NFL Betting: How Much Are Injuries To Star Running Backs Really Worth?

NFL Betting: How Much Are Injuries To Star Running Backs Really Worth?

September 26, 2020 – by Jason Lisk

Saquon Barkley is out for the season after a knee injury, at age 23 (Photo by Robin Alam/Icon Sportswire)

Christian McCaffrey and Saquon Barkley, the two running backs being drafted in 2020 fantasy football drafts before anyone else, both went down with significant injuries in Week 2. Barkley tore his ACL and is out for the season; McCaffrey has a high ankle sprain that will keep him out for multiple games.

From a betting perspective, how should the Giants and Panthers be valued going forward in games without their star running backs?

In recent years, a large segment of the football analytics community has focused on the idea that “running backs don’t matter,” and it often comes up when running backs are signed to a big contract extension.

Well, let’s dig into the data and examine the historical impact when star running backs miss games.

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Valuing Star Running Backs Who Miss the Majority of a Season

The first thing we have to do is try to define a star running back, and it’s not easy.

Stats in football don’t just belong to the running back (or quarterback, or wide receiver); they are the result of the interaction of everyone on the field. Nevertheless, better players do tend to put up better stats. With that in mind, our first test was to look at how teams who lost a key running back for most of the season did.

To do this, we looked at all running backs in the last 25 years who fulfilled the following:

Averaged more than 100 yards from scrimmage per game the previous seasonHad over 1,000 total yards from scrimmage the previous seasonPlayed in no more than 8 games in the season in questionPlayed for the same team as the season before

We opted to exclude retirements, injuries that pre-dated the regular season, and holdouts, for a few reasons. First, if we are trying to assess situations where a team has to react to a star RB injury during the season, including backs who retired or got injured before the season started introduces more cases where the a team could better plan ahead to address the loss.

Second, some of those injuries would have occurred at the end of the previous season, so rather than trying to decipher when exactly a player was injured, we just excluded RB’s who never played for the team the next season. That leaves us with 24 total cases.

Star RB’s That Got Injured Mid-Season

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