Last season, I took a look at how offensive line play impacted RB performance – this year, I will revisit this topic, with a slightly different approach. While last year I clumped the O-line together as a single unit, this year, I break down each line by position. In doing so, we can see which teams may have weak points in the trenches.
Approach
My approach is simple. I took the average number of fantasy points scored per rush by position on the O-line. In plotting, we can see where each team excels along the trench. While this evaluation also depends on the talent level of the RB, we can assume that since it is the same back(s) running the ball repeatedly, getting an average level of performance at each position will give a strong representation of each O-lineman’s performance. In this, I plotted the results below.
Some interesting takeaways:
- The Bills have an outstanding line – every member of their trench blocked at a level higher than the league average, giving James Cook plenty of opportunity to score fantasy points.
- The Panthers’ run blocking looks quite strong, with four linemen outperforming the league average.
- The Cowboys certainly had a down year with their O-line, but it may not have been Ezekiel Elliott and Rico Dowdle‘s fault that their fantasy output was so poor.
- The Raiders’ line needs to see some improvement across the board in order to support Ashton Jeanty.
- The Cardinals and Bears have some strong points on their lines, which could be promising for next year’s backfield.
After observing trends on each line, I found out each team’s number of linemen who granted higher-than-average fantasy points per rush when they were the lead blocker. From here, I mapped these numbers to each team’s highest-performing fantasy RB from last season. The R-squared value between the two variables is 0.21, telling us 21% of the variation in RB performance is explained by the variation in blocking performance. More simply put, about a fifth of fantasy RB performance relies on how good their O-line is, and this is quite a lot. We can see this in the table below, where the top-performing lines routinely have high-performing backfields.
We see three teams near the top that truly stand out: the Panthers, Colts, and Commanders. These teams all have 80% of their O-line outperforming the mean, yet have low-performing lead backs. In the case of the Commanders, this is mainly attributed to the fact that their lead rusher only carried the ball 39 more times than QB Jayden Daniels – the offense is simply not made for a high-performance RB. For the Colts, while Anthony Richardson certainly steals some of the rushes, it isn’t quite the same level. Jonathan Taylor likely lacked performance due to split carries with Trey Sermon and Tyler Goodson from week to week. The Panthers’ lead back performance is a bit more of a mystery, but since the team brought in two new RBs (Trevor Etienne and Rico Dowdle) to add competition, it will be interesting to see how they perform this season. If they continue the strong performance, we could see a breakout season from one of the Carolina backs. Outside of these three anomalies, we see three more on the opposite end, with the Rams, Dolphins, and Saints having very strong fantasy rushing numbers despite only having 20% of their lines being top-performing. It goes to show that while it isn’t necessary to have a strong O-line to have great fantasy RB numbers, it is strongly desired. You need a special talent like De’Von Achane, or Alvin Kamara to put up great numbers if you are missing talent in the trenches.
from Fantasy Footballers Podcast https://ift.tt/yenNuc9
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