NFL

The 20 Best Offensive Players From Week 12

Who were Week 12's most impactful offensive players, according to our algorithm?

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 12's results:

Player Position Passing
NEP
Rushing
NEP
Reception
NEP
Rating
Chris Godwin WR 17.30 100
D.J. Moore WR 0.49 15.79 100
Jarvis Landry WR 14.50 98
Nick Chubb RB 4.66 3.79 97
Sam Darnold QB 18.15 1.69 93
Allen Robinson WR 11.43 91
Leonard Fournette RB 3.50 2.61 91
Will Fuller WR 11.11 90
Ryan Tannehill QB 13.48 5.85 89
DeAndre Hopkins WR 10.91 89
A.J. Brown WR 10.84 88
Jameis Winston QB 16.33 2.38 88
Latavius Murray RB 5.50 88
Drew Brees QB 14.84 87
Rashaad Penny RB 5.13 86
Derrick Henry RB 4.34 0.75 86
Baker Mayfield QB 16.66 -2.64 85
Calvin Ridley WR 0.96 9.20 84
Kyle Allen QB 11.67 0.73 81
Christian McCaffrey RB -2.78 6.82 79


- Chris Godwin picked apart the Atlanta Falcons on Sunday, generating 184 yards and 2 touchdowns on 8 targets, good for 17.30 Reception NEP, the 10th-highest Reception NEP output of any player all season.

- D.J. Moore earned 126 yards and 2 touchdowns on 9 targets in a narrow loss to the New Orleans Saints. In five post-bye games, Moore has the third-most air yards per game, behind only Mike Evans and Tyreek Hill, according to FantasyADHD.

- The Cleveland Browns did what they needed to do against the Miami Dolphins, and Jarvis Landry and Nick Chubb were key reasons for it. Landry turned 13 targets into 10 catches, 148 yards, and 2 touchdowns against his former team. Chubb handled 24 touches for 164 yards and a rushing touchdown. Cleveland has won three straight to get to 5-6 on the season.

- Sam Darnold racked up 315 yards and 3 total touchdowns for the New York Jets in a win over the Oakland Raiders. The Jets also have won three straight while scoring 34 points in each of them. Matchups against the Cincinnati Bengals and Dolphins could get them to 6-7 before a final push against three teams above .500.