NFL

The 10 Best Offensive Players From the Divisional Round

Stefon Diggs caught the game-winning touchdown to get the Vikings to advance. Was he the weekend's best offensive player?

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 10 best ratings from the prior weekend of football.

Here are the results from the divisional round:

PlayerPositionRating
Stefon DiggsWR98
Antonio BrownWR98
Ben RoethlisbergerQB97
Tom BradyQB95
Danny AmendolaWR94
Corey DavisWR94
Alvin KamaraRB93
Leonard FournetteRB90
Vance McDonaldTE90
Tevin ColemanRB86


- Stefon Diggs did a lot of his damage on a 61-yard, game-winning, walk-off touchdown, but at the end of the day, he wound up with 137 yards on 6 catches, with that touchdown. He added 14.58 expected points via his catches and nearly broke the win probability graph on numberFire Live in the Minnesota Vikings' last-second win over the New Orleans Saints.

- Antonio Brown racked up a performance score of 98 on a huge stat line against the league's best pass defense in the Jacksonville Jaguars. Brown's 11 targets yielded 7 catches for 132 yards and 2 scores. That resulted in a Reception NEP of 14.01, the highest mark against Jacksonville this season. In Week 5, Brown recorded 13.02 Reception NEP against them, the second-highest single-game score against the Jags. Third place? Vance McDonald, with 11.11 this weekend.

- Ben Roethlisberger tallied up 19.08 Passing NEP on the Jaguars (a huge improvement from a -14.80 score in the regular season). Roethlisberger's score is one of two Passing NEP scores better than 3.45 against the Jaguars this season (Jimmy Garoppolo posted a 14.30 in Week 16).

- Tom Brady actually led the week in Passing NEP at 20.05, thanks to 337 yards and 3 scores on 53 attempts against the Tennessee Titans. Danny Amendola was responsible for 11 of the catches, 13 of the targets, and 112 of the yards. He earned 12.39 Reception NEP.

- Opposite the New England Patriots' offensive onslaught was Corey Davis, who turned 8 targets into 5 catches, 63 yards, and 2 touchdowns. That led to 12.12 Reception NEP.