Truth About Running Backs: NFC West
This is the next in a series of articles that attempts to shine a light on how various teams really do use their backs and what we can surmise about them going forwards. Today we focus on the NFC West.
This division has a reputation as a pass-happy one but there’s some really diverse running games here. Let’s delve into them.
Arizona Cardinals
The Cardinals running back corps has been a little obscured by the ongoing drama about David Johnson. The first chart on the Cardinals shows just how little Johnson was used after the halfway point of last season:
Obviously, he was hurt and missed some games, but it was also clear after he returned that he just was not a big part of the offense. And when he did get used, he was unimpressive. It’s certainly possible that he was never a 100 percent fit and he’ll be used much more in 2020, but it seems unlikely.
He’s likely to be on the roster with over $16 million in dead cap, but we should expect to see Johnson as a complementary piece. This should be no surprise. He’s 28 now (peak running back production age is 25), has seen multiple injuries and his career year back in 2016 seems increasingly distant.
To be a little more positive about Johnson the following chart shows the three backs’ yardage by length of play:
Although Kenyan Drake has a reputation as being a great fit in this offense (and able to rip off long gains), you can see here that he actually had a lower proportion of his yardage come from big plays than Johnson and Chase Edmonds did. That’s a little misleading, admittedly. The point here really is that all three backs had a large proportion of their yardage come from big plays.
The Cardinals as a team had the second-most rushing yards on long plays in the NFL. This seems to fit the overall concept of a spread-out, air raid offense. You make space for the running game by forcing defenses to cover the whole width of the field.
Los Angeles Rams
Just like the Cardinals, the Rams are also a team that had a relatively poor rushing year which has been a little overshadowed by the fall of their star running back. There are no conversations about the Rams backfield that are not dominated by opinions on Gurley’s knee and how much the Rams trust his overall health.
Clearly this is a concern and it should be addressed. Gurley does have a bad knee. The Rams did draft a back fairly early in 2019. And Gurley did produce less than he did in 2018. These things are all linked right?
The first chart (or pair of charts really) compares overall Rams running back usage in 2018 vs 2019:
Gurley certainly did lose some volume. In 2018 he had 337 touches and in 2019 just 272. That’s about 20 percent fewer rushes/targets. But Gurley produced around 40 percent fewer yards. So, something else must have been going on too.
If you look carefully you can see that one big difference between the years was Gurley’s receiving volume. He had 81 catches in 2018 and just 49 in 2019. That is a very significant difference.
The other major difference for Gurley was his big play percentage. The next chart shows the proportions of Gurley’s yards that came on plays of varying amounts:
In 2018, about 55 percent of Gurley’s yards came on big plays (i.e., chunk plays of ten yards or more). In 2019 that dropped to just 40 percent. He went from having 996 yards of big plays to just 429. Even accounting for volume that’s a big difference.
San Francisco 49ers
So close. The 49ers came so close to glory. What’s surprising is that so many people only seemed to realize this season what a genius Kyle Shanahan is. It’s been obvious for years to anyone paying close attention.
One of the most interesting things about his running game is how he uses his backs – interchangeably.
Last summer drove a lot of interest in roles in this system. Coach Shanahan made some comments about Tevin Coleman potentially being used in short-yardage systems and there were lots of predictions about Jerick McKinnon’s role.
This was mostly nonsense. The genius of Shanahan is that none of the backs has a specific role. They’re all used very similarly so there are no tells about what the offense is doing. When teams like the Patriots or Bears roll out a certain player then the defense can make some assumptions. That’s just not the case with the 49ers.
The first chart here shows the carry/target split for the top four backs on the team:
All of the players saw a virtually identical ratio. The more you delve into the 49ers over Shanahan’s tenure there the more you see this. Identical usage.
Here’s usage by down:
Although Matt Breida was virtually unused on third down (on extremely low volume) you can again see very similar usage for all the backs. There’s not enough space here to share all the information over the past three seasons of Shanahan in San Francisco but the same theme occurs again and again. There is no “Tevin Coleman role.” There is no “receiving back” or “short yardage back.” There’s not even a “Raheem Mostert role.” Genius.
After you realize that all 49ers backs are used interchangeably, the leap to understanding what weekly usage looks like is easy. Here’s combined carries/targets by week for the season:
The term “starter” is increasingly meaningless for running-backs, but this team exemplifies why. The team gave at least two backs significant volume in almost every week, and at no point did any back own over 80 percent of the volume. All the backs in this offense can be productive but they can be tough to start because you’re hoping for a long play or a touchdown.
Seattle Seahawks
A lot of dynasty owners are somewhat disgruntled by the Seahawks because Rashaad Penny sits on their rosters. This has somewhat got in the way of the fact that Chris Carson was on the cusp of being a workhorse back (which for this writer is playing 75 percent of snaps, handling 75 percent of running back carries and owning 75 percent of the team’s running back targets). Carson’s 325 combined carries/targets was extremely high.
The first chart here shows how dominant he was on all downs:
As you can see, he owned over 65 percent of running back usage on each and every down – this is extremely rare in the modern game. The fact that Carson played in 16 games certainly helped, but he was impressive above and beyond that.
It’s been tough for Seahawks backs to deliver this recently because Pete Carroll has favored using a designated receiving back. The next chart shows the carry/target split for all the Seahawks backs:
Travis Homer and CJ Prosise were both used as the receiving back at times. But even so Carson managed 47 targets. He’d managed just 32 across his previous two seasons in the NFL combined.
Forty-seven is not a huge number (he scraped in as a top-24 running back in targets), but it was enough to mean his overall volume was very high. Carson was sixth among all backs in combined targets/carries. He was featured about as much as you’d expect a back to be in Seattle. His injury is a worry and Penny has an opportunity to win more work, but Carson had a firmer grip on a bigger job than many realized in 2019.
Now you’ve got a little bit more information on how some of the backs in the NFC West were used in 2019 and you can use that information to make better decisions about how they’ll be used in the future.
Thanks for reading.
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