Win Yards: Why Josh Jacobs is Underrated

It can be difficult to separate the quality of a running back from the quality of his offensive line, and offense as a whole. A great line can open a hole large enough for a Mack truck to drive through. A strong passing attack can flush defenders out of the box, leading to more open room for backs to run through. Our advanced stats do a number of different things to try to break that out, both in terms of DVOA and DYAR and with things like adjusted line yards, where we attempt to divide responsibility for rushing value between the ballcarrier and the line. It can be difficult, though, which is one reason we often reiterate our DYAR disclaimer that when we say, “In 2024, Derrick Henry has a rushing DVOA of 24.5%,” what we really are saying is, “In 2024, Derrick Henry, playing in Todd Monken’s offensive system with the Baltimore offensive line blocking for him and Lamar Jackson selling the fake when necessary, had a DVOA of 24.5%.” Football – it’s complicated!

One interesting way to try to break running back value down is to see how running backs perform when the space given to them by their teammates vanishes, and they have to make a play themselves.

You can do this is by using yards after contact – how far do you keep going when a defender finally gets their hands on you? The ability of, say, a Tank Bigsby to run through an arm tackle (4.2 yards after contact per rush!) jumps off the screen at you more than Alexander Mattison’s attempts (1.8). It’s not perfect, as it’s easier to run through someone when your blockers give you enough time to pick up a head of steam, but it does help separate those backs who are earning their own yards from those who are just picking up what the defense gives them.

There is a problem with just using yards after contact, though. What happens if you’re running so well that no one can lay a finger on you? This is the classic Barry Sanders problem – his best runs wouldn’t give him any yards after contact, because he could break your ankles before you got within two feet of him. Avoiding tackles is just as valuable as running through them, and yards after contact misses those.

Our charters here at FTN combine broken tackles and non-contact forced missed tackles into an avoided tackle stat. We also then track “win yards,” combining yards after contact and yards after those non-contact missed tackles. Every yard a running back gains after a defender has a legitimate chance to bring them down goes into win yards, which makes it useful to separate which backs are generating offense on their own, and which are just running into the holes opened for them.

Using the FTN Fantasy StatsHub, you can check the leaders in win yards (or any of our other multitude of stats!) at any time, but let’s check in on the win yard leaders as we reach the halfway point of the season. These stats are complete through Week 9, but do not yet include the Steelers-Bengals TNF game.

The number that jumps out first and foremost here belongs to James Conner – 49 avoided tackles, 10 more than anyone else in the league. Yes, Arizona hasn’t had the bye yet, but that’s still a massive outlier over the rest of the league. Conner has avoided a tackle on 33.3% of his rush attempts; only Zach Charbonnet (34.4%) is doing that at a higher rate, and he only has about 40% of Conner’s carries.

Conner and Charbonnet have to avoid tackles to be successful, because they’re both near the bottom of the league in yards before contact–Charbonnet at 0.9, Conner at 1.1. That’s not surprising for Seattle; they’re 28th in adjusted rush yards and 29th in ESPN’s run block win rate, so this is just another indicator that their line is primarily made out of Swiss cheese. Charbonnet and Kenneth Walker are doing everything they can just to survive out there. But Arizona? Thirteenth in adjusted line yards, ninth in run block win rate, and yet Conner is still having to dodge tacklers early and often. There’s a disconnect here between these offensive line stats and Conner’s contact stats that’s hard to really chase down. Watching the film, my best argument for what’s going on is that Conner is running himself into trouble more often than other top running backs … but just as quickly running himself out of it. Whereas other backs do a better job than Conner at finding holes and accelerating through them, Conner seems to almost invite contact, knowing that he can bully his way through most defenders and hit the jets. It remains to be seen if he can keep this pace up. It’s a lot of contact to be taking on and the Cardinals don’t appear to be particularly interested in using a change-of-pace back behind him. For now, though, it creates an impressive highlight reel.

Derrick Henry and Saquon Barkley being in the top three in win yards is no surprise. They’re two of our three top players in rushing DYAR, after all. Barkley has more win yards but fewer avoided tackles because he has been the slightly more explosive back this season; 14.6% of his runs are of 10 yards or more, which ranks eighth in the league, and his 3.8% juke rate ranks fifth. He’s more likely to cut around (or over!) you five yards downfield than he is to run through you at the line. Henry remains arguably the league’s top bulldozer, though he’s also been significantly helped by his move to Baltimore. In 2024, Henry has the luxury of 3.3 yards before contact, second most in the league. In 2023, that was just 1.8. His avoided tackle rate has mostly stayed the same (it’s down from 19.6% to 19.0%), but he’s making contact with defenders a full yard and a half further downfield and doing it with a larger head of steam. Trying to tackle Henry seems like one of the worst experiences a human being can have at any time; doing it when he’s running at you as fast as he can is a nightmare – though we’ll put a pin in him for a moment and come back.

Josh Jacobs, too, moved teams this offseason, but he hasn’t had the same kind of benefits that Henry has enjoyed. Green Bay’s only giving him 1.4 yards before contact, the same as he had in Las Vegas a year ago. But Jacobs’ avoided tackle rate has shot through the roof (12.0% to 24.7%), closer to where he was in 2022 and earlier. In this case, it isn’t the change in offensive line that’s helping, as the Packers’ line is a bit of a dodgy run blocking unit to begin with. It may just be the change in environment; Jacobs has spoken about how frustrating it was being on a Raiders team without stability and with a sizeable history of losing. Being on a contender seems to have put the spring back into Jacobs’ step, even if a whopping 75% of his rushing yards have been win yards this season, eighth-most among qualified running backs. Only Najee Harris and Tank Bigsby have a higher percentage of their yards come as win yards among backs with at least 500 yards this season, as they do yeoman’s work behind inefficient blocking schemes.

Henry actually has the second-lowest percentage of his rushing yards being win yards at just 52.3%, which is interesting. Most of the bottom of that list are runners who aren’t getting much of any push of their own – the Jaleel McLaughlins and Rico Dowdles of the world who have spent most of the year getting precisely what has been blocked for them and nothing else. However, there are backs near the bottom of that list who stand out – Barkley, in 12th, Henry, in second, and Jahmyr Gibbs at the very end, the only running back in football this season who has more than 50% of rushing yards come before an avoided tackle.

You can see from that list how some successful running backs really have their offensive lines to thank. James Cook is fifth in rushing DYAR but 35th in win yards; he’s getting a huge chunk of his yardage from successful inside zone rushing that has popped up massive running lanes for him to run through. You also have situations like Denver, where neither Jaleel McLaughlin nor Javonte Williams are precisely setting the world on fire as they run, and their line hasn’t done a great job opening gaps for them, either.

But then you have Barkley, Henry and especially Gibbs, who are pairing fantastic run blocking with strong running, and have ended up 1-2-3 in our DYAR rankings. The trio also are the top three in yards before contact, which is not a coincidence – generating free, unblocked yards is the best way for an offense to have rushing value. The crux of the “Running Backs Don’t Matter” idea-stroke-meme is that when you give any running back the lanes that Detroit, Baltimore or Philadelphia are opening, you can have success, and thus you don’t need to pay for a superstar to take advantage of them.

But man, is it nice to have that superstar if you can fit it into the budget. Baltimore was first in yards before contact last year as well, but Gus Edwards isn’t the same kind of force with the ball in his hands that Derrick Henry is. Henry averages over half a yard more after contact than Edwards did a year ago and avoids tackles at a significantly higher rate. Is that worth the tick up from an 18.4% team rushing DVOA to a 19.7%? Maybe, maybe not. But it’s certainly fun to watch.