Yesterday, I looked at the players who threw for the most yards and touchdowns against each franchise. Today I will do the same but with rushing statistics.

But before going on, I’d urge you to take a few minutes and re-read this incredible document our founders signed 237 years ago. It’s great having a day off in the summer to barbecue and celebrate with family and friends, but it’s important to take a few moments and remember what this holiday really means. Like preventing this site from becoming Futbol Perspective.

Let’s again start with a bit of trivia. Do you know which player has rushed for the most yards against any one opponent?

What about the most rushing touchdowns?

Let’s take a look at the players who have rushed for the most yards against each franchise:
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Let’s start with a bit of trivia. Do you know which quarterback has thrown for the most passing yards against any one opponent?

What about the most passing touchdowns?

Last year, on the Wednesday through Friday of Fourth of July, I posted a list of franchise leaders in passing stats, rushing stats, and receiving stats. This year, I’ll be doing the reverse, looking at the biggest nemeses for each franchise. We’ll start with the passing stats today.

The table below shows for each NFL team the quarterback to whom they have allowed the most passing yards since 1960.
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Three years ago, I posted a list of Approximate Times of Knockout in the NFL: I defined the time of a knockout as how much time was remaining in every game when the winning team first scored more points than the losing team ultimately scored by the end of the game.

I want to revisit the issue but use a slightly different formula. Since we have robust play-by-play data going back to 2000, I thought we could get more precise. In this post, I am defining the time of knockout as the last time the eventual losing team had the ball within one score of the eventual winning team. This seems to fit the definition of knockout a little bit better, I think, although it’s certainly not perfect. I went through every game of the 2012 season and recorded the time of knockout for the victor in each game. If you lost a game and last had the ball trailing within one score with 5 minutes left in the 3rd quarter, that goes down as a knockout with 20 minutes remaining. For the winning team, they get +20, while the loser gets -20. If you do that for every game, you can get season ratings.

Let’s take a look at the Patriots. They went 12-4 last year, and had an average net time of knockout of 19.4 minutes. The “net” means this includes losses in there as well. In their 12 wins, the Pats had an average time of knockout of 26.3 minutes, while in their four losses, they were knocked out with just over one minute remaining, on average. The Patriots had the highest average net time of knockout, but you might be surprised to see who had the highest average time of knockout in victories:
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I’ve spent a lot of time this offseason looking at how to grade wide receivers; today I wanted to get some initial thoughts down on paper on running backs.

I’m short on time today, which means a lot of data and not so much theory. One of the more underrated statistics to measure running backs is the number of first downs they produce. I don’t like using Yards per Carry for running backs because that metric is pretty sensitive to outliers. But by using rushing first downs, perhaps we can smooth things out.

We know that the value of a touchdown is about 20 yards, but what is the value of a rushing first down? Being short on time, I took the easy way out. Pro-Football-Reference has produced Expected Points Added for each team’s running game going back to 2000. I decided to run a regression on the team level to best predict rushing EPA based on four rushing statistics. The R^2 was 0.77, but more importantly, here was the best fit formula:

EPA = -16.6 -0.58*Rush + 0.067*Rush_Yd + 1.43*Rush_TD + 1.08*Rush_FD

What interests me is the relationships between the variables. Rushing touchdowns are considered 21.3 times as valuable as rushing yards, which happens to fit in well with our previous assumptions. But more importantly, this tells us that a rushing first down is worth 16.1 rushing yards. That seems pretty high to me, and I reserve the right to adjust this later, but for now, let’s adjust down and say the value of a rushing first down is 15 yards. Now what?
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