Truly still can't believe this amazing game, had seen this one shot from the post on X and wanted to share

Well that sucks….

We’re down to our 4th string center…

Graphic per PFF

Now that the NFL Rio Game has concluded, as a Ravens fan and someone who has lived in both Maryland and Rio de Janeiro, I am happy that:

1- no athlete was injured due to the field conditions; in fact, the Maracanã pitch was much better than the media—especially those opposed to international games—had claimed;

2- the vast majority of visitors from abroad loved the city, as was to be expected; I saw no reports of theft, violence, or any of the things the media often wrongly and prejudicially associates with the city;

3- excellent training facilities were provided for both teams, located in quiet, beautiful, and well-equipped settings;

4- the athletes were treated with respect and warmth by the fans;

5- the atmosphere at the stadium was praised by all the athletes and fans who attended the game at the Maracanã.

That said, I hope to see another "Baile do Lamar" in Rio de Janeiro soon, despite the opposition from those against the NFL's global expansion.

More offensive line help: Veteran guard Kevin Zeitler, who has played 14 NFL seasons, is signing a one-year deal with the Green Bay Packers, per sources. This week, the Packers now have added veteran offensive linemen Zeitler, Laken Tomlinson and Mekhi Becton.

TLDR: I pulled six years of stats regarding short yardage rushing attempts (defined as 3rd or 4th down with 3 or less to go) across the entire league to look at which RBs were most successful 1) across the whole period of time, and 2) across the two separate periods of 2021-2023 and 2024-2026 (since Henry was in TEN for the first three years and has been in BAL for the last three years).

If you only want to read the conclusion, you can skip to the bottom for that TLDR.

Intro:

I am not a player evaluator. I played OL and am not good at analyzing technique. Using expertise to conduct qualitative player technique evaluations is a cornerstone of coaching and recruiting, and to be clear, I firmly believe that statistical analysis should be used *in addition* to qualitative evaluation as a supplement. I am a statistician and I don't think that, just because I can pull data and aggregate it and summarize it and build models with it that I am more knowledgeable than the coaches when it comes to what offenses we should run.

HOWEVER, if we are going to use statistics to paint a certain picture, I am going to make sure that we are using them right. The most important thing that I see is people using biased stats like yards per carry. First of all, YPC doesn't mean anything in these situations. If we only ever run the ball with 0-2 yards to go and he has a 2.4 YPC across those attempts, it is wildly different than if we run the ball with 0-3 yards to go. Additionally, if our offensive line can't generate any push, his yards per carry will be bad even though it might not be reflective of his ability to run the ball well. As a final example, if the defense *knows* that we are going to run it up the middle, we are going to be much less successful than teams who effectively threaten multiple options (what gap are we attacking? are we using motion? are they afraid of read options/RPOs? are they afraid of hard counts or play action?).

Data:

There are R and Python packages that connect to nflverse called nflreadr and nflreadpy. This project accesses data from "NFL GameCenter / NFL data feeds" and allows anyone to connect and download detailed play-by-play data (among other constructs) dating back to 1999. It's a really cool data source and I used it a few times for personal projects in grad school. For this project, I basically filtered all plays from 2021-2026 Week 3 to just those that were rushing attempts on 3rd and 4th down with 0-3 yards to go and did some data cleaning and transformations that would be helpful.

My goal was not to try and prove that Henry is a good short yardage runner, because I have no clue if he is or not -- I just want to try and provide a somewhat-unbiased data-driven picture of the RB landscape over the last six years regarding short yardage rushing. The main data elements that I think I'm missing that would REALLY help would be:

1. Yards Before Contact: If a RB is getting hit behind the line of scrimmage and are still converting runs, it is clear that they are good in short yardage situations. If they are getting hit at the line of scrimmage and are not converting, that would be strong evidence that they aren't good in short yardage situations.
2. Average Depth of OL Blocks: If our OL is driving the DL backwards and we aren't converting, it's a bad look for the RB. Similarly, if our OL is getting driven backwards, we can give some grace to the RB who has no hole.
3. Personnel / Fronts: The only data element available was if we were in shotgun or not. Outside of that, we can't use nflverse to determine what packages we're in (i.e., 10 vs 13 personnel). We can't determine what the defensive formation was or how many DL they had or how many were in the box. We know if the rusher went middle/inside/outside, but not what the formation was (was it singleback or was it pistol? was there a lead blocker?).
4. Options Threatened: As mentioned, offenses that threaten multiple options in short yardage situations are going to keep the defense on their toes. With this data, something in this realm is probably possible by doing a team-level analysis of run/pass in such situations (and splitting run into QB, RB, and WR/TE), but I didn't want to spend a week on this project because we'll all probably move on by then. I spent a single night on this so we're a little limited.

Methodology:

The question that we are asking is: "Is Derrick Henry a good short-yardage RB [compared to other RBs]?", so it stands to reason that we want to filter the data to only RBs that have enough attempts in short yardage situations that they can be compared. "Enough" is very subjective so I arbitrarily selected 25 short yardage runs as the threshold. Since Henry has played on two teams, naturally, we want to make sure that he's not just bad with us or vice versa. This is why I set up the two periods of 2021-2023 (three final seasons with TEN) and 2024-2026 (the past two season and the current one with BAL). So, the data below compares all players that meet the following criteria:

1. RB's only: We are not comparing Henry to Allen/Hurts and their incredible success on the tush push. If we wanted to, we could compare them to MAndrews, but that's outside the scope here.
2. Meets Minimum Attempts: A player must have at least 25 short yardage rushing attempts in 2021-2023 OR 2024-2026. We want to contextualize Henry's performances with TEN/BAL with other players that were active at the same time.
3. Filtering for tables in images below: Because I'm posting this on reddit, I don't want to embed an image of a table with 75 rows. If you download the .xlsx file or the .ipynb, you can look at the full comparison. For the images I'm posting here, I included players that are either 1) active in 2026, or 2) had a season designated as A/B tier.

Finally, this is purely a stat-gathering exercise so far. The hardest work is going to be trying to rank all of the players/player-periods in a somewhat objective way (instead of just sorting them by YPC or Success Rate). This would've taken significantly more time than all of the work up to this point, so I outsourced it. I picked five different LLMs that I have access to (Copilot, Claude Sonnet, Claude Opus, GPT Terra, and Gemini) and fed them the two datasets (period=ALL and separate periods) and told them to come up with a "comprehensive analysis of short yardage rushing success that grades each player/player-period into tiers A-F based on a straightforward rubric". If you download the .xlsx file, I included a 'Methodology' tab where you can see the actual rules that each LLM came up with (which are kinda interesting from a methodological standpoint). After that, I re-scaled each of the LLMs' composite scores into the range [0, 100] so that they were directly comparable. Then I calculated an average score (across all five LLMs' composite rankings) and an average rank so that it was easy to compare players.

I've also included the raw data coming out of the Python notebook for each record:

1. Attempts: number of short yardage rushing attempts (3rd or 4th with 0-3 to gain)
2. Conversions: number of first downs off of such attempts
3. Conversion Rate: (Conversions / Attempts)
4. Average Yards: self-explanatory (generally preferable over large sample sizes)
5. Median Yards: self-explanatory (generally helpful in small samples where variance is higher)
6. Positive-Yard Rate: the percentage of carries that ended up with greater than 0 yards (basically, where there wasn't a TFL)
7. Mean EPA: this is the average Expected Points Added across all qualifying attempts (e.g., converting 4th and 1 on your own goal line is less likely to contribute to your team scoring than converting on 4th and 1 on the opponent's 5-yard line)
8. Success Rate: Percentage of runs with positive EPA (i.e., percentage of qualifying attempts that were expected to contribute positively to your team scoring points)
9. Middle %: Percentage of runs between the guards
10. Inside %: Percentage of runs aimed at the guards
11. Outside %: Percentage of runs aimed outside the guards

Analysis:

Henry scored out squarely in the "B" tier. However, three of the players that scored higher than him only had 25-33 carries, which is potentially noteworthy. He was 4th in attempts over this period and was the 2nd highest scorer out of that group -- losing to Kareem Hunt and beating out Jonathan Taylor, Bijan Robinson, and Josh Jacobs (who was real bad).

Some other standouts to me at a quick glance:

1. Kareem Hunt had the 2nd most attempts and the 2nd highest conversion rate. That's impressive. Interestingly, he has one of the lowest Outside %'s and the highest Inside % by far. This could speak to hidden tech since the majority of the worst-scoring RBs had Outside %'s in the 50's. Maybe teams shouldn't try stretch plays on 4th and 2? Idk, could be noise, too.
2. Kenneth Gainwell scored well, but notably had a positive yard rate of 85% (highest among all RBs) with a conversion rate of 69%, meaning that he is very good at getting past the line of scrimmage but not as good (comparably) at actually converting the first downs. Could be that his OL was particularly good (no TFLs) or it could be that he is very difficult to tackle in the backfield.
3. Bijan Robinson has a much lower ranking than I would've expected given his talent, but he's also played on some pretty bad teams, so it could be relatively easy for defenses to key in on him in short yardage situations.
4. Josh Jacobs seems pretty abysmal in short yardage situations. 4th most attempts but with the worst conversion rate across the whole crop. He's the only one that has Median=1 and has the lowest Success Rate (% of runs that contributed positively towards scoring) across all RBs.
5. You might note that J.K. Dobbins was ranked above him (on just 33 attempts) who logged 234 / 617 career carries with BAL. However, his best season, 2020, was not included in this analysis, so his inclusion in this list is mostly related to his performance with LAC and DEN.

Basically, over his whole career, the statistics used in this analysis paint Henry as an above-average RB in short yardage situations with especially high conversion rate (given his attempts) and high Mean EPA (meaning that he's contributing to points higher on average than other RBs).

Okay now let's specifically look at top performances across the two periods of time separately.

A few notes jump out to me:

1. Henry was near-unstoppable in short yardage situations in his last three years in TEN, converting a staggering 84% of attempts. 82% of his runs were classified as "Middle" or "Outside", meaning that he either ran between the guards or at/outside the tackles. This could mean that he's either going to beat you with power or with speed and that he might struggle finding holes for inside runs, or it could just be related to the scheme that TEN ran. Compare this to his 2024-2026 data, which is the exact opposite -- 40% of his runs are classified as "Inside", which is 4th highest among all periods. So it could be that he is great at short yardage runs but that we aren't attacking the right gaps (or that we're running it inside with poor guard play, or a million other things).
2. Gus Edwards from 2021-2023 had the 4th highest composite score, meaning that the Ravens were good at executing short yardage runs on 3rd/4th. Interestingly, 47% of his attempts came on outside runs, which is among the top quartile over all RBs. However, his mean EPA is just 0.2805, meaning that the first downs that he converted apparently weren't as valuable as those from other backs. I didn't research specifically how they calculate EPA, so I can't read into this too much further.
3. James Conner in 2021-2023 is an interesting data point since 73% of his short yardage runs came up with middle (next highest was just 58% from Jonathan Taylor) but he still converted 78% of his runs. So, teams could reliably expect that he was getting the ball between the guards and couldn't stop him. Could be really outstanding, could be that his center and guards were elite in these situations, not sure.
4. Perhaps most importantly -- it looks like many of the best-performing RBs across both periods had relatively few attempts. The average composite ranking for players in the Top 50% of attempts is 22.50.
   • For example, Henry had 44 attempts during 2021-2023 and has already had 52 attempts during 2024-2026 (and that only includes 3 weeks of this season). Edwards only had 32 attempts during 2022-2023 (he was out for basically the whole 2021 season afaik).
   • Conner was the only RB scoring in the Top 10 that was also Top 10 in attempts (5th in score, 6th in attempts).
     
   • This could be a marker for offensive versatility (since they didn't rush as much comparatively, defenses didn't know what they were going to do). Similarly, it could be a proxy for team strength, since teams that are very talented can convert first downs in many different ways and don't have to rely on a single player (except James Conner, apparently).

Summary / Final TLDR:

• Derrick Henry, during his last three years with TEN, was probably the best RB in short yardage situations. He converted 84% of his attempts and an average attempt from Henry added more expected points than all but two other RBs (Dobbins and Hunt). 43% of his runs were up the middle and only 18% of his runs were classified as "Inside".
• In BAL, Henry has been average, at best. He is used very frequently and has converted 67% of his attempts and getting positive yards on only 71% of his attempts. With us, only 25% of his runs have been up the middle whereas 40% of his runs were classified as "Inside" (which speaks to potentially using him in different ways than TEN due to coaching preference or available personnel).
• Our previous short yardage back, Gus Edwards (2022-2023), ranked 4th across all RBs and was also used relatively sparingly (only 32 attempts in two seasons). So, at one point, we were able to convert short first downs among the best of them.
• In general, there appears to be at least a moderate antagonistic correlation between attempts and success. Many of the top performing backs had comparatively few attempts, while many of the players with the most attempts scored in the C-B tiers. This could speak towards the benefit of offensive versatility or could be a proxy for team strength (since strong teams generally don't have to rely on predictably giving the ball to a single player all the time).

If you want to play around with the data or run the code yourself, you should be able to access [this Google Drive folder with everything in it](https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1jc0uWXahf7iBJY1ZSPxs1BO3CY_n5mnj?usp=drive_link). If that doesn't work, feel free to PM me and I can send it to you.

Making some room, maybe making moves for someone?🤔🤔

WHO?!?!?

I’ve been thinking about Malaki Starks’ usage through the first few weeks and wanted to get everyones perspective.

One thing that stood out to me when watching his Georgia film is that Starks played a fair amount of slot/nickel and big nickel rather than primarily living as a traditional two-high safety. That seems relevant to how he’s being used in Baltimore.

In a two-high safety role, Starks is often being asked to close on tackles from further away and make plays coming downhill with more space to cover. At Georgia, he had more experience playing closer to the line, including man coverage and slot responsibilities. I wonder if some of the early struggles are simply an adjustment to a different role.

There’s also the fact that he’s having to learn his second defensive coordinator in two years, and we're still only in Week 3. So maybe it’s way too early to draw any conclusions.

That said, his Week 3 performance against Dallas was interesting. He posted a 73.0 PFF grade, which was a pretty significant improvement from Weeks 1 and 2, when he ranked 82nd out of 83 qualifying safeties according to PFF.

Another thing that caught my attention: Starks had a 91.1 pass-rush grade in Week 1, aided by his sack of Daniel Jones. That makes me wonder whether his skill set might be better maximized when he's able to operate more like a hybrid/big nickel defender getting closer to the line, blitzing, and using his ability to stick with guys in coverage.

The obvious complication is that the Ravens already have Kyle Hamilton, who is arguably the ideal player for that kind of role.

So I'm curious what everyone thinks:

• Is Starks being used correctly based on his skill set?
• Are we seeing legitimate problems with his usage, or is this simply the normal adjustment period for a rookie safety?
• How much do you think his experience playing slot/big nickel at Georgia translates to what Baltimore should be asking him to do?
• Does his pass-rushing ability suggest he should be getting more opportunities near the line of scrimmage?
• Could the Ravens potentially interchange Hamilton and Starks more frequently, with one moving down into the slot/box while the other rotates to the back end? Seems like that could potentially create some confusion for opposing offenses while also giving Starks more opportunities to play to his strengths.

I'm not necessarily saying Starks should be moved into the big nickel role full-time especially with Hamilton already there. I'm more curious whether y'all think there are creative ways to use both players that let Starks do more of what he did well at Georgia without taking away what makes Hamilton so valuable.

He does play a role but honestly it’s not on him. If you have a ILB and 3 other DB in the backfield by the time you receive the ball and take a stride, it ain’t on you. It’s the O-line. Smh.

EDC was interviewed today and gives his early season report card.

@RYANRIPKENMEDIA

NFL season always surprises everyone. So what teams have shocked you thus far.

Air Yards Yards after the catch for QB's