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Saquon Barkley has crushed it this season. The Philadelphia running back continues to break big runs, as he has three touchdown runs of 60 or more yards in the playoffs.
Can Barkley continue to break these explosive plays and lead Philadelphia to a Super Bowl win over Kansas City? Let’s update previous work that suggested a large random component in explosive plays.
In a pivotal study, Bill Connelly looked at both success rate and explosive plays in college football. For an offense, a play is a success if it gains following fraction of yards towards the next first down:
- 50% on 1st down.
- 70% on 2nd down.
- 100% on 3rd, 4th down.
To isolate explosiveness, he looked at explosiveness only on successful plays. We don’t care about plays that get stuffed at the line of scrimmage. They never had a chance. We want to isolate how big a play gets once it has reached some threshold for success.
For college football teams, Bill found success rate to be very predictive, and isolated explosiveness to be almost completely random. He concluded the best way to generate explosive plays was to have more successful plays and get fortunate to break a few.
If this holds for the NFL, it’s a problem for Philadelphia. This season, Saquon Barkley has had a 42.5% rushing success rate, lower than the 43.5% NFL average.
Let’s perform Bill’s study on rushing in the NFL. I will calculate yards per carry on successful plays for individual players. Over the past 5 seasons of data, I found an R-squared value of about 0.12. (If this is new to you, check out my visual primer on least squares and R-squared values.)
In terms of predictability, this R-squared value of 0.12 sits in an intermediate zone. Success rate for NFL rushers has a very solid R-squared of 0.25. Isolated explosiveness for college football teams was 0.015, which means that randomness dominates big plays at that level.
In the NFL run game, there is some signal in isolated explosiveness. This season, Barkley had 11.9 yards per carry on successful plays, much better than the 8.5 NFL average. He is more likely to break a big run than Kansas City’s Kareem Hunt, who had 6.1 yards per carry on successful plays.
I know this is stating the obvious. It’s more fun when numbers reveal the hidden truth in football.
Barkley has always been a boom or bust running back. Over the past three seasons, he has been worse than NFL average by success rate but better than average in explosiveness. That happened not only with Philadelphia this season but also with the New York Giants the past two seasons.
I had thought about Barkley under 109.5 rushing yards for the Super Bowl. However, after finding some signal in explosive plays for NFL players, I no longer have any interest.
Football betting with a PhD edge
This article was sent to The Power Rank’s email newsletter on Sunday, February 9, 2025. This newsletter is a free service that strives to be:
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The predictions are based on my PhD research from Stanford, and the content covers college football and the NFL.
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