NFL

The 20 Best Offensive Players From Week 9

Was Mike Evans' 180-yard game the best performance of the week?

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 value 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.

Here are Week 9's results:

Player Position Passing
NEP
Rushing
NEP
Reception
NEP
Rating
Mike EvansWR17.53100
Christian McCaffreyRB5.095.2299
Kenyan DrakeRB6.413.6999
Tyler LockettWR14.3698
Marvin JonesWR14.2598
Tyreek HillWR0.3913.5498
Melvin GordonRB5.972.8398
Zach ErtzTE13.5397
Jimmy GaroppoloQB24.75-0.3397
Russell WilsonQB20.951.0596
Kenny GolladayWR12.1894
Emmanuel SandersWR11.7292
Derrick HenryRB2.613.8392
Damien WilliamsRB6.72-0.4991
D.J. MooreWR11.1990
Deshaun WatsonQB11.704.7590
D.K. MetcalfWR0.3710.7289
James WhiteRB1.803.5387
Lamar JacksonQB12.704.3887
Devin SingletaryRB3.481.7386


- Mike Evans balled out again this week, turning 16 targets into 12 catches, 180 yards, and a touchdown. That led to a boost of 17.53 expected points for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers' offense in a shootout against the Seattle Seahawks.

- Christian McCaffrey had another silly outing with 146 rushing yards and 2 touchdowns on 24 attempts. He scored another touchdown on one of his three targets. He now has 1,244 scrimmage yards and 13 touchdowns.

- Kenyan Drake debuted well with the Arizona Cardinals on Thursday night, generating 162 total yards on 19 touches -- plus a touchdown. Drake played 84% of the team's snaps and could be a workhorse if David Johnson misses time.

- Tyler Lockett showed what he could do with extra targets in that high-scoring game between Tampa Bay and Seattle. His 18 looks led to 152 yards and a pair of scores from Russell Wilson, who ranked 10th this week on our list of performances.

- Marvin Jones bounced back after a down week and went over 100 yards (126 on 10 targets) and scored, though the Detroit Lions lost in Oakland. Kenny Golladay also made the top 20, coming in at 11th. He had 132 yards and a touchdown but didn't make quite the expected points impact that Jones did.