffs. It was the 1967 season when Taylor really became a full-time receiver—his 70 catches were good enough that he finished first in that category for the second year in a row, but he didn't carry the ball a single time. Including that year and through the rest of his career, Taylor had 484 catches and only 11 runs.

• Terrelle Pryor: Pryor is an odd fit here because he did not transition from runner to receiver, he transitioned from passer to receiver. He began his career as a quarterback, but not a very good one—in 2013, his only year as a starter, he finished next to last in passing DVOA. (However, we should point out that Pryor's DVOA that season was -31.6%; that's better than what either Sam Darnold or Carson Wentz did last year, and they were both given another chance to start in 2021.) He was a very good runner, however, finishing with 576 yards on 83 carries. He did not catch a single pass that year, but he caught 77 of them in 2016 for a Browns team that was such a mess that six different quarterbacks (including Pryor himself!) ended up throwing passes for them.

• Bobby Joe Conrad: Conrad, like Morris, began his career in 1958. He did not get a single rush or reception in his rookie year with the Chicago Cardinals, but in 1959 he had 74 runs with only 14 receptions. The next year the Cards moved to St. Louis, and a few years later Conrad's days as a runner were over. In his last eight NFL seasons, he caught 371 passes (including an NFL-best 73 in 1963) with only one run.

Most of these men played more than half a century ago, making Patterson something of an anachronism. For more recent examples, you would need to look at Patterson's fellow Class of 2013 draftees Tavon Austin (31 more catches than runs as a rookie, 46 more runs than receptions in 2017, three career touchdowns on kickoff returns) or Theo Riddick (37 more catches than runs in 2015, 39 more runs than catches the next year); Dexter McCluster of the Chiefs (68 more rushes than receptions in 2011; 45 more catches than runs in 2013); former Chargers/Saints/Eagles star Darren Sproles (48 more runs than catches in San Diego in 2009, 27 more catches than runs in New Orleans in 2012, nine career special teams touchdowns); or former Browns special teams ace Josh Cribbs (35 more runs than receptions in 2009, 34 more catches than runs in 2011, eight career kickoff return touchdowns).

That's not a very long list, which makes it exceedingly difficult to forecast what Patterson will do in the rest of 2021 and beyond. So far, however, he has been the brightest light in what otherwise looks like a lost season in Atlanta.