Finding Touchdowns With The New Running Back Freak Score

Matt Spencer
March 22, 2021

Freak Score is our home-grown size-adjusted speed metric that uses height, weight, and speed to project the TD-scoring potential for NFL prospects. Unlike many other measures for an NFL prospect’s size/athleticism profile, the Freak Score incorporates player height. Since its inception 6 years ago the NFL has seen a great many changing trends, but the Freak Score has remained a top predictor.

I recently went through the process of recreating the original RotoViz Freak Score study in an effort to update the metric and determine if it is still effective in today’s NFL. In short, yes, it is still one of the top predictors for identifying whether a wide receiver prospect looks like an elite touchdown magnet! During that study, I set up the same regression analysis for NFL running back prospects.

There are already many weight-adjusted speed metrics to choose from for identifying top RB prospects, but they all have two things in common:

They ignore height^[1]Kevin Cole previously found height to be an important RB metric in his regression tree analysis.
They are not optimized to find TDs, but usually overall fantasy production

I believe that height can be used to improve size-adjusted speed metrics, as we saw for WRs.

The New RB Freak Score

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Footnotes[+]Footnotes[−]

Footnotes
↑1	Kevin Cole previously found height to be an important RB metric in his regression tree analysis.

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Matt Spencer

Machine Learning Approach to Football Analytics with JavaScript

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