NFL

The 20 Best Offensive Players From Week 14

Le'Veon Bell's performance was pretty flawless. Did anyone come close to matching his big game?

Week 14 games aren't over yet, so maybe the title of this article is a little misleading. It should read something like The 20 Best Offensive Players From the Thursday and Sunday Games in Week 14.

That just doesn't flow all that well.

As you know, we like math here at numberFire. Our algorithms help tell a better story about sports -- they're able to dig through the nonsense, helping us look at things that matter on the court, field or rink.

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 20 best ratings from the Thursday and Sunday games.

Here are Week 14's results:

PlayerPositionRating
Le'Veon BellRB100
Bilal PowellRB97
Carlos HydeRB97
Demaryius ThomasWR96
Odell BeckhamWR88
Isaiah CrowellRB88
Latavius MurrayRB88
Zach ErtzTE87
Sam BradfordQB86
LeSean McCoyRB84
Robby AndersonWR84
Tevin ColemanRB83
Matt RyanQB83
Carson WentzQB82
DeMarco MurrayRB82
Lamar MillerRB81
Aaron RodgersQB81
T.Y. HiltonWR81
Kenny StillsWR80
Jeremy HillRB80


- So, Le'Veon Bell's 298-yard day was the best performance of Week 14. That's not a surprise. He ran the ball 38 times for 236 yards and 3 touchdowns and added 62 yards on 4 catches. That earned him the only 100 rating of the week so far. He accounted for 11.30 Rushing NEP -- only three players topped 5.44.

- You may not have enjoyed the San Francisco 49ers-New York Jets game much, but it did boast some great running back performances, based on NEP. Bilal Powell rushed 29 times for 145 yards and 2 touchdowns (8.18 Rushing NEP), and Carlos Hyde ran 17 times for 193 yards (6.44 Rushing NEP). Powell chipped in 5 catches for 34 yards, and Hyde caught his only target for a 7-yard touchdown.

- The best non-running back performance belonged to Demaryius Thomas, per our rating system. He earned a 96 after hauling in 10 of 16 targets for 126 yards. He didn't find the end zone, but he did generate nearly 13 points in expected scoring with his receptions (12.96 to be exact).

- There was a big gap between the rest of the field by our rating system. Odell Beckham racked up 10.83 Reception NEP after catching 4 of 9 targets for 94 yards and a score. Zach Ertz caught 10 of 13 targets for 112 yards (10.59 Reception NEP).

- Latavius Murray and Isaiah Crowell topped 100 yards each. Murray ran 22 times for 103 yards and a touchdown on Thursday Night Football (5.44 Rushing NEP), and Crowell turned just 10 carries in to 113 yards but no scores (5.42 Rushing NEP).