Runs for No Gain

The run game is a complicated beast in the NFL. Join us as Pro Football Focus writer Sam Monson takes a plunge into the belly of that beast and we try to decipher who gets credit and who takes blame when teams fail to gain yardage on a rushing play.

The running game is a complicated process at the NFL level. Between the performance of the running backs themselves, the performance of a line of blockers working in harmony in front of them, and the performance of each of the eleven defenders on any given play there are a massive amount of variables that go into every rush, all of which ends up as a simple figure — a rush for X number of yards.

Well at Pro Football Focus we don’t think that’s good enough. We want to get inside the numbers, go deeper into the run game and diagnose more than is possible from just reading a few yardage statistics. We have already attempted to focus in on just the performance of the running back with our Elusive Rating article, and our grading play-by-play as the season goes is the most detailed analysis of the run game you will find anywhere online. But in this piece we’re going to have a look at some numbers that examine a team’s entire running game, and how often it fails to produce.

We have crunched the numbers from every rusher in the league in 2009 and produced a list of how often that player rushed for no gain or negative yardage. In order to focus in purely on backs with a heavier workload, we have set a qualifying number of carries of 75 to make the final list. These numbers include playoff figures, which is worth noting any time we use a total carries figure or a number of runs for no gain, but isn’t relevant when looking at the ratio of runs for no gain between players.

The numbers show a clear and stark correlation with the performance of a team’s offensive line during the 2009 season, as you would expect. But there are also some players who managed to buck that trend and some interesting dynamics within teams between players that of course are rushing behind the same set of blockersd

Firstly, a look at just how strong the relationship between the performance of an O-line is and the ability of rushers to avoid no-gain runs. Minnesota’s Adrian Peterson managed to rank ninth in the Elusive Rating, and fumbles aside, is widely considered one of the league’s toughest runners. But with 23.8 percent of his rushes last season for no gain or worse, he had the ninth-poorest percentage figure in the NFL. His stable mate in the Minnesota backfield, Chester Taylor, was one of the eight other rushers to record a poorer mark. This matches up clearly with our grading data, which shows Minnesota had the league’s worst run blocking unit on offense last season.

The discrepancy between Peterson’s strong showing in our Elusive Rating and his poor showing in this study is directly related to the struggles that the Minnesota offense had in run blocking in front of both Peterson and Taylor. Worryingly for Minnesota fans, they appear to have done little to address that in the offseason, and will be relying on a much improved performance from some of their young starters in 2010.

At the other end of the scale, neither Laurence Maroney nor Kevin Faulk ranked higher than 29th in the Elusive Rating, but because New England had the second-best run-blocking offense, those same players were able to rank sixth and seventh, respectively, in percentage of runs for no gain. Maroney failed to gain yards on 28 of his 195 carries, and Faulk on just 11 of his 76 carries, meaning both players failed to gain yardage on less than 15 percent of their carries for the season. Neither graded exceptionally well throughout the season, or recorded high scores in the Elusive Rating, but they were able to avoid unsuccessful runs because of the performance of the blockers in front of them.

Baltimore’s running duo of Ray Rice and Willis McGahee, running behind the sixth-ranked run-blocking unit in the league, both posted a near-identical percentage to rank 10th and 11th in the no-gain study. The duo managed to be separated by just 0.1 percent in the final results, recording 15.2 and 15.3 percent, respectively.

But then there were some players whose figure didn’t match up with either their fellow rushers on that team, or the quality of their line’s run blocking over the season. Dallas finished the year with comfortably the best run-blocking offense in the NFL according to our grades, and while Tashard Choice was able to reflect this, finishing third with just 13.9 percent of his runs failing to gain yardage, the other two parts of that three-headed rushing backfield failed to live up to his ratio.

Felix Jones ranked 23rd and failed to gain yardage on 17.1 percent of his rushes. Perhaps the most powerful runner in the stable, Marion Barber, failed to gain yardage on a full 20 percent of his carries, ranking 36th in the study, though he did battle injuries throughout the season, which must have affected his ability in this regard.

Another set of backs with differing results were those with the Atlanta Falcons. Jason Snelling headed their rushers, finishing in ninth and failing to gain yardage on 14.8 percent of his rushes. Workhorse Michael Turner wasn’t that far behind, with a figure of 16.9 percent, but third-down back Jerious Norwood failed to gain yardage on 25 percent of his carries.

In this case, the numbers could be explained by the differing ways in which the team used each of these runners. Norwood was often fed draws or used on misdirection runs behind the line of scrimmage. These plays take longer to develop, and if they are diagnosed quickly, they can be stopped for a significant loss. Turner and Snelling, on the other hand, were used far more conventionally between the tackles. That being said, Norwood’s numbers were down across the board from the often impressive figures he has posted in the past, so it is perfectly possible that he just had an extremely poor season, by any measure.

Interestingly, some of the same names that stood out in the Elusive Rating are making a case for themselves again in this study. Pierre Thomas ranks fourth, with Reggie Bush coming in at 30th. Bush must also be given the same recognition as Norwood, however, in that he is used far more on plays that have a greater propensity to being stuffed short of the line if they are quickly diagnosed.

Buffalo’s Fred Jackson ranked highly in the Elusive Rating and finished fifth in this study despite Buffalo’s run-blocking offense ranking in the bottom third of the NFL last season. The real measure of Jackson’s performance comes in his comparison to Marshawn Lynch behind the same line. Lynch, far from a poor back himself, failed to gain yardage on 20 percent of his runs last season, whereas Jackson only failed to gain yards on 14.3 percent of his carries.

The final mention goes to the Oakland Raiders, and this time it’s for something positive. According to our grades, there were only four teams to finish the season with a poorer mark for run blocking on offense than Oakland, and so naturally you would expect that their running backs ranked fairly low down in this study. But quite the opposite is true.

Darren McFadden narrowly fails to crack the top 10, finishing in 12th with just 15.4 percent of his rushes failing to gain yardage. But Michael Bush is the standout of the study, topping the list of runners with 11.4 percent of his 123 carries failing to gain yardage. Bush’s figure is a clear 2 percent better than anybody else in the study, and the next three players all ran behind excellent run-blocking units.

Lowest percentage of runs for no gain

Highest percentage of runs for no gain

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