The 20 Best Offensive Players From Week 11
Week 11 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 11.
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 11's results:
| Player | Position | Rating |
|---|---|---|
| Thomas Rawls | RB | 100 |
| Doug Martin | RB | 98 |
| Giovani Bernard | RB | 97 |
| JJ Nelson | WR | 97 |
| DeAndre Hopkins | WR | 94 |
| Jameis Winston | QB | 94 |
| Spencer Ware | RB | 93 |
| Julio Jones | WR | 93 |
| Russell Wilson | QB | 92 |
| James Jones | WR | 91 |
| Cam Newton | QB | 91 |
| Carson Palmer | QB | 89 |
| Theo Riddick | RB | 89 |
| Patrick DiMarco | FB | 87 |
| Jonathan Stewart | RB | 87 |
| Bilal Powell | RB | 85 |
| Cecil Shorts | WR | 83 |
| Andy Dalton | QB | 82 |
| Ahmad Bradshaw | RB | 79 |
| Allen Robinson | WR | 78 |
- If you started Charcandrick West in fantasy football yesterday, you're probably not thrilled to see Spencer Ware's name so high on this list. And the same could be said for Marshawn Lynch owners, as he was a late inactive, allowing for Thomas Rawls to put together the top performance of the day. Rawls, according to our Rushing NEP metric, added nearly 10 points for the Seahawks on the ground alone. To put that into perspective, since rushing is much more inefficient than passing, only five running backs have hit that total all season long.
- Jameis Winston, according to our numbers, was the best quarterback yesterday. He accumulated a Passing NEP of 21.48, which was roughly eight points higher than his season total, thanks to a handful of negative performances.
- As for the other quarterbacks -- Cam Newton was outplayed by Russell Wilson, despite his five touchdown passes. A key reason for this was because Newton faced favorable field position all game long, where three of his touchdown passes came when the Panthers started their drives within the Washington 35-yard line. Wilson, on the other hand, played so far above expectation thanks to some big splash plays -- plays that were missing from Newton in Week 11.
