Lions fans know very well how good the running game has been all season. D’Andre Swift and Jamaal Williams are both having strong starts to the season in coordinator Ben Johnson’s offense.
Now we have some impressive visualization of just how awesome the top two RBs have been for Detroit.
The graph below, compiled by Ben Baldwin, combines the expected yards per carry based on the play design and the defense it’s going against, as determined by NextGen Stats. The Y-axis is the actual yards per carry the RBs are getting with their carries. The farther up and right a player sits on the graph, the better.
And there’s Swift on an island all by himself in the upper righthand corner!
Williams is the big blue dot at the 4.5 actual yards per carry line by Kareem Hunt and Breece Hall. He doesn’t have a gaudy excess of rushing yards over expectation, but Williams is nicely above the sliding bar that denotes success. Note that most of the runners of Williams’ inside style (examples include Leonard Fournette, Ezekiel Elliott, Mark Ingram) tend to sit pretty close to the expected yards per carry line. Williams averaging 4.5 YPC when expectations say he should gain just 3.7 is a nice recognition of how consistently effective Williams has performed in the first four weeks.
Note that Swift has an extremely high expected YPC figure. That’s a testament to the Lions’ offensive line and blocking of the TEs and WRs.
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