His Year: CJ Spiller 2012

Imagine being the best RB in the NFL, but your coach won't play you. That's exactly what happened to CJ Spiller in 2012.

It’s been a tough stretch for CJ Spiller.

Following one of the best college football careers of all time (one that saw him inducted into the college football hall of fame fairly recently) for Clemson, he was drafted into the NFL with the ninth overall pick in the 2010 Draft.

This did not shock anybody, but what did shock everybody was where he went.

The Bills? Seriously?

Those who were not NFL fans back in 2010 (and even some that were) may not remember that in 2010 the Bills had two starting running backs already in Marshawn Lynch and Fred Jackson, so this was a head scratching pick to say the least.

Remember the feeling last year when Atlanta drafted Bijan Robinson despite being set at running back already? It was about like that.

Bills fans (who were coming off a 6-10 season in 2009 and knew the team had holes all over the offence) did not like this pick, and as a result it got taken out on him when the Bills traded Marshawn Lynch to the Seahawks. It got no better when Fred Jackson was named starter and Spiller got to touch the ball only 98 times total in the 2010 season, as Jackson had a mild breakout.

It must be said again that on the offensive side this team had holes everywhere. Considering players like Jermaine Gresham (TE), Mike Iupati (G), Maurkice Pouncey (C), and Dex Bryant (WR) were all Pro Bowl offensive players picked later than ninth in the first round in 2010, the Bills could’ve filled any one of them, but instead they elected to pick a third running back, who in 2011 was again not really a factor as Fred Jackson was having a real breakout this time, leading the NFL in raw rushing yards and in Rushing Yards Over Expected (RYOE) before going down for the season in week 11 with a broken leg that finally allowed CJ some playing time.

He did well in his new starting position. Not quite as well as Jackson did, but it was good enough for the Buffalo fans and media to begin to demand that head coach Chan Gailey split the touches a bit better. In a move that is almost unprecedented in NFL history (I’d never seen it before this), Chan actually admitted that this was a weakness to his game and resolved to get better at sharing the load between his two backs.

When the first game of the 2012 season, on the road in New York against the Jets, comes around, it becomes clear that he has not improved in this regard, and this is where we find the difference between writing His Year articles on QBs vs writing them on any other position. A QB cannot have his breakout game while touching the ball just once in the first quarter, but a running back can, and CJ does.

After watching Fred Jackson get six out of the first seven touches and his team fall behind 21-0 as Mark Sanchez plays probably the best game of his career, Fred goes down with an injury. He will not be back, but this is good news for the Bills, as CJ immediately rips off a 56 yard rush for a touchdown to narrow the score to 21-7.

I’m going to say this once so I don’t have to say it all over this entire piece: there are two types of 56 yard run. There are ones where everything is blocked up and any NFL-calibre back can take the ball to the house, and there are ones like this, where the Jets get hands on CJ within two yards of the line of scrimmage, and twice more downfield, and it just doesn’t matter as he gets out of them all and takes it to the end zone to narrow the deficit.

That was an amazing start to CJ’s season, but something is about to happen that also never really happens in the QB His Year articles.

CJ catches a ball down the left sideline from QB Ryan Fitzpatrick for 30 yards, but fumbles the ball upon the hit.

It’s very close. In fact, there’s a challenge as to whether this was a drop or a catch and then a fumble, but when the replay process is all finished it’s ruled that CJ has just given back almost all of the value he got from the 56 yard run with a killer fumble at the 50 yard line.

The Bills don’t touch the ball again for the rest of the first half and come out for the second half down 27-7. This does not really matter to CJ Spiller, who by now knows that touches come at a premium and he must absolutely take advantage when he gets some. Regretfully, you cannot really run much when down 27-7, so despite the Bills’ drive starting with two very solid eight yard runs from CJ, they eventually pass themselves into oblivion and Fitzpatrick ends this drive with a pick six to take the score to 34-7 and take the Bills’ estimated Win Probability (according to NFLFastR) to zero.

Once the Bills go down 41-7, the Bills drop the two minute drill and go back to playing real offence knowing they’re not going to win, which gives CJ a few more touches. At 6:52 of the third quarter there’s another fantastic 49 yard rush, this time featuring hands on CJ in the backfield, which leads to another Buffalo touchdown. Also featured is Darrelle Revis injuring himself trying to tackle him (an injury that will end Darrelle’s Jets career), but this game has been over since half.

It’s an encouraging sign that after the Bills put CJ in the game, they scored 28 in three quarters to end the game as 48-28 losers, and CJ ends this game with 14 carries for 169 yards plus two catches, but being honest with ourselves it’s hard to be encouraged about anything after a loss this bad. Some people in the wake of this game are talking about how well CJ played, but not a lot.

Hindsight makes this even worse, as the Jets are going to finish 2012 ranked as the league’s 21st best rush defence. Not exactly a great measuring stick, but if you want to be a great player, you must have great games against the bad defences. CJ delivered in spades today.

Next up in week two are the Kansas City Chiefs, who are the worst team in the NFL by a big margin, and everybody knows it. They also feature a rush defence in the 20s, and CJ also tears it apart, but at this point it becomes easy to notice that something fishy is happening.

CJ gets 16 designed rush touches in this game. He finishes with 123 yards and two touchdowns plus three catches, another great game. This is awesome until you realise that the rest of the team also combines for 16 rush touches, and theirs go for 45 yards and do nothing but hurt the team.

Why would you do this?

I understand that Gailey agreed that he’d share the touches at the beginning of the season, but in the first quarter of the Jets game as Jackson got six touches and CJ got just one and the team fell behind 21-0 it became clear that this was not true. How come now that CJ is the starter we have to share the ball, but when Fred was in there it was a one man show?

If you think that I’m making a mountain of a molehill, and it’s just a few worthless touches against the Kansas City Chiefs, and that it’s not a big deal, I suspect the next stretch of games will change your opinion.

CJ Spiller has just started the first two games of the year with 29 carries for 292 yards, becoming the first person to make it two games into a season averaging ten yards per carry since Jim Brown, but for some incomprehensible reason, he touches the ball just six times in week three against Cleveland. He’s on the field for only 13 of the Bills’ 68 offensive snaps.

It’s Cleveland, so this is still an easy win, but what is up with this business? Fred Jackson isn’t even back yet. For reasons that nobody except Chan Gailey knows, CJ Spiller, as a reward for the hottest start the NFL has seen since the 1960s, has been benched in favour of Tashard Choice, who is 28 years old and has never been able to lock down a starting job anywhere.

What the hell is this?

Choice will get 15 carries for the whole rest of the season, but apparently he desperately needed 20 carries in this one game on the road in Cleveland as a stopgap for the injured Fred Jackson.

Oh boy, if only the Bills had a stopgap for the injured Jackson already.

Can you understand this?

I can’t understand this, and it gets no better once Jackson comes back for week four.

Ten touches in week four and just seven in week five indicate that CJ is now definitively back to being a bench player. He suffers this status for the good of an offence that suffers another blowout loss against New England and that scores just three points in that week five game in San Francisco.

Surely it couldn’t have hurt to just throw him in because they had nothing to lose, like what happened in New York, but no. Seven touches.

This shocking lack of usage for the man who is most definitely the Bills’ biggest weapon is not lost on anybody. Mix in the fact that he is currently the NFL’s leader in yards per carry, and it becomes baffling. There are articles and analyses asunder from the middle of the 2012 season (that still exist on the internet) asking the same question I’m asking: why are there not more touches for CJ Spiller?

CJ Spiller is also asking this question, and week by week the relationship between the new star and his coach is getting more and more strained, but in the next two weeks I have to give Chan Gailey just a little bit of credit.

Next game is week six in Glendale to play the Cardinals. Everybody knows what the Bills must do in order to win. You see, this is one of the forgotten 2010s Cardinals defences. They’re forgotten because their offences were so bad that they never did any winning, but for a few year stretch they were awesome at making opposing offences look really bad, and week six of 2012 is right in the middle of that stretch.

However, the specialty of the Cardinals (like any top defence post 2011 rule changes) is their second ranked pass defence. Their rush defence ranks just 14th, and we know the Buffalo Bills have possibly the best player in the entire league to exploit this weakness. The question is whether they will use him.

The first play of the game is a Fred Jackson fumble that immediately sets the Bills up with a 3-0 deficit, but by and large the answer is yes. The second Bills drive sees CJ touch the ball three times (two rushes and one catch). Buffalo does not score, but against this Arizona team, just getting a few first downs is crucial in the field position war, because the combo of Kevin Kolb and John Skelton at QB on the other side is not going to get any first downs in return.

This shows, as Kolb is taken down in the end zone for a safety and the score moves to 3-2, but things go right back to being awkward as every one of the first five rushing attempts on the next series go to Fred Jackson. They don’t go all that well, accounting for just 17 yards, but Ryan Fitzpatrick is able to get the Bills into a good enough position for CJ to get into the end zone on first and goal from the ten to make the score 9-3.

From here, the teams go back and forth not accomplishing very much (only two CJ touches in this time) all the way until 4:53 to go in the half, when the Cardinals finally score to move back ahead 10-9. Interestingly, the Bills respond to this by coming out with CJ, but to no avail. Both teams go into the half with the same 10-9 score.

We pick back up at 3:12 of the third quarter. The score has moved to 13-9 in favour of Arizona, and CJ has had just one touch in the interim, but at last he’s about to blow the top off this game like only he can.

After a productive seven yard run to get the Bills to the 50, on second and three he bursts through the middle all the way to the 17 for a 33 yard gain, while also tallying 30 yards over expected on this one play alone. This was all CJ, and it was a pivotal play. By its lonesome, it’s increased the Bills’ estimated WP from 29 percent all the way back up to 40, and two plays later when the Bills get into the end zone for a 16-13 lead it’s all the way up to 53.

We sink back into the malaise in the fourth quarter though, as once again CJ isn’t being given the chance to do much. He gets a seven yard run on a second and 28, and an 11 yard catch on the ensuing third and 21, but for the most part has to just watch as Fred Jackson gets seven touches this quarter, the Bills give up a field goal to tie the game at 16, and must block a field goal as time expires just to make overtime.

Overtime sees a very healthy 17 yard rush from CJ to put the Bills in awesome position to win on the Arizona 35, but three incomplete passes mean that the Bills do not win now. They do win later, 19-16, but that was CJ’s only touch in overtime.

This is an article about CJ Spiller, so I’ve had to skip a lot of the details, but this is one of the most exciting NFL games that nobody remembers. I implore you to go back and watch it if you can, but stay for now so I can give you the details of this great performance.

In this game, Chan Gailey actually kept his promise and used his two running backs in different ways to accomplish different things. When Fred got on the field, he mostly stayed for stretches of five plays in a row, while CJ’s touches were more interspersed throughout the offence. In the end, CJ got 12 rushes plus five pass targets, while Fred got 16 rushes and six pass targets.

Before I cut Gailey to shreds, let’s at least give him some props for trying to keep his public promise to share the touches better, but how obvious can it be that he’s giving the majority of these touches to the wrong player? I’m about to show you a graph of Buffalo’s RYOE (Rushing Yards Over Expected) numbers, the success of Bills’ backs at getting more than what their blockers give them. If the back can get exactly what his blockers give him every time, this number would be zero, so look at the results below:

Do you see that?

CJ Spiller is over the 100 yard mark already, and we’re only six weeks into the season, and he’s only had 48 qualified carries. Juxtaposing this with Fred Jackson, who is well into the negatives (meaning he’s generally getting less than he should given the blocking), shows why giving Fred Jackson more touches than CJ Spiller is ludicrous, and should never have been done in the first place.

In fact, he’s so far above Fred Jackson that he’s not even that reasonable of a comparison. I’m going to show you a better one.

Adrian Peterson is going to come within a breath of setting the NFL’s all time single season rushing yards record in 2012. Alfred Morris is going to finish 2012 with 1613 rushing yards and be the second team all-pro running back. How is CJ doing compared to these guys?

Yup.

It’s not just Fred Jackson that CJ is blowing out of the water. The best rushers in the NFL do not belong on the same field with him. I’ll repeat myself: Adrian Peterson is going to finish with 2000 yards this season.

Just imagine if the Vikings had CJ Spiller.

Week seven sees the Bills finally back at home to face the Tennessee Titans, in a game that should they win would move the Bills to 4-3, their first winning record more than four weeks into a season in years, but it’s not going to come easily. The Titans, with their own version of CJ (Chris Johnson), have come to play, scoring an easy touchdown on their first drive.

This Bills drive (like every game) opens with Fred Jackson getting the first three touches, but this isn’t the Cardinals. Fred is very productive. CJ struggles somewhat, but does take a screen pass 20 yards to convert a crucial third and ten in the red zone to tie the game. Both teams then trade one play touchdowns (an 83 yard rush for the Titans, a kick return for the Bills) to instantly move the score to 14-14.

When the Titans score again to take another lead at 10:21 of the second quarter, CJ is all over the ensuing response. A ten yard rush on first and ten, a four yard rush on second and four, a 20 yard rush on first and ten, come out for a breather so Fred Jackson can account for 19 yards in the next two plays, and then come back in for a seven yard gain on first down. This is what the Bills could’ve been all season. It’s truly beautiful offence in that ‘you cannot stop my running back’ sort of way.

Unfortunately, the drive results in only a FG, so it’s 21-17, and when the Bills get the ball back, we again see Chan Gailey falling into the bad habit of seeming to just forget he has the NFL’s leader in both raw yards per carry and yards over expected per carry on his roster, as CJ does not touch the ball at all (in a drive where Fred Jackson catches four balls) as the Bills walk down the field to score another field goal to go into the half down 21-20.

It’s been a great half for the whole Buffalo offence, but why is it that we have to keep going through this?

You’ve got the best back in the NFL. Give him the ball. Is it really that difficult?

The Bills are down 28-20 before CJ touches the ball again, but it’s a very productive 11 yard screen on second and eight, and later in the drive CJ is able to convert a simple check down into a first down on a third and one as the Bills score again to narrow the score to 28-27.

Buffalo’s next touch doesn’t see CJ be especially productive with the ball, but he’s effective in pass protection, especially on the touchdown pass that gives the Bills a 34-28 lead at ten seconds left in the third.

The Titans don’t score on their next two touches, and nor do the Bills (with great help from a killer offensive holding penalty), which leaves the Titans with the ball at 2:57, and we can do nothing but watch as Tennessee completes the two minute drill to take the lead and the win 35-34 and crush the soul of every Buffalo fan that ever thought they could have a winning record.

This sucks.

After winning as underdogs in Glendale last week the Bills have now lost as favourites at home to the Tennessee Titans, and while CJ did actually get the majority of the designed rushing attempts in this game (12 for CJ, ten for the rest of the Bills) for just the second time all season, all the screen passes and the dump offs mean that Fred Jackson still touched the ball 20 times to CJ’s 18.

I’m not going to get mad at the touch situation this week, because Fred Jackson actually played very well in this game also. By far his best of the season, but in a game that was lost by one point, with CJ Spiller on your roster, one can wonder what might have happened had the Bills attempted to rush the ball any more than 22 times. Just a thought.

I’m thinking that thought for two reasons. First is that it’s the same thought that Bills fans were thinking that day. Second is that I don’t want to move past the bye and onto week nine against Houston, because I’m 100 percent sure that I’m going to blow a gasket when we get there.

I’ll give you one guess as to why.

If you were an NFL head coach, and your roster looked like the 2012 Buffalo Bills’, and thankfully you have an extra week to prepare to face perhaps the AFC’s best team, the 7-1 Houston Texans, and the master plan you came up with to have your team win this game is to have your team’s best offensive player touch the ball just 11 times as your team operates at a 35 percent success rate (meaning 65 percent of your plays made your team less likely to score), generates negative EPA/Play, and loses, I would certainly hope that would cause you to have a change of heart.

If in the following game after that against perhaps the other best team in the AFC, the New England Patriots, you allow your best offensive player to touch the ball just 13 times (compared to a staggering 24 Fred Jackson touches) as you squander a real chance to win on the road in New England as 14 point underdogs, I would begin to reconsider your future career prospects.

Why in the world did Chan Gailey come out of the bye refusing to give the ball to CJ Spiller all over again?

The Houston loss was a blowout loss and there was likely nothing that a running back could’ve done to change the outcome, and I can accept that, but in a fight to the death on the road against a division rival in which you lose just 37-31, coming only fifteen yards short of stealing the game away at the end, you cannot convince me that it wouldn’t have helped the Bills to have the NFL’s yards per carry leader on the field for more than just 47 percent of the offensive plays.

I’m showing the graph again:

CJ has now been passed in terms of total production by Adrian Peterson, who now sits at 200 yards over the average running back on the season. The Bills could’ve had all that production, and probably more, if they would’ve just committed to CJ more and earlier, in the same way that Minnesota did with Adrian. Instead of 2012 NFL MVP Adrian Peterson, I would’ve always been able to dispute by bringing up the name CJ Spiller, but I can’t, and it’s not CJ’s fault.

It’s the fault of whoever is making the decision to not let CJ touch the ball, but now whoever that person may be is out of options, because on the final play of the Patriot game Fred Jackson went down with injury. He will not be active for week 11.

You’d figure this would be CJ’s big breakout, but it just isn’t. In fact he has perhaps the worst game of his Year so far (ignoring the six total touches against Cleveland). He does get 22 rush attempts plus four pass targets for 120 total yards with a personal success rate of 53.5 percent in a game the Bills are never in serious danger of losing. For most these would actually be quite good numbers, but when you’re the best running back in the NFL a game like this is quite the disappointment.

Week twelve in Indianapolis is quite the opposite. Buffalo spends most of this game behind, so 22 carries isn’t a possibility. He’ll end the day with 14. It’s also very hit and miss, with only six of his carries getting more yards than were blocked for him, but CJ is a home run hitter, and you have to live with that sometimes. He parlays a very low success rate into big production by breaking off two different runs of at least 20 yards, plus two more of double digits. Once again, the Bills do not win because a running back can only have so much impact, but once again CJ Spiller has proven that he is not to be messed with.

At least, I thought he proved that.

This is getting so outlandish that I’m beginning to worry you won’t believe me, but CJ’s reward for 103 yards on just 15 total touches for the Indianapolis Colts is to play fewer snaps than any (non-Cleveland) game all season in week 14 against the Jacksonville Jaguars.

Unbelievable.

After finally getting a little taste of the playing time he’s deserved all season, and rewarding it by rushing for 198 yards in those two games, CJ gets to be on the field for just 24 plays in week 13. That’s only 37% of the Bills’ plays. I believe this is (to some degree) intended as a compliment, because CJ doesn’t play the fourth quarter of this blowout win, but by this point the playing time has become such a bitter issue between player and coach that it’s not received that way. Not one bit, especially in light of what happens next week.

What happens next week is that CJ Spiller gets seven rushing attempts against the St. Louis Rams.

Seven.

Eight total touches from the team’s best offensive player in a game where the Bills score just 12 points against the merely good (11th ranked) St. Louis Ram defence is not acceptable. The entire point of this article is for me to pump up CJ Spiller, but I’ve been trying to be as moderate as I possibly can be about the playing time. No more.

CJ Spiller is either one or two in terms of the best running backs in the NFL right now. On a per play basis, he’s one. On a total basis, he’s behind Adrian Peterson. CJ to this date still remains the NFL’s leader in yards per carry. He’s spent the whole season shucking the reputation of merely being a ‘perimeter runner’ (why is that an insult?), and yet has still remained a big time big play threat. As of this point, only CJ and Adrian Peterson have double digit plays of 20+ yards. CJ has 11, and Adrian has 18. Considering Adrian by this point has almost twice as many carries, there is no bigger big play threat in the NFL than CJ.

In addition, somehow, despite all of the Chan Gailey meddling, CJ manages to still rank tenth in raw rushing yards, despite not really getting starting running back carries. To this point, he’s averaged just 11.1 carries per game, and for what? Look at how the Rams game went:

One back is great. The other is terrible.

Why does the great one have to beg for playing time?

After this week 14 game, it all blows up. It blows up in the fandom. It blows up in the media. It blows up in the dressing room.

It begins with coach Gailey saying: “He had … good runs in that drive, he gets winded and he comes out.”

Implying publicly that your star running back gets winded a lot, and that’s why he’s not playing, is perhaps not the best way to go about this situation.

Alas, it’s exactly what Chan Gailey did, and what else could he do? After a whole season of both player and coach denying that the reason was his pass protection, denying his lack of presence in red zone packages, and (obviously) denying the reason is performance, conditioning is really the only route to go to explain why this man is not on the field.

Of course, CJ vehemently and categorically denies not being properly conditioned, and with his responses to the media after each game all season, while staying professional, getting more and more curt with each passing week, it finally had to happen. A private meeting goes down between coach and player on the Monday after the St Louis game, and I truly believe some real things were accomplished in that meeting, because for the last three weeks of the season (with the benefit of another Fred Jackson injury), CJ finally begins being treated like the star running back he is.

Week 15 sees CJ make mincemeat of the junior version of the future legion of boom, albeit in a 50-17 loss to the Seattle Seahawks, but one look at this offensive breakdown will show you which element of the offence was most at fault for that:

Very rarely will you see a pass game that bad with a rush game that good, but leave it to a His Year article to find something like this.

Week 16 sees CJ avenging his personal worst game of the season against the Miami Dolphins from earlier this season, as he accounts for 173 yards on 26 touches, but the Buffalo Bills still find a way to lose this game 24-10. You know exactly why and how. I feel no need to show the graphic for the second week in a row.

A terribly unfortunate element to this story happens in week 17 against the New York Jets. The very same Jets that got this story started all those months ago. CJ struggles immensely, rushing for just 59 yards in 24 carries, which is bad enough in itself, but worse than that is that this single bad performance was enough to drop CJ just barely (the winner decided by the second decimal place) behind Adrian Peterson for the NFL lead in yards per carry.

It really stinks that CJ fell just short of this award.

It doesn’t mean anything in reality to lead the NFL in a statistic, but what it would’ve done is brought more attention onto him, both contemporaneously and in 2024 as this story is becoming more and more historic, to outdo a 2000 yard rusher in terms of yards per carry. Every time people thought of 2012 Adrian Peterson, and wanted to know why he wasn’t the league leader, they would’ve found this story, but as it stands it’s now totally forgotten, all because of six yards against the New York Jets.

Just six more yards would have made CJ Spiller the yards per carry champion, but he couldn’t quite get there.

Regardless of what he did not do, what CJ did do was extremely impressive. On just 207 carries (22nd in the NFL, right behind the legendary Vick Ballard), he managed 1244 rushing yards (8th), which translates to 6.01 yards per carry, just barely (six yards barely) behind Adrian Peterson’s 6.03.

The raw numbers are great, but the Bills had a pretty good offensive line in 2012. How much of that production can CJ take responsibility for?

I’m glad you asked, because asking (and answering) that question makes CJ look so much better. We begin with the graph:

You can see that Adrian and CJ overlap almost perfectly once we run out of CJ carries, at about 243 yards above expected given the blocking. Nobody else in the NFL is even close. These are the two best backs in the NFL by far, and that’s shown even better in the following graph.

Up and right indicates great backs helped by great blocking. Down and right are poor backs being flattered by great blocking. Up and left are good backs hindered by poor blocking, and down and left means a bad back with bad blocking to boot. Knowing that up and right is where you want to be, look at how far away Adrian and CJ are from the rest of the crowd:

It’s no contest. CJ’s 1.41 yards over expected per touch trump Adrian’s, but Adrian got slightly better results with a bit better blocking up front. Take your pick as to who’s better, but the fact that there can be a debate between CJ Spiller and the 2000 yard version of Adrian Peterson tells me all I need to know.

CJ Spiller was an all time great running back in 2012, and no matter how much Chan Gailey tried, nobody can take it away from him.

It’s important to remember the greatness that existed, because now comes the sad part that’s inevitable when writing about running backs.

CJ would never reach these heights again after 2012.

0.85 yards above expected per touch in 2013 means he’s one of the best backs in the league next year too, but after that his career as a starter is over. He’ll bounce around the league long enough to make it to the 2017 season before he retires, but at that point he’ll become one of a long line of running backs to have just one truly great season.

Don’t get me wrong, Alvin Kamara is in this club. Saquon Barkley is in it, so is Dalvin Cook. Travis Etienne is rapidly approaching it as well if he can’t get things turned around quickly. It’s not bad company to be in, but it’s so much worse to be in this list and have your best season not be remembered because Chan Gailey decided to arbitrarily, stubbornly, and bewilderingly limit you to just 207 carries.

It’s not a fun situation to be in, but it’s better to be great once and have nobody realize it than to have never been great at all. Never forget that.

Never forget CJ Spiller’s Year.