When healthy, Redskins’ Derrius Guice was No. 1 most elusive RB in NFL

The best ability is availability, but considering what Derrius Guice could do during his brief action in 2019, his future is bright.

One of the biggest knocks on Washington Redskins running back Derrius Guice has been his ability to stay healthy. During his two full seasons in the NFL, he’s played in just five games, missing his entire rookie year with a torn ACL, and being sent to the IR twice in 2019 for multiple knee injuries.

When he’s been on the field, however, Guice is nothing but electric. In his five games with the Redskins, he has a total of three touchdowns and 324 total yards on just 49 touches. Though it is a small sample size, those are impressive numbers.

Pro Football Focus would agree. In a recent Stat Spotlight that they did, tracking the elusiveness rating for every RB in the NFL, Guice doesn’t make the list simply because of his minimal number of reps. However, if you were to change the qualifier from 100 carries to 20 carries, Guice jumps up to the No. 1 overall spot.

Don’t know what we’re talking about when we say discuss the elusiveness rating? It simply measures a back’s forced missed tackles and yards after contact.

When you look at the 2019 season as a whole, Dallas Cowboys rookie Tony Pollard (116.1), and Oakland Raiders rookie Josh Jacobs (103.6) were near the top of the list, and Tennessee Titans’ Derrick Henry was not far behind. But from weeks 11-13, when Guice was healthy and getting a decent workload, his rating, 175.3, was higher than anyone this season.

The low number of attempts skews the statistics a little bit, and if you want to believe that with more of a sample size Guice would have fallen off quite a bit, go ahead. But if you watched Guice when he was on the field, and you saw what he could do with the football when given a chance, you know that the Redskins have something special, should he be able to stay healthy. This PFF stat proves exactly that.

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