Yard share is the total amount of yards a player gained divided by the total number of yards gained by their offense.
The resulting % gives us a great idea at how useful a player is within their offense and how much the team relies on them to move the ball. I looked at Opportunity Share earlier and you can find those results here, but Yard Share is a new stat I’ve been tracking and it seems to have a stronger correlation to how good a player really is. Opportunity for carries and targets are great, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the player is great. We want players who can rack up yards as well as opportunities. What they do with their opportunities is what separates an OK player from a Great player, so yard share is a great way to identify these players.
Link to 2020 Projected Yard Share
Top 12 RBs in Yard Share (2019)
| PPR | Team | Player | RuYds | RecYds | Yard % |
| RB1 | CAR | McCaffrey | 1,387 | 1005 | 40.18% |
| RB8 | CLE | Chubb | 1,494 | 278 | 30.83% |
| RB7 | JAX | Fournette | 1,152 | 522 | 29.21% |
| RB5 | TEN | Henry | 1,540 | 206 | 28.30% |
| RB6 | MIN | Cook | 1,135 | 519 | 28.22% |
| RB2 | GB | Jones | 1,084 | 474 | 26.81% |
| RB16 | NYJ | Bell | 789 | 461 | 26.60% |
| RB13 | CIN | Mixon | 1,137 | 287 | 25.84% |
| RB4 | LAC | Ekeler | 557 | 993 | 25.41% |
| RB3 | DAL | Elliott | 1,357 | 420 | 25.19% |
| RB10 | NYG | Barkley | 1,003 | 438 | 25.04% |
| RB20 | DEN | Lindsay | 1011 | 196 | 23.84% |
9 of the top 12 RBs above in Yard Share finished as RB1s in 2019.
Mixon (RB13), Bell (RB16) and Lindsay (RB20) were strong RB2s.
The cutoff number of about 25% seems to indicate a strong likeliness of being an RB1. Of the 11 RBs over 25% yard share, 9 of the them were RB1s.
Target RBs over or around 25% yard share.
The (3) RBs to finish as RB1s and below 25% yard share are Alvin Kamara (RB9), Mark Ingram (RB11) and Chris Carson (RB12).
RBs 13-24 in Yard Share (2019)
| PPR | Team | Player | RuYds | RecYds | Yard % |
| RB12 | SEA | Carson | 1,230 | 266 | 23.71% |
| RB15 | PHI | Sanders | 818 | 509 | 22.11% |
| RB21 | LV | Jacobs | 1150 | 166 | 21.92% |
| RB9 | NO | Kamara | 797 | 533 | 21.77% |
| RB32 | WAS | Peterson | 898 | 142 | 21.72% |
| RB23 | IND | Mack | 1,091 | 82 | 21.55% |
| RB24 | CHI | Montgomery | 889 | 185 | 21.35% |
| RB11 | BAL | Ingram | 1,018 | 247 | 19.03% |
| RB28 | HOU | Hyde | 1070 | 42 | 18.25% |
| RB33 | BUF | Singletary | 775 | 194 | 17.52% |
| RB14 | LAR | Gurley | 857 | 207 | 17.25% |
| RB31 | NE | Michel | 912 | 94 | 17.18% |
RBs above 15% yard share should be considered strong bets to finish as RB2s or better.
20 of the top 24 RBs in yard share finished as RB1s and RB2s in 2019.
The outliers are Adrian Peterson (RB32), Carlos Hyde (RB28), Devin Singletary (RB33) and Sony Michel (RB31).
Next 6 RBs (25-30)
| Rank | Team | Player | RuYds | RecYds | Yard % |
| RB18 | ATL | Freeman | 656 | 410 | 16.63% |
| RB19 | NE | White | 263 | 645 | 16.10% |
| RB25 | TB | Jones | 724 | 309 | 15.54% |
| RB34 | PIT | Conner | 464 | 251 | 15.34% |
| RB26 | SF | Mostert | 772 | 180 | 15.03% |
| RB22 | LAC | Gordon | 612 | 296 | 14.88% |
Here we find Devonta Freeman (RB18), James White (RB19) and Melvin Gordon (22), our remaining Top 24 RBs in PPR from 2019.
23 of the top 24 RBs in PPR last year finished in the top 30 of yard share %.
The only player not to make the list from the Top 24 is Kenyan Drake, and this is because of his trade to Arizona. He would have easily made these lists had he been on one team, so I think it’s safe to say that Yard Share is a great indicator of determining who the Top 24 backs will be.
In the studies below, I selected the top 4 players from each team in Yard Share %.
Looking at the scatterplot chart above, players who are higher up and farther to the right are the ones we are hoping to draft. The higher up they are, the better the offense. The farther right they are, the more yards they accounted for within their offense.
The chart above shows the yard share % distribution for each position. If you can, envision your draft picks in four distinct buckets; early round picks, early mid-round picks, late mid-round picks, and late round picks. This chart breaks out the four distinct buckets, also known as quartiles, of player yard share %. The further right the quartile, the earlier players in that quartile should be targeted in drafts.
These dual axis charts demonstrate the total amount of team yards by the bar length and darkness along with the total number of player yards by the dot. The players are sorted by their yard % in order to illustrate how total yards gained by a player and the yard % of a player can tell different stories. Breaking these charts out by position allows us to see how much each player was relied on based on their team’s yardage output.
I’ll be using Yard Share % as a tool for my drafts in 2020 and I highly recommend you do as well. In tandem with Yard Share %, my 2019 Opportunity Report offers some useful knowledge on how carries and targets correlate to PPR finishes. Link to 2019 Opportunity Report.
You can find my 2020 Projected Yard Share’s here.
And my 2020 Projected Opportunity Share’s here.
Thanks for reading!
— Kyle
(data visualization courtesy of @jkheffernon)
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