Breaking Down the ‘Boys: Here’s why DeMarco Murray could break out vs. Rams

Cotton

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Breaking Down the ‘Boys: Here’s why DeMarco Murray could break out vs. Rams


By Jonathan Bales
jonathan@thedctimes.com




Jonathan Bales is a special contributor to SportsDayDFW.com. He’s the founder of
The DC Times and writes for DallasCowboys.com and the New York Times. He’s also the author of Fantasy Football for Smart People. He can be reached at jonathan@thedctimes.com. You can follow him @BalesFootball.

There’s been a lot of talk surrounding running back DeMarco Murray lately, not much of it positive. Most notably, Murray has been criticized for failing to break tackles and for his “straight-line” running style.

None of us are scouts, yet most of us already had a pretty good idea that Murray is a straight-line runner; he doesn’t make a ton of defenders miss in the open-field. But he has the three most important traits when predicting running back success: weight, speed, and pass-catching ability.

At 220 pounds with true 4.41 speed, Murray is a near-elite weight-speed combination back. Even if we judge running backs based on straight-line speed alone, look at the numbers.




Those figures become even more extreme when you add weight into the mix. Simply put, if you aren’t blazing fast (think Jamaal Charles or Chris Johnson), you better have size. And even then, running below 4.55 is almost a death sentence for running backs.

So what are we criticizing Murray for, really? One bad game? He’s been highly efficient over the course of his NFL career behind a below-average line, and as his 13 receptions this year show that he has added value as a receiver out of the backfield.

Projecting Murray in Week 3

One of the cool things I’ve been doing lately is using rotoViz’s GLSP model to project players from game to game. Here’s how it works:

A common refrain to hear in weekly lineup columns is something like “DeMarco Murray ran for 130 yards the last time he faced the Giants defense.” That seems like reasonable information to consider when setting your lineup, but it also has a fatal flaw. That’s just onegame. It’s a small sample.
The idea behind GLSP is that we take the search for games
against an opponent and make two changes to widen the search. We widen the search to include similar players and also similar defenses. So instead of just looking at DeMarco Murray against the Giants defense we would also look at Frank Gore’s game against the Giants defense. Gore and Murray touch the ball a similar number of times per game and they are roughly the same size. But then we would also look at Murray’s game against the Eagles defense. The Giants defense and Eagles defense allow roughly similar numbers to opposing RBs. All of this
searching is done with a simple algorithm that scores each matchup by similarity.

There are two reasons that this approach is useful. First, it works. It makes accurate predictions. End of story.

Second, it frames projections in a probabilistic manner. It’s like predicting the weather; we don’t know for sure if it will rain just like we don’t know for sure that Murray will run for 100 yards, but if we know that there’s a 70 percent chance of both events occurring, that’s useful information.

Using the app, here are Murray’s 25 closest comps for Week 3.


The average stat line for those backs is 65 rushing yards, 0.48 rushing touchdowns, 3.4 receptions for 29 yards, and 0.12 receiving touchdowns. That’s 94 total yards and 0.6 touchdowns, on average.

Using Murray’s comps as a guide, we can estimate the likelihood of him hitting certain milestones this week. First, the touchdowns:



You can see there’s around a 64 percent chance that Murray doesn’t score in this game and an 84 percent chance that he scores no more than one time. His projected yards tells a different story:



Of the five different subsets of total yards, the single most likely is 121 or more. Actually, based on his comps, Murray has right around a one-in-three shot of breaking out for at least 121 yards on Sunday.


And some of those players went for way more; there were two performances of at least 220 yards and seven with at least 160. That means that of the eight players who went for at least 121 total yards, seven of them actually totaled at least 160 yards.

None of this is to say that Murray is a sure thing to have a huge game, obviously. He could easily have a poor outing. But my guess is that we’ll see one or the other this week—either a dud or a big-time performance—and the odds say it could be the latter.
 

ravidubey

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Speed at RB is not as important as quickness.

Backs need to reach fast-closing holes at the LB level on almost every play. They rarely get in straight-line footraces.

The longer your stride the slower your acceleration and ability to change direction in crowded spaces. A higher center of gravity also makes this hard, and Murray runs high. This makes Murray more of a one-cut downhill runner. The Cowboys OL is not a good fit for this as the guards can't reach the second level consistently.

To mitigate this problem Dallas needs to 1) run by committee throwing different looks at the defense and giving Murray time to recover and 2) throw to their backs by design to spread the linebackers around.
 

Cotton

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Speed at RB is not as important as quickness.

Backs need to reach fast-closing holes at the LB level on almost every play. They rarely get in straight-line footraces.

The longer your stride the slower your acceleration and ability to change direction in crowded spaces. A higher center of gravity also makes this hard, and Murray runs high. This makes Murray more of a one-cut downhill runner. The Cowboys OL is not a good fit for this as the guards can't reach the second level consistently.

To mitigate this problem Dallas needs to 1) run by committee throwing different looks at the defense and giving Murray time to recover and 2) throw to their backs by design to spread the linebackers around.
Emmitt Smith agrees with this.
 
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