5 NFL Red Zone Trends to Monitor for Week 3

The Clear Top Tier of Red Zone Backs

Through two weeks of the season, two players have set themselves far apart from the pack as far as red zone workload goes.

Todd Gurley and Alvin Kamara are not only the only players to have double-digit opportunities (rush attempts plus targets) in the red zone, but no player has even two-thirds as many opportunities as either of them.

The most for any non-Gurley and non-Kamara player so far this season is 8, while Kamara comes in second with 12 and Gurley paces the league with 18.

Gurley's domination is of little surprise -- his 72 opportunities in 2017 were second only to Le'Veon Bell, and the third place player was way behind him with 59. Kamara's mark also isn't especially surprising, as 2017 saw him and Mark Ingram both rank top-11, combining for 87. With Ingram out, Kamara is dominating the New Orleans Saints' backfield work all over the field.

Now part of this can be attributed to what their teams have done. The Rams and Saints both rank top-three in red zone snaps. The backs have also dominated in terms of their share of their team's work, though, with opportunity market shares of 47.4% (Gurley) and 46.2% (Kamara). Those marks rank sixth and seventh, respectively, in the NFL.

Also encouraging about this is that the only players with bigger market share are also dealing with very small samples -- none of the five players ranking ahead of them are on teams that have more than 16 total opportunities. No player finished 2017 with a red zone opportunity market share over 50%, and so it's far more likely that Gurley and Kamara (as long as Ingram is out) can keep up their paces than it is that the players above them will.

Ingram's return will assuredly cut into Kamara's touchdown upside, but for the next two games, Kamara should continue to offer among the league's best touchdown upside. For Gurley, it's not a surprise that last year's touchdown king has this kind of upside, but it's nice to confirm that he's not going anywhere, thanks to the big volume backing up his four touchdowns in 2018.