NFL

The 20 Best Offensive Players From Week 2

Aaron Jones' dominant game was a perfect 100 in our performance ratings. Could anyone catch him?

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 2's results:

PlayerPositionRatingPassing NEPRushing NEPReception NEP
Aaron JonesRB100-9.418.55
Kareem HuntRB99-7.463.72
Tyler BoydWR99--15.35
Cam NewtonQB9717.834.86-
Austin EkelerRB95-2.165.25
Josh AllenQB9224.29-1.05-
David MontgomeryRB92-1.595.88
Terry McLaurinWR92--11.66
Chris CarsonRB90-1.614.26
Raheem MostertRB88-3.750.96
Russell WilsonQB8713.221.94-
Julian EdelmanWR87--10.56
Mark IngramRB87-4.700.56
Jared GoffQB8620.07-0.95-
Joe BurrowQB8312.790.45-
Ryan TannehillQB8318.92-0.28-
Patrick MahomesQB836.586.48-
Kyler MurrayQB836.915.98-
Baker MayfieldQB8010.991.49-
D.J. MooreWR80--10.61


- Last week, Davante Adams led the way with a 98 score, but this week, it was his teammate, Aaron Jones, earning top billing in the performance metric. Jones ran 18 times for 168 yards and 2 touchdowns and had another 68 yards and a score on 8 targets. It was a complete performance.

- Kareem Hunt entered the weekend leading in performance rating after a 99 on Thursday Night Football against the Cincinnati Bengals. Hunt scored twice on 12 total opportunities and racked up 101 total yards. In the same game, Tyler Boyd put up a 99 by way of catching 7 of 8 targets for 72 yards and a score. Expectations for that matchup may have been low, but they led to two of the biggest Week 2 performances.

- Cam Newton's New England Patriots nearly stole a game from the Seattle Seahawks, but he was stuffed at the goal line to end the game. Despite that, his performance kept the Pats in it: 30 of 44 for 397 yards and a touchdown to go along with 11 carries, 47 yards, and 2 rushing scores. He's been about twice as efficient as the NFL average on a per-drop back basis, based on his Passing NEP rating.

- Austin Ekeler and the Los Angeles Chargers gave the Kansas City Chiefs a serious run for a Week 2 win in Justin Herbert's NFL debut. Ekeler racked up 148 total yards on 20 opportunities. He didn't find the end zone, and his Total NEP wasn't substantial, but he made substantial win probability changes with his touches.