James Robinson and Why Running Backs Don't Matter

What happens when you mix a great running back with a bad scheme, bad blocking, and a bad pass game? You get 2021 James Robinson.

Very confrontational title. I know.

This is a subject that’s been done to death by now, and quite frankly it can be answered by one sentence; the success of a rush play is more determined by the quality of the offensive scheme and the quality of the blocking than the quality of the running back. Therefore, if you’d like your rush game to be more successful, you should invest in those three things in that order. First a better scheme, then better blocking, and if you’ve still got money after those two things, then you get a better running back.

What happens if you execute this process in the wrong order? What if you get the elite running back, but neither the scheme nor the blocking?

That’s what I’d like to talk about today.

James Robinson was an undrafted free agent out of Illinois State University in 2020, and for all intents and purposes was the best undrafted rookie the NFL had ever seen up to that point, because (in a feat almost impossible for an undrafted player) he was able to start right out of training camp for the woeful 1-15 2020 Jacksonville Jaguars. As a result, he finished with the most rushing yards, scrimmage yards, 100 yard games, etcetera that an undrafted rookie had ever had, even winning rookie of the month in September 2020, and at season’s end he was ranked the NFL’s eighth best running back in the year end top 100 list they do.

That’s not the season I want to talk about today.

It was a great season results wise for James, but on the whole was almost entirely a product of his environment. You see, the 2020 Jacksonville Jaguars (while being a horrendous team on the whole) were actually a great place for a running back to thrive. James’s 4.68 expected yards per carry for the season were the ninth most in the NFL in 2020, and considering he only averaged 4.49 yards per carry that season, you can see that this was actually not all that great at all.

Don’t get me wrong. Having only 44 rushing yards below expected, only -0.18 per carry, as a rookie is actually quite a good sign. Contrary to popular belief, running backs don’t come into the NFL as fully formed products. They take jumps in year two just like most other offensive players do. Take as evidence Christian McCaffrey, who is still near the top of the league right now. He was perhaps the worst back in the entire NFL in his rookie season, averaging half a yard below expected given the blocking per touch, but by year two he was the CMC we’ve all come to love, getting 0.92 RYOE (Rushing Yards Over Expected) per touch.

Coming off an already fairly successful rookie season, and with the year two jump ahead of him, everybody expects great things out of James for 2021, which is why they ranked him eighth among RBs (100th overall) on the yearly NFL players tier list, but they didn’t know just how bad it was going to fall apart in Jacksonville.

Coming off a 1-15 2020 with coach Doug Marrone and Offensive Coordinator Jay Gruden, who had both had okay success designing run schemes in the past, the Jaguars decided to replace them with head coach Urban Meyer, a man with no NFL experience ever, and offensive coordinator Darrell Bevell, who’d spent the last several years of his career in Detroit and Seattle scheming good running backs into oblivion, which meant that this already had the makings of a rough season.

Recall the three priorities to a good run game. We’ve got the third priority, a great running back, locked up. No problems there, but the first priority, scheme, is already looking a little iffy. How about the blocking?

Tackles Cam Robinson and Jawaan Taylor are both still here, but over the offseason the Jaguars have lost two interior linemen, Guard AJ Cann and Center Tyler Shatley (who is still here but will miss a lot of the season with injury). These are not massive losses, but still necessitate replacements that will (spoiler alert) will be of slightly lesser quality.

That means that going into the 2021 season, we have a running back set to make the next step, but his legs have been chopped out from under him by having his offensive line deteriorate a little bit, and getting subpar run schemers for offensive coaches, and still it gets worse.

As a replacement for the fairly reliable Gardner Minshew, the Jaguars have brought in rookie Trevor Lawrence. For a running back who pretty much knows he’s not going to be here to see this QB mature, this is a horrendous development. Removing a QB with the experience of Minshew to bring in a true rookie is going to hamstring the passing game for the Jaguars all year, and since we all know that a successful passing game helps facilitate a successful running game, this is another hurdle that Robinson must jump over.

In sum, there are four strikes against James Robinson. Two were here last season: the blocking is weak, and the horrendous defence means that carries are going to be limited because you can’t run the ball in blowout losses. Two are new for this season: the offensive coaches have changed to people with a very limited track record of designing successful rush schemes, and this season James is going to be getting a lot less help from the pass game than he did last season.

This has gone from a fairly good situation to perhaps the worst situation any RB could be in, and that doesn’t take long to show. Week one in Houston sees James get just five rush carries, and this is because by the time he gets his first one the Jaguars are already down 14-0. There are a few pass catches, but that’s not really James’s game, and this is an early demonstration of just what a great RB can do on a team this bad.

His expected yards per carry in this game given his blocking was 3.29. His actual yards per carry was five, which is an exceptional 1.71 RYOE per touch, over ten total RYOE in this game alone. There are 29 running backs with at least 100 carries that could not get that many over the entire 2021 season. James has done it on extremely limited carries, but couldn’t do any more because his team was hopelessly behind before he could even get into the game.

I think you’re already seeing why I’ve titled the article the way I have, but don’t fret. There are more examples.

Week three against the white hot 2021 Arizona Cardinals (who are going to start this season 8-1) sees the Jacksonville offence operate like this:

Very successful when rushing. Extremely unsuccessful when passing. James doesn’t really get going until the second half, but when he does he puts the team on his back, including one drive where there were no passes thrown en route to a touchdown that gives the Jags a 19-10 lead in the third quarter. From here however, James doesn’t touch the ball again until the Jaguars are behind 31-19 because of back to back drives of Trevor Lawrence incompetence.

When he does touch the ball it’s sick. 21 yards, then nine yards, then five more, but it’s just not enough to overcome what’s now a late fourth quarter deficit. Once again James tried, accounting for 25 yards over expected in this one game alone on a crazy 2.05 RYOE per touch, but when a QB turns the ball over four times, there’s just nothing a back can do to overcome that.

Those two are great examples of there being limited ability for a running back to help his team, but games like week four in Cincinnati are the real bread and butter of what I want to talk about today. Once again against the eventual AFC Super Bowl representative, the Jaguars are prohibitive eight point underdogs, just like last week, and just like last week they manage to hang in, but this time they allow James to control the game.

He gets seven touches in the first quarter alone, including the touchdown that opens the scoring at 7-0. The second quarter sees a 20 yard run that gets James 18 yards over expected on one play because there were Bengals in the backfield, and in general things are going well. The Jaguars are up 14-0, and it seriously looks like we’re going to beat the Cincinnati Bengals, which would be a big coup for this struggling Jacksonville bunch.

Unfortunately, as can happen when your offence is being dictated by a running back, a drive in the third quarter sees James being stuffed at the line twice in a row and before it even starts it’s already over, and this is all the Bengals need to get back into the game, tying it 14-14 before you can blink, and all of a sudden we’re in a second half dogfight with Joe Burrow and his Bengals.

The first play of the fourth does see James slamming his way into the end zone for a touchdown and a 21-14 lead, but there will be no more significant touches as the Bengals hold the ball for almost all of the fourth quarter and pull away with a 24-21 win.

It’s clear in the second half that the Bengals decided that James was not going to beat them, as his performance plummeted, but that should’ve allowed the pass game to pick up the slack. In many ways it did, with Trevor Lawrence having probably the best game of his nightmarish rookie season in Cincinnati, but it still wasn’t enough.

This has to already be becoming frustrating to the man who is clearly taking his year two jump right before our eyes. Even when he opens up the field so much that the horrendous QB that rookie Trevor Lawrence is can have a good game, but it’s still not enough to win, it must become extremely easy to wonder what the point of all this is.

Week five against the Titans nets James his most raw yards and most yards above expected (148 and 71, respectively) in a game on the season as he convincingly, definitively, and easily outplays Derrick Henry to make it crystal clear that there’s a new sheriff in this division. However, the offensive production breakdown looks like this:

Therefore, despite being ripped to shreds on the ground this is a fairly easy 37-19 win for the Titans, and now having fallen to 0-5 the Jaguars’ season is all but over. It’s great to hang in like they did against Cincinnati and against Arizona, but if you can’t actually win any of those game it doesn’t really matter.

I say that in an effort to foreshadow week six, where the Jaguars actually do get a win. It’s against the free falling Miami Dolphins, and it comes on a last second field goal, but it’s a win nonetheless. Once again James runs hot and cold, getting stuffed at the line a lot, and obviously can’t help on the two minute drill that wins the Jaguars this game, but on the whole with two runs of 20+ yards and an average of 5.56 yards per carry (including one rush that was called back by an unrelated facemask penalty, because this is an article about a running back. He gets credit for everything) against an expected average of just 3.58 yards per carry, this was another great day from James, and once again allowed the team to hide Trevor’s weaknesses a little bit.

It’s finally clear that if they find a weak enough opponent and can manage to hide Trevor Lawrence behind James just enough, that these Jaguars can win. Keep in mind that they hadn’t won since week one of 2020. That’s over 13 months ago now. There’s been a lot of losing in Jacksonville, and it helps to at last know that this team can win.

Little did you know, this is the end of our story.

In the very next game, week eight against the Seattle Seahawks, James has a 17 yard carry on the last play of the first quarter. He slams his foot into the ground trying to put the brakes on, and feels pain. All involve believe that he’s injured his ankle, and he will play no more the rest of that day.

Once everybody gets home to Jacksonville, James will be diagnosed with a bruised heel, and he will not so much as practice until the Thursday before week ten in Indianapolis. Even then, he will describe his heel as still hurting quite badly, and it’s clear in his play.

James Robinson will never be the same again.

After rushing for 138 yards more than expected (1.62 per touch) in the first half of the season, James will get nine RYOE in the second half (0.11 per touch). Any amount of positive yards over expected means he’s still an above average running back, but it’s not what it was. Look at this first half comparison between James and the 2021 league leader in total RYOE, the Colts’ Jonathan Taylor:

James is down in terms of raw yardage 138 to 183 on account of having 40 fewer carries, but on a per play basis he’s actually slightly better. With eight games left to go to catch up, we could’ve had a real race to see who the best RB in the 2021 season was, much like Adrian Peterson vs CJ Spiller in my last running back article. Instead, James bruised his heel, and look at this second half comparison:

Ouch.

Instead of a race, Jonathan Taylor is the NFL’s best back by a landslide, and things will only get worse for James.

James Robinson was an elite running back, perhaps the best in the NFL until the bruised heel happened. Even with this clear impediment, James was still playing like an above average NFL running back, until the unthinkable happened.

In a week 16 game against the New York Jets, James Robinson tears his Achilles tendon. As he’s carted off the field, we can all see him openly weeping, and I want to cry with him, because we all know what’s just happened. Over the course of just eight weeks, James has gone from one of the NFL’s premier backs to still being pretty good to no longer being a starting calibre NFL player.

He comes out in 2022 not as a bad player, but strictly an okay one. Zero RYOE on the dot means he can at least get the yards the line gives him (not a skill every NFL back has. There were still 27 backs with at least 83 carries in 2022 worse than James Robinson), but no more than that, and with second contract time coming up, there’s no reason at all to pick up a zero RYOE back, and so James was done.

He was still in the NFL in 2023, but registered a total of one carry, and currently resides on the Saints’ practice squad, so he’s not technically finished yet, but there’s one more thing I’d like to say about this 2021 season before I go.

Recall I showed the running back yards over expected vs results of the rush graph in my CJ Spiller article. Up and right is a great back with great blocking. Up and right is where you want to be. Up and left means great backs sullied by bad blocking. Down and right means a poor back carried by good blocking, and down and left means a poor back with poor blocking to boot. Look at where James Robinson is on this graph:

Even with all the injuries that happened in the latter half of the season, this is the epitome of up and left. You see, what I’ve neglected to share with you is that the up and left quadrant is almost entirely empty. This is because bad teams tend not to waste resources on great running backs. Below is the representative example of the 2018 season:

You see how the up and left great back but poor results quadrant is almost entirely empty? Every season looks like this. No season looks like 2021, but there James is all by his lonesome up there in the top left corner. James was an undrafted free agent. Imagine if he’d been picked up by the Cowboys or the Chiefs with those offensive lines. The league could’ve had a real problem on their hands.

Instead, James got to win a grand total of one game during his elite run, and that folks is why running backs don’t matter. During the era from 2006 to present where RYOE is measurable, there’s been only one other example (2010 Tim Hightower) of a man personally playing so well and getting such poor results for it. It just doesn’t happen, and yet here we are.

0.88 yards over expected per rush, and yet -0.18 EPA/Play per rush. The stats can’t decide whether you ought to give the ball to James Robinson every chance you get or whether you ought not to give him the ball at all, and this is the story with elite running backs on teams that aren’t elite. No matter how great they are it’s often times best not to have them touch the ball.

This is why there are no second running back contracts. If you’re in the position to be bringing in a big money back, you best make sure that you don’t put yourself in a position where it’s disadvantageous to have your big money man even touch the ball because he can’t go anywhere when he does. This excludes teams with bad rush offences. If you are in a position to be able to have a running back thrive, would you rather spend that money on your back and his half a yard over expected per touch or to try to improve your pass game to try to get your QB to move from his 1.5 yards over expected per touch to two yards over. This also excludes most teams with good rush offences.

That leaves us in the counterintuitive position of it only being optimal to give a back a big contract if your rush offence (meaning scheme and blocking) is good, and your pass game is already stacked. This covers all of the recent examples of second running back contracts. 2023 David Montgomery, 2021 Nick Chubb, 2020 Derrick Henry, 2020 Alvin Kamara, 2019 Ezekiel Elliott, etcetera.

All of these contracts feature a back going to a place with a rush offence that’s great and a pass game that’s stacked, or one that they thought was going to be stacked in the case of the 2021 Browns. Generally, the rule of thumb is that when every hole on offence is filled, then a back can get a sizeable contract, but never before.

All of this logic comes from this one James Robinson season, and it’s a shame for him that the Jaguars weren’t better. If they were, perhaps he’d be one of the best backs in the game with a second contract in his hand as we speak. Instead he’s a practice squad player on a team liable to miss the playoffs again. Such is the life of an NFL running back.

Thanks so much for reading.