It’s hard not to love explosive running backs – players who can take a handoff, find a hole, juke past a linebacker, and race to the end zone. These are the type of plays that circle through our minds as we think about how a player’s skill set will translate to the NFL.

There’s no denying that they’re exciting, but if they don’t translate to professional production, they shouldn’t drive prospect evaluation. On top of that, it’s easy to let highlights build the perception that a particular back exploded to the end zone every time he touched the ball.

This drives two important questions – are breakaway rushes predictive of NFL success? And which prospects were actually explosive?

Breakaway Rushes and NFL Production

It turns out that there is a meaningful relationship between breakaway rushes and NFL success. Breakaway rushes are rushing attempts that gain 15 or more yards. Like all things related to prospect evaluation, breakaway rushes are far from a magic bullet. That said, they do a better job of explaining the variance in fantasy output of NFL RB prospects than a variety of other measures.

This is evidenced by analyzing the relationships between RB fantasy scoring in NFL Years 1-3 with other measures. Since 2015, when the Speed Scores (SS) of drafted RBs are plotted against half-PPR points per game, the relationship has been far weaker than the relationship that scoring holds with the “Breakaway Rush Score” (BRS).

Speed Score is widely considered one of the more important RB measures. It is a size-adjusted metric that considers a player’s 40-yard dash time in the context of his weight. A player that posts a sub 4.40 forty-yard dash at 195 pounds is impressive. A player of equal speed, that weighs 225 pounds is even more impressive. That said, research I performed while developing BRS a couple of years back, showed that when plotting BRS or SS against fantasy scoring, BRS did a stronger job of approximating a line. In fact, the R² produced by BRS was 0.138 and the R² produced by SS was only 0.058. In many cases, this relationship wouldn’t be anything to write home about. However, in the context of RB evaluation, this puts BRS on par with rushing and total yardage as one the strongest single predictors of NFL fantasy scoring. When calculated, these numbers weren’t isolated to only include players that completed their first three seasons. Doing so would have created a sample of just 60 players but would have shown a stronger relationship between PPG and BRS.

Breakaway Rush Score

In general, the more breakaway rushes that a player records in college, the better his chances of being productive in the NFL are. This makes sense. In order to generate explosive plays, an RB needs to earn opportunity. The more efficient he is with this opportunity, the more yardage he’ll accrue and the long runs that he’ll break.

With some players declaring after their junior season, players missing significant time due to injury, and missed games due to COVID present in available data, raw breakaway totals can be skewed. To account for this, we can determine a player’s career rushing attempts per game, multiply this by 48 (to assume a four-year career, inclusive of 12 games per season), and then multiply this total by his percentage of rushes in each bucket to calculate normalized totals.

Said differently, if Player A averaged 10 rushing attempts per game and rushed for 20 or more yards on 10% of rushes, we could say that he amassed 480 rushes with 48 going for 20 or more yards. This allows us to better compare players and yields results that are more predictive than pure totals. In my research, I’ve found that combining the normalized totals of a player’s 15-plus-, 20-plus-, and 40-plus-yard attempts create the strongest relationship between breakaway rushes and PPG in years 1-3.

Top 30 Breakaway Rush Scores 2014-2022 (Drafted RBs)

An impressive group of players own the top-30 BRS since 2014. One could argue that more than half of the list has proven to be fantasy “hits.” As the available data only dates back to the 2014 season, some of the scores listed are not based on entire careers. This raises the scores of players like Melvin Gordon. He played his final season in 2014 and recorded a career-high in attempts that year. Nonetheless, this list provides a picture of the types of backs that evidenced explosiveness in college.

The 2023 RB Prospects