Week 14's 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 14.
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 14's results:
| Player | Position | Rating |
|---|---|---|
| Amari Cooper | WR | 100 |
| Derrick Henry | RB | 100 |
| George Kittle | TE | 99 |
| Kenny Stills | WR | 99 |
| Saquon Barkley | RB | 98 |
| Tyreek Hill | WR | 98 |
| T.Y. Hilton | WR | 98 |
| Tom Brady | QB | 96 |
| Ben Roethlisberger | QB | 96 |
| Rob Gronkowski | TE | 94 |
| Kenneth Dixon | RB | 92 |
| Frank Gore | RB | 90 |
| Andrew Luck | QB | 90 |
| Dede Westbrook | WR | 90 |
| Julian Edelman | WR | 90 |
| Robert Foster | WR | 89 |
| Austin Ekeler | RB | 88 |
| Derek Carr | QB | 88 |
| JuJu Smith-Schuster | WR | 88 |
| Aaron Jones | RB | 84 |
- Amari Cooper didn't let Derrick Henry run away with the top performance of Week 14. Cooper reeled in 10 of 13 targets for 217 yards and 3 touchdowns in an overtime win over the Philadelphia Eagles to net a perfect score, his second 100 rating in the past three weeks. Cooper has the Dallas Cowboys surging toward the playoffs and has more Reception NEP (59.43) than anyone else in the league since joining the Cowboys.
- Henry added 17.79 Rushing NEP on 17 carries (1.05 per carry, about a full point above the league average on a per-carry basis) with his 238-yard, 4-touchdown game against the Jacksonville Jaguars on Thursday. The highest mark of the season had been 13.57 Rushing NEP (Isaiah Crowell in Week 5) prior to Thursday. Henry had -2.90 Rushing NEP on the season entering the game.
- George Kittle hung 210 yards and a touchdown on the Denver Broncos this week, including 136 yards after the catch, per AirYards.com. Via NextGenStats, Kittle is second in the league in yards after the catch per reception among qualified players.
- Kenny Stills caught 8 of 9 targets for 135 yards and a touchdown in the Miami Dolphins' upset win over the New England Patriots. Stills did that despite just one deep target (16-plus yards downfield), which he caught for 43 yards.
- Saquon Barkley has been doing all he can for the New York Giants this season, and on Sunday, he turned 18 touches into 197 yards and a touchdown in a blowout win over Washington. Barkley has 1,124 rushing yards and 9 touchdowns on 209 attempts, good for 13.39 Rushing NEP. He also has added 30.21 expected points as a receiver (78 catches, 629 yards, and 4 touchdowns).