The 10 Best Offensive Players From the Super Bowl
With football, we love our Net Expected Points (NEP) metric, which measures the number of points a player adds (or loses) to his team versus what he's expected to add. Rather than counting statistics like yards, touchdowns and receptions, NEP looks at down-and-distance situations and field position and relates these instances to history. When a player outperforms what's happened in the past, he sees a positive expected points value on the play. When he doesn't, his expected points gained on the play is negative. All of these little instances add up, then, to be a player's Net Expected Points total.
You can read more about NEP in our glossary.
Using a formula that compares individual single-game performance to history, the numberFire Live platform takes this Net Expected Points formula and assigns a rating to a player's performance. Each week, that's what we'll show here -- the 10 best ratings from the prior weekend of football.
Here are the results from the Super Bowl:
| Player | Position | Rating |
|---|---|---|
| Tom Brady | QB | 99 |
| Nick Foles | QB | 98 |
| Danny Amendola | WR | 97 |
| Rob Gronkowski | TE | 96 |
| Zach Ertz | TE | 89 |
| Chris Hogan | WR | 83 |
| James White | RB | 80 |
| Jay Ajayi | RB | 67 |
| LeGarrette Blount | RB | 66 |
| Alshon Jeffery | WR | 64 |
- So, according to our performance ratings, Tom Brady was the game's most outstanding player. He threw for 505 yards and 3 touchdowns on 48 attempts, earning 26.52 Passing Net Expected Points in the process. On passes traveling at least 16 yards downfield, Brady was 8 of 14 for 228 yards and a touchdown. More than half of his drop backs increased expected scoring (53.06%); however, the costly sack and fumble late in the game lost the New England Patriots 4.85 expected points.
- By comparison, Nick Foles threw for 373 yards and 3 scores (plus an interception) on 43 attempts. He generated 22.40 Passing NEP, including a 55.81% Success Rate. On deep throws, Foles went 5 of 9 for 117 yards, 2 touchdowns, and 1 interception.
- Danny Amendola led the game with 15.00 Reception NEP, thanks to 8 catches on 11 targets for 152 yards. Despite not scoring a touchdown, no player made a bigger impact with his receptions, according to our analytics.
- Rob Gronkowski's 2-touchdown game generated 12.99 Reception NEP for the Pats. In all, he had 116 yards on 9 catches (15 targets) against the Philadelphia Eagles on Sunday night.
- Zach Ertz caught 7 of his 9 targets for 67 yards and the game-winning touchdown. That production led to 11.00 Reception NEP for the eventual Super Bowl champions.
