Dave Caban uses his RB Breakaway Score metric to evaluate the 2024 rookie RB class and find the most explosive players in the class.
It’s hard not to love explosive running backs — players who can take a handoff or a screen, 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 Plays and NFL Production
It turns out that there is a meaningful relationship between breakaway plays and NFL success. For the purposes of this article, RB breakaway plays are rushes or receptions that go for rushing attempts that gain 10 or more yards. Like all things related to prospect evaluation, breakaway plays 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 most other metrics.
This is evidenced by analyzing the relationships between RB fantasy scoring in NFL Years 1-3 with other measures. Since 2014, 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 “RB Breakaway Score” (RBBAS).
Speed Score (SS) 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 who posts a sub 4.40 forty-yard dash at 195 pounds is impressive. A player of equal speed, who weighs 225 pounds is even more impressive. However, the research I performed while developing RBBAS, showed that when plotting RBBAS or SS against fantasy scoring, BRS did a stronger job of approximating a line. In fact, the R-squared produced by RBBAS was 0.166 and the R-squared produced by SS was less than 0.007. In many cases, this relationship wouldn’t be anything to write home about. However, in the context of RB evaluation, this puts RBBAS on par with rushing and total yardage as one the strongest single correlators with NFL fantasy scoring.
RB Breakaway Scores
In general, the more breakaway plays that a back records in college, the better his chances of being productive in the NFL are. This makes sense. To generate explosive plays, an RB needs to earn opportunities. The more efficient he is with these opportunities, the more yardage he’ll accrue and the more explosive plays he’ll have a chance to make.
With some players declaring after their junior season, players missing significant time due to injury, and missed games due to COVID, raw breakaway totals can be skewed. To account for this, we can determine a player’s career rushing attempts and receptions 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 and receptions in each breakaway bucket to calculate normalized totals. The buckets inspected in this article relate to plays going for 10+, 15+, 20+, 30+, 40+, and 50+ yards. A play that goes for 50 or more yards will get counted as contributing to each bucket.
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 years past, I’ve experimented with different combinations of buckets to find those that possess the strongest relationships with NFL scoring. However, after having more data to work with now, I’ve determined that simply adding up the normalized totals across all buckets correlates with fantasy scoring nearly as well as any mixture. To keep things simple and potentially easier to get one’s head around, I’ve decided to take these normalized totals and scale them from 0 to 100 to arrive at an RB’s Breakaway Score. While considering results, be careful not to think of a player’s score as being analogous to a percentile. For example, Breece Hall’s score of 58 places him in the 84th percentile.
