Charted NFL Waters: Alternate offensive stats and measuring running back value

Charting the NFL waters again to highlight the most efficient teams in the league in 2020 and how running backs have measured up to their contracts. 

We’re back again for the third installment of this running column in which we have been and will be using charts to analyze interesting topics from around the NFL. And we have some exceptionally intriguing aspects of the league to break down on the docket this week.

First, we’ll be examining how all 32 NFL teams measure up to one another in regards to efficiency stats and putting that into some context. Then we’ll dive specifically into the running back landscape and see how players have performed and produced relative to their salary cap hit and/or contract.

Let’s get to the charts, shall we?

Who were the most efficient NFL teams last year?

View the interactive version of this chart here.

Efficiency is an interesting concept. Time and downs are both scarce resources in football, which is why teams have to make the most of them when they can. The ability to do this is generally measured using efficiency stats, as this might tell us how quickly a team is able to get down the field and how slowly they can force oppositions to do the same.

Metrics such as Yards per Point and Points per Play are extremely useful in understanding this very phenomenon. When it comes to the ultimate goal, putting more points on the board than your opponent, a side’s Red Zone Scoring Percentage tells us how efficient they are when it really matters. How many red zone opportunities do they waste to the number that they convert and put themselves in a better position for winning a game?

As expected, the Packers feature quite high on the list as Aaron Rodgers’ MVP season wasn’t just prolific in terms of the numbers he put up, but was also extremely efficient. Rodgers was consistently throwing 300+ yards last season with attempts in the 20s and complemented by a strong run game. The Packers, overall, were able to put up the highest efficiency stats in the league.

Measuring NFL running back contracts in relation to TD/yardage return

View the interactive version of this chart here.

In the previous article, I had a visualization to measure a receiver’s contract as a proportion of his touchdown and yardage return. This was an interesting chart to see which receivers were providing the biggest return on the investment teams have put in them (their salary). I wanted to extend this to running back’s with one modification.

The main issue with the receiver chart was that, as expected, guys on rookie contracts posting even above average seasons would feature highly on this chart and, because of this, those receivers on their second contract were potentially misrepresented. I tried to find a solution to this by coloring those on rookie contracts in orange, as shown above.

We can still see running backs on rookie contracts dominate but this visualisation gives more credit to the other backs that posted strong campaigns, such as Alvin Kamara and, of course, Derrick Henry. Another interesting observation here is that ageing backs on smaller contracts who still posted solid seasons featured high (probably as expected) like Adrian Peterson and Frank Gore.