Massey: Offensive lines drive rushing production, leaving little individual running back variance
Cade Massey · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · Apr 19, 2021 · at 52:31
Wharton professor Cade Massey explains why NFL front offices devalue running backs, citing tracking data showing offensive line blocking drives most rushing output.
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“The most important thing is that we've come to appreciate how dependent their performance is on other components, and especially the offensive line. And the simplest way to think about it is you shouldn't think about a rushing yard as being, you know, attributed to a running back. It's an offensive line and running back accomplishment. And we've just never done that before. We've always thought about it as the running back. And it's become very apparent, and especially, again, this is something that motion tracking has helped us understand how extraordinarily influential the offensive line is in the running backs production. And so it leads us to do things like partition a run between pre-contact and after-contact. And so you can start parceling out the individual contribution of the running back, and what we find is that there's just not that much variation in the part that the running back brings. It's not zero, but it's not as much as fame and celebrity and compensation would suggest.”
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