Why fear this RB? Analyze the data

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Listing the NFL’s top running backs is easy. Everybody can rattle off names such as Le’Veon Bell, Ezekiel Elliott or LeSean McCoy.

But how about Mike Gillislee, who played backup in Buffalo in 2016? What about Rex Burkhead, who started one game for Cincinnatilast year?

You may be thinking: Huh? But Gillislee and Burkhead were the No. 1 and No. 2 rushers in 2016, according to one advanced stat,called rushing success rate.

Rushing success rate measures the percentage of rushing attempts that increased a team’s chances of scoring. The idea is to give more weight to a 5-yard run on a third-and-2 than a 12-yard runon third-and-20.

Still, if those names don’t send shivers down Steelers fans’ spines, this might: The New England Patriots signed both Gillislee and Burkhead this offseason.

“There’s a reason why they’re making these decisions,” Ron Yurko, a Ph.D. student in statistics at Carnegie Mellon University,said of the Patriots.

That reason is sports analytics, the analysis of data to inform team decisions on the field or in the front office. Now, Yurko, who is from Irwin, and CMU graduate Maksim Horowitz have opened up the world of football analytics to the public by developing nflscrapR, statistical software that displays data from every single NFLplay since 2009.

Thefield of sports analytics has blossomed in recent years, and professional baseball (think “Moneyball”) and basketball have led the way in making easyto-usedata available to the public. “Butfootball ...” Yurko said. “...has got to catch up,” said his adviser,Rebecca Nugent.

Private companies such as Pro Football Focus and ESPN regularly comb NFL stats for their own ready-made rankings, but much of their data and methods areproprietary and subjective.

“Duringthe fall semester of my senior year, I had a growing interest in daily fantasy football, and I