『The NFL's Most Misunderstood Debate』のカバーアート

The NFL's Most Misunderstood Debate

The NFL's Most Misunderstood Debate

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32 teams. One season of data. The results are clear but the conventional wisdom about what they mean is almost entirely backwards. Teams that run more do win more. The reason why changes everything.Thanks for reading NET WINS! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.Every NFL offseason produces the same conversation: run the ball to win, or throw to win? Coaches talk about “establishing the run.” Analytics departments preach pass efficiency. Fans argue about whether their team’s 4.2 yards per carry is what’s really driving the offense.The 2025 NFL season data answers the question directly and then immediately complicates it.The Numbers That Start the ConversationLeague averages in 2025: 32.1 pass attempts per game, 26.8 rush attempts per game. Teams ran on 45.6% of their plays. Here is what those numbers correlate with when you line them up against wins:The run-heavy teams win more. The pass-heavy teams don’t. Yards per carry has almost no relationship with winning. And the single variable most closely tied to winning isn’t run or pass volume it’s how efficiently a team passes when it does throw.By the quartile breakdown:Five wins separating the most run-heavy teams from the least. That’s the difference between a playoff appearance and a top-five draft pick.Thanks for reading NET WINS! This post is public so feel free to share it.Why the Conventional Wisdom Is Wrong About What This MeansHere’s where the analysis has to be honest about causality.Teams that are winning run more because they’re already winning. When a team has a lead in the fourth quarter, it runs the ball to drain the clock. When a team is trailing by 14 in the fourth quarter, it abandons the run and throws constantly which is why losing teams accumulate high pass attempt totals and low rush attempt totals. The correlation between rushing and winning is real. The direction of causality is backwards from what coaches usually imply.The evidence: rushing efficiency (yards per carry) has almost no relationship with winning (r = +0.095). If running caused winning, efficient running should correlate with winning. It doesn’t. What correlates with winning is rushing volume and volume is dictated by game situation, not by a team’s philosophical commitment to the run.This matters because “establish the run” is a strategy that says volume causes winning. The data says volume reflects winning. They’re very different claims.The Actual Signal: NY/ANet Yards per Pass Attempt — passing yards minus sack yards, divided by total pass plays including sacks — correlates with wins at r = 0.688 and with points scored at r = 0.887.That last number is worth dwelling on. NY/A explains 77.5% of the variation in points scored across all 32 NFL teams. It is, by a wide margin, the strongest single variable in this dataset. Every point of NY/A translates to roughly 2.9 additional wins across a season:Wins = 2.851 × NY/A − 8.89The spread between the league’s best (New England, 7.7 NY/A) and worst (New York Jets, 4.3 NY/A) is 3.4 points a projected gap of 9.7 wins. New England won 14 games. The Jets won 3. The formula nearly explains the entire difference.Look at what happens at the extremes:NY/A ≥ 7.0 (elite passing efficiency):NY/A < 5.0 (poor passing efficiency):Every team with NY/A below 5.0 won three or five games. Every team with NY/A above 7.0 won ten or more. The Las Vegas Raiders ran the ball the least of any team with poor NY/A and still went 3-14. The Jets ran more than the Titans, Browns, and Raiders and still went 3-14. Running volume didn’t save any of them.The One Team That Proves the RuleThe New York Jets are the only team in the 2025 NFL season where yards per carry (4.6) exceeded net yards per pass attempt (4.3). Every other franchise generates more value from passing than rushing on a per-play basis universally, across all 32 teams, regardless of coaching philosophy or roster construction.The Jets went 3-14.This is not a coincidence. When passing is less efficient than running, a team’s offense has broken down at its most fundamental level. The Jets’ situation isn’t evidence that running is better than passing. It’s evidence of how catastrophically bad their passing game was, so dysfunctional that their mediocre running game was actually the more productive option.Is There an Optimal Mix?Once you control for NY/A statistically, run share adds almost nothing to win prediction (R² gain of 0.009, not significant). The mix doesn’t matter independently of efficiency.But here’s the wrinkle: among the four teams with NY/A ≥ 7.0, there’s a pattern. New England (50% run share, 14W) and Seattle (51% run share, 14W) run much more than the Rams (44%, 12W). The teams with elite passing efficiency who also run heavily win the most.This is almost certainly a game theory effect. A team that passes at a 7.7 NY/A rate but runs on only 35% of plays is giving the defense permission to commit ...
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