If you’re anything like me, your first instinct on Sundays is to track not which teams are winning their games but rather which players are winning DFS games for you. When a guy in one of my lineups has even just a five-yard run, I outright fist pump like some head coach standing on the sideline. And when one of my guys gets a big play . . .
There are no words to describe the euphoria of spraying beer all over yourself and anyone else within a ten foot radius. The resulting stickiness: That’s the stickiness of champions.
It’s difficult in real football to gain a large chunk of yards in one play, but when it does happen it most frequently comes through the air, as running the ball inherently provides fewer yards per play. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t big plays on the ground. It just means that by definition they tend not to be as big as the big plays we see when a quarterback throws the ball.
Often, one big play — especially when it ends in a touchdown — can be the difference between finishing high in a large guaranteed prize pool and winning the entire contest.
But what running backs are breaking long runs and how can we target them specifically in DFS?
What Exactly Is a Big Play for a Running Back?
To attempt to answer this question I started with a sample size of play-by-play data from the last fifteen NFL seasons. I looked at 233,825 individual run plays. First, I sorted ‘yards gained’ from high to low and broke the entire sample into five equal quintiles, with 46,765 run plays per quintile.
From there I found the average yards gained in each of the five quintiles. The reason I averaged these instead of using the high and low values for my range is that here at FantasyLabs we have in our Trends tool a filter that screens based on the average length of a player’s ‘long run’ each week.
Finally, I created percentile ranges for these historical averages. The following chart displays these ranges and gives us a better idea of what we should expect on each NFL run play, based on the data of the past 15 years: 
So a player who averages 12.92-plus rushing yards on his longest run of each game would be in the top-20 percent of ‘big-play running backs’ in the NFL. On average, these players are breaking long runs and big plays every week. They are the type of running backs who carry a lot of upside in GPPs.
The Plus/Minus Values of the Quintiles
The following trend and chart show this top quintile on FanDuel and a breakdown of the entire population. Note the Plus/Minus values that we see for each quintile. Since Plus/Minus is a salary-based metric, we can see the extent to which big plays provide real value in DFS:
The main observation to make is that, in general, the bigger a player’s big-play average is, the more DFS value he provides.
For the remainder of this study, I will refer to this top quartile as a ‘big plays’ category. The players in this top quartile are the runners we want in GPPs.
How Do We Target This Big-Play Quartile?
Intuitively we should infer that big-play running backs are valuable in DFS. The question is how do we find them. Should we be looking for running backs with high volume? — or high efficiency?
Does a player who just sees more volume have a higher chance to break a big run than a player who is highly efficient?
I calculated five quintiles for both volume (Starter Rush Attempts per game) and efficiency (Success Rate per game) in the same way as before, except that the sample for starter rush attempts was from this past NFL season only.
The following chart displays these ranges for both volume and efficiency for each percentile group.
Now that we have solid quintile ranges for both volume and efficiency, we can use the trends tool again to see which leads to a higher Plus/Minus on FanDuel under the “big plays” category we created. It is also relevant to see how many players even qualify for the “big play” quartile from each respective category.
As you can see, targeting players in the top efficiency quartiles leads to both a higher Plus/Minus and a larger pool of qualifying players.
In other words, more big-play running backs get their big runs through high efficiency than through high volume. Although volume is important — especially if we are looking for safe floors — efficiency is what we want to target when we seek big plays. As even Editor-in-Chief Matthew Freedman says in his ode to volume, “Efficiency still matters in tournaments. It’s not everything, but efficiency is something. It’s a vital component of true GPP upside.”
That efficiency is linked to big-play ability more than volume is incredibly actionable, since salaries tend to be more directly impacted by volume than efficiency. What this means is that we can target efficient and cheap running backs without impacting our ability to gain big-play upside.
Conclusion
In spite of (or maybe because of) the variance involved with big plays, they have a large impact in DFS every week.
Knowing what types of players are more prone to long runs in any given week can help us target running backs with more upside in GPPs. Volume may be king at the running back position but the contrarian move in regards to big-play potential in GPPs might just be to target high-efficiency runners instead of high-volume workhorses.
