I made a small webpage that displays a histogram of a running back's yards per play. Take a look!
Based off this post from a few days earlier, some people brought up how misleading a stat that uses an average (like YPC) can be.
So, with some free time to spare, I thought it would be fun to plot a histogram of a running back's yards per play for a given season, and I created this:
This was my first foray into making a website of mine public, so let me know if you have any suggestions, problems, or just general feedback!
Some known issues / todos:
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I want to make it easier to select players, but for now, you are limited to a hard coded list of the top
5080ish rushers. Sorry if it's tough to find someone or if someone you really wanted to analyze isn't there, I'm working on it. -
There are some QBs on the list, but their PASS attempts are throws, not receptions.
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I'm looking into adding some aggregation stats (
total yardage, total attempts,standard deviations, etc.) -
Historical information for players who switched teams this year (for example LeSean McCoy) doesn't work.
EDIT:
(Oct 7, 2:00PM PST): Thanks for all the feedback everyone! I just added the ability to display two graphs on the screen, using the "Show Second Graph" button in the top right. Let the RBBC comparisons commence!
(Oct 7, 5:30PM PST): Guess who got sidetracked at work today, reading all of your comments and working to make this tool better for you all. I've added some more players to select from, as well as added a section to display attempts, yards, and averages.
(Oct 8, 11:00AM PST): Added some wide receivers! Still using rushing / passing yards, though I want to explore more WR-centric stats.
(Oct 8, 4:30PM PST): Added WR stats.
Posted Oct 7, 2015, 3:15 PM UTC · edited
Excellent tool. Makes me want to start looking at median ypc rather than average ypc. I wonder if that would be a telling statistic or not
That's a pretty great idea. I'm willing to bet it would be a lot more revealing by eliminating the outliers.
An RB who consistently gets shit YPC, then rips off a 50+ yard run might end up looing like he had a great day despite the struggles.
If we want to call certain guys "touchdown dependent", then we should also acknowledge that some guys (like, say, Spiller) are "big run dependent."
Median isn't actually that useful because the yards are recorded by full yard without decimals and running backs often have a number of bigger plays which when talking about median just ends up cancelling out the number of negative and short runs, so the median for many running backs is just 3. If it's 2, then it's quite bad.
I'm sure there's some way to do decimals. It would be a much better metric if so.
You'd have to do a hybrid median/average system.
Knock off the high and low outliers (by an equal amount on each end) then average the rest. That would give you some sense of what their typical rush looks like.
The NFL and the stats bureaus to my knowledge don't track runs to anything more specific than full yard.
Don't take this the wrong way, but you are wrong. You say why in your post, big runs, these make the mean useless.
Median is the right way to look at this data as it is a non-normal distribution. Mean is only telling when there are no outliers. Because RB's bust off 50+ yard runs, outliers, it skews the mean to the high side, when in reality the majority of their carries could be more in the 2 YPC range. If you had looked at the median, you would see this, if you look at the mean you would set higher expectations than you should.
All of this being said, my gut tells me it's highly likely that there isn't a huge gap between the two ways to look at it. It won't give you decimals with median, but you could use this data to form clear tiers.
I didn't say mean was useful, I said median was not useful. Because with the way the data works out, it's not. For almost any RB, the median yards per carry is 3. Source (last paragraph). I've edited my post to make it more clear.
In the end all that matters is the total yards. Chris Johnson comes to mind as someone who fits this mold. He'll have like 15 carries for 35 yards, then break off a 60 yard TD run. All we care about is that he ended with 95yds and a TD. I could care less how many shitty runs he had as long as he ends the day with a decent total.
Median YPC + touches per game gives you a good idea of a players floor however. Now that we're getting into the bye weeks it can help you choose between a high ceiling/low floor vs low ceiling/low floor type player. For example, if you're choosing between Melvin Gordon or Alfred Morris. If your opponent has a lot of guys on bye and is playing a lot of high variance players while you have most of your starters, you likely want to minimize the variance in your Flex position so you'd pick Morris.
Spiller and Hillman from last week both fit into this description. Their YPC is way too high for how they actually performed and 70+ yard runs are so far from reliable, unlike runs like those of Chris Johnson or Todd Gurley
I would also rather see median points per game for the current season on the league website interface. That is far more useful to me than average points per game.