Week 7 games aren't over yet, so maybe the title of this article is a little misleading. It should read something like The 20 Best Offensive Players From the Thursday and Sunday Games in Week 7.
But that's not really a concise headline.
As you know, we like math here at numberFire. Our algorithms help tell a better story about sports -- they're able to dig through the nonsense, helping us look at things that matter on the court, field or rink.
With football, we love our Net Expected Points (NEP) metric, which measures the number of points a player adds (or loses) to his team versus what he's expected to add. Rather than counting statistics like yards, touchdowns and receptions, NEP looks at down-and-distance situations and field position and relates these instances to history. When a player outperforms what's happened in the past, he sees a positive expected points value on the play. When he doesn't, his expected points value gained on the play is negative. All of these little instances add up, then, to be a player's Net Expected Points total.
You can read more about NEP in our glossary.
Using a formula that compares individual single-game performance to history, the numberFire Live platform takes this Net Expected Points formula and assigns a rating to a player's performance. Each week, that's what we'll show here -- the 20 best ratings from the Thursday and Sunday games.
Here are Week 7's results:
| Player | Position | Rating |
|---|---|---|
| Kareem Hunt | RB | 100 |
| Marlon Mack | RB | 99 |
| Patrick Mahomes | QB | 98 |
| Dion Lewis | RB | 98 |
| John Brown | WR | 98 |
| James White | RB | 97 |
| Tajae Sharpe | WR | 96 |
| Mitchell Trubisky | QB | 93 |
| Trey Burton | TE | 92 |
| Matthew Stafford | QB | 90 |
| Zach Ertz | TE | 88 |
| Philip Rivers | QB | 88 |
| Tarik Cohen | RB | 87 |
| Tom Brady | QB | 85 |
| Josh Gordon | WR | 85 |
| Mike Evans | WR | 83 |
| George Kittle | TE | 82 |
| Carson Wentz | QB | 81 |
| Emmanuel Sanders | WR | 81 |
| Todd Gurley | RB | 81 |
- Kareem Hunt helped cement yet another top-20 performance on the year, as he ran 15 times for 86 yards and a touchdown (5.35 Rushing NEP), and caught 5 of 6 targets for 55 yards and 2 more scores (6.61 Reception NEP) in the Kansas City Chiefs' blowout win over the Cincinnati Bengals.
- Marlon Mack had the top performance entering the late game, as he totaled 159 yards (126 rushing yards and a touchdown on 19 carries plus 33 receiving yards and a touchdown on 2 catches). In sum, that added up to 7.23 Rushing NEP and 3.68 Reception NEP (10.91 Total NEP).
- Patrick Mahomes was hyper-efficient in Week 7, completing 28 of 39 attempts for 4 touchdowns and a pick. On passes traveling at least 16 yards downfield, Mahomes completed 4 of 6 passes for 100 yards and a score, and he was 7 of 10 for 4 touchdowns in the red zone. Mahomes has added 111.34 Passing NEP this season, which would have ranked sixth among all passers last season.
- Dion Lewis broke out across the pond in Week 7. He ran 13 times for 91 yards and had 64 receiving yards on 6 targets. He didn't score, but he added 5.35 Reception NEP and 3.91 Rushing NEP (9.26 Total NEP) to the Tennessee Titans' expected output.
- John Brown caught all 7 of his targets for 134 yards and a touchdown in a narrow loss to the New Orleans Saints. Brown generated 14.31 Reception NEP, adding more than 2.00 expected points per target (the league average is around 0.67). Despite the high efficiency, Brown had just 2 deep targets (for 33 yards).