The 20 Best Offensive Players From Week 7
Week 7 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 7.
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 7's results:
| Player | Position | Rating |
|---|---|---|
| Lamar Miller | RB | 100 |
| Danny Woodhead | RB | 99 |
| Mike Evans | WR | 99 |
| Nate Washington | WR | 98 |
| Ryan Mathews | RB | 95 |
| Doug Martin | RB | 95 |
| Todd Gurley | RB | 94 |
| TJ Yeldon | RB | 94 |
| Darren McFadden | RB | 94 |
| Amari Cooper | WR | 94 |
| Charcandrick West | RB | 94 |
| TY Hilton | WR | 93 |
| Mark Ingram | RB | 93 |
| Derek Carr | QB | 91 |
| Arian Foster | RB | 90 |
| Ryan Fitzpatrick | QB | 87 |
| Ryan Tannehill | QB | 87 |
| Tom Brady | QB | 86 |
| Stefon Diggs | WR | 86 |
| Jameis Winston | QB | 86 |
- For Lamar Miller, it's not really about the percentage of snaps played, but actually getting touches when he's on the field. His snap numbers have shown no sign of improvement since the Joe Philbin firing, but the last two weeks have seen him touch the ball 70.8% and 44.7% of the time on those snaps, which are the two highest totals of his season. In other words, the Dolphins' offensive playbook is starting to go through Miller more, and we've seen the results the last two weeks.
- Danny Woodhead was a garbage time hero yesterday, which is why his NEP total was so high. On the final drive alone -- complete garbage time -- Woodhead had 7 catches for 56 yards and a touchdown. Whew.
- Mike Evans finally got things going for fantasy owners yesterday, posting the highest Reception NEP total of all wideouts. Up until this week, he had totaled just over 11 Reception Net Expected Points. On Sunday, he added over 15 points on catches only, more than doubling his season total.
- Joseph Randle sustained a back injury in yesterday's Cowboys game, and Darren McFadden (not Christine Michael) took over lead back duties. He performed admirably, adding 6.53 expected points on the ground alone. He's now easily the most efficient running back on the Cowboys, and it shouldn't shock anyone -- regardless of Randle's injury -- if he starts seeing more work as a result.
- This is the first time in four weeks where Devonta Freeman wasn't a top 20 weekly player. According to our numbers, Freeman put up a rating of 49 after a below expectation rushing performance.
