The 20 Best Offensive Players From Week 12
Week 12 games aren't over yet, so maybe the title of this article is a little misleading. It should read something like The 20 Best Offensive Players From the Thursday and Sunday Games in Week 12.
That just doesn't flow all that well.
As you know, we like math here at numberFire. Our algorithms help tell a better story about sports -- they're able to dig through the nonsense, helping us look at things that matter on the court, field or rink.
With football, we love our Net Expected Points (NEP) metric, which measures the number of points a player adds (or loses) to his team versus what he's expected to add. Rather than counting statistics like yards, touchdowns and receptions, NEP looks at down-and-distance situations and field position and relates these instances to history. When a player outperforms what's happened in the past, he sees a positive expected points value on the play. When he doesn't, his expected points gained on the play is negative. All of these little instances add up, then, to be a player's Net Expected Points total.
You can read more about NEP in our glossary.
Using a formula that compares individual single-game performance to history, the numberFire Live platform takes this Net Expected Points formula and assigns a rating to a player's performance. Each week, that's what we'll show here -- the 20 best ratings from the Thursday and Sunday games.
Here are Week 12's results:
| Player | Position | Rating |
|---|---|---|
| Julio Jones | WR | 100 |
| Keenan Allen | WR | 99 |
| Antonio Brown | WR | 99 |
| Jamison Crowder | WR | 99 |
| Philip Rivers | QB | 98 |
| Robby Anderson | WR | 97 |
| Joe Mixon | RB | 95 |
| Christian McCaffrey | RB | 95 |
| Matt Ryan | QB | 94 |
| Marvin Jones | WR | 94 |
| Case Keenum | QB | 93 |
| Ben Roethlisberger | QB | 92 |
| Jamaal Williams | RB | 90 |
| Derrick Henry | RB | 87 |
| Jermaine Kearse | WR | 86 |
| Mohamed Sanu | WR | 86 |
| Rob Gronkowski | TE | 85 |
| Carson Wentz | QB | 84 |
| Dion Lewis | RB | 84 |
| Davante Adams | WR | 83 |
- Julio Jones, obviously, had the biggest in-game impact of Week 12. He racked up 252 receiving yards and 2 touchdowns on 15 targets. His 23.42 Reception NEP is a single-game high for the season. Jones caught 6 of 8 targets for 184 yards and both touchdowns on passes traveling at least 16 yards downfield.
- Keenan Allen had himself a day yet again on Thanksgiving Day. Allen caught 11 of 14 targets for 172 yards and a touchdown against the Dallas Cowboys. Allen generated 16.25 expected points on his catches but had only 1 catch on 2 targets for 32 yards on passes deeper than 16 yards downfield. His quarterback, Philip Rivers, had the best quarterback showing of the week, throwing for 434 yards and 3 touchdowns. Rivers completed 27 of 33 attempts for a whopping 30.92 Passing NEP (no other passer was above 20.00 this week).
- Antonio Brown did everything he could to tie Jones for the top spot this week but fell just a tad shy. Brown caught 10 of 12 targets for 169 yards and 2 touchdowns on Sunday Night Football against the Green Bay Packers. He produced 14.89 Reception NEP overall and caught all 3 of his deep targets for 97 yards and a touchdown.
- In the night game on Thanksgiving, Jamison Crowder caught 7 of 10 targets for 141 yards and a touchdown. His Reception NEP tally of 14.82 ranked fourth through the first 15 games of Week 12. Similar to Allen, Crowder did most of his damage on short passes, as he had just 1 catch on 2 targets for 38 yards on deep attempts.
