Analyzing Jimmy Johns

Jimmy Johns and his performance in 2006 was very much the hot topic of discussion last Fall. For months, almost from the first snap of the Hawai'i game to the end of the Independence Bowl, Darby v. Johns debates filled Alabama message boards and other mediums of football discussion. Of course, the performance of Johns is not purely one of past relevance for the Crimson Tide. With Darby gone, Johns has the most experience of any returning back, and his performance will likely be a key determinant of the success in our rushing attack in 2007.

Thus, I decided to break down John's performance in the 2006 season.

Just scratching the surface, using the standard statistics, Johns logged 66 carries for 293 yards, and thus averaged 4.4 yards per carry. He had one touchdown, and his longest run from scrimmage was 26 yards. Of course, the purpose of this blog is to go much deeper than anything you will find in a traditional stat-line, so let's start delving further right now.

For starters, I charted every carry that Johns had in ten games this season. The eight games included the standard eight conference games, the season opener against 11-2 Hawai'i, and the Independence Bowl vs. Oklahoma State. I chose to ignore the results from the Duke game and the Florida International game, mainly because both were such terrible teams (0-12 each), and many of the carries by Johns in both games came from the quarterback position where he was running Shula's variant of Meyer's Tim Tebow package, which does us little or no good in evaluating Johns' effectiveness as a tailback.

All told, in those ten games, Johns accumulated 51 carries for 274 yards. However, I decided to omit three of those carries for a variety of reasons (one was a halfback pass gone bad, another was a draw play on third and 25+, and the other was an intentional carry solely to move the ball to the middle of the field at the end of a half). Once adjusted for those carries, Johns carried the ball 48 times for 267 yards, thus averaging 5.56 yards per carry.

Impressive as that yard-per carry number may be, Johns' performance looks better the deeper we go.

Football Outsiders came up with Running Back Success Rate in order to take down and distance into account in whether or not a particular run is successful. Long story short, a run is considered successful if it generated 40% of yards needed for a first down on first down, 60% of yards needed on second down, and 100% of yards needed on third and fourth downs. Obviously, the higher the success rate for a tailback, the more he consistently picks up the needed yardage, and the lower the success rate for a tailback, he's less consistent in picking up the needed yardage. In the NFL, a success rate of 50% or higher is considered very good, while a success rate of 40% or lower is considered very poor. So how did Johns stack up? Of his 48 runs, 28 were successes, which means he had a whopping 58.33% success rate. Though I would imagine success rates for good backs in college football tend to be a bit higher than in professional football (due to greater disparities in talent between good and bad players), a success rate of almost 60% would be considered very high. Any time a player, at any level, can create a successful play almost 60% of the time he touches the ball, it's speaks highly of that particular player, especially when he does so with an offensive line as poor as the line we had in 2006.

Beyond that, Johns did an exceptional job of limiting negative plays. Football Outsiders, again, came up with a statistic to measure negative plays by tailbacks, called the Stuffed Rate. Technically, a back is "stuffed" if he gains zero or negative yards on first down, or if he gains less than one-fourth of the yards needed for another first down on second and third down. Using that metric, Johns was again impressive. Of his 48 carries, he was stuffed a mere 6 times, for a Stuffed Rate of only 12.5 percent. Again, a very impressive statistic that speaks volumes of Johns performance. On the whole, studies have indicated that backs that consistently gain positive yardage have a higher value than backs who are more boom and bust -- those who have big gains sprinkled in with several no gains and negative plays, and that seems to fit Johns to a T. All told, he consistently gained positive yardage at a very high rate all season.

Another thing to consider, largely on those lines, is how a few long gains can impact a back's average. In reality, a couple of very long gains in a season when a back has a relatively few amount of carries can change a tailback's yard-per-carry average by two yards or more (Tide fans may well remember when Santonio Beard averaged over 7 yards per carry in 2001 when that very thing happened). As a result, a few big gains skew the data to make it seem like a particular back consistently gained more yardage, when in reality he wasn't as good, but had a couple of big runs along the way (Again, Beard, 2001). You can get around that, statistically speaking, by capping the runs of more than 10 yards and just counting them as a 10-yard run. For example, a 75-yard run goes down statistically as a 10-yard run. So what effect does that have on Johns' performance? Again, Johns performs well here. Johns had 6 carries of 11 yards or more in 2006, and once you cap those runs at 10 yards, Johns ran for 224 yards on 48 carries, which still yields a yard-per-carry average of 4.66. Again, even when you cap the big runs to keep them from skewing the average, Johns still shows through as a consistent yard-gainer almost every time he touched the football.

Let's go one step further by categorizing Johns' carries by yards gain on each individual carry:

Negative to 2 yards: 14 times (29.17%)
3-5 yards: 15 times (31.25%)
6-10 yards: 13 times (27.08%)
11+ yards: 6 times (12.50%)

Again, Johns looks very impressive. Over 70% of his carries went for three yards or more, and right at 40% of his carries yielded six yards or more. Again, the basis is the same: Johns consistently gained good chunks of positive yards each time he touched the football with relatively few negative plays mixed in.

I, for one, have been a bit harsh on Johns and his performance in 2006. However, perhaps next time I should keep my mouth shut before I do a more thorough analysis. After analyzing his season much closer, Johns looked very good in 2006. Certainly, he needs to improve greatly on the fundamentals of being a tailback, but even with poor fundamentals, he still had a very solid and productive season in 2006. Much of that, of course, can be chalked up to Johns' amazing physical abilities, something everyone has gushed about since he stepped onto campus over two years ago. Without doubt, Johns has a lot of work to do off the football field, but on the football field he looked very good in 2006.

Judging by his performance in 2006, mixed with his amazing natural abilities, if Johns can get it together off-the-field and with his fundamentals, he seems to have the potential to be a truly great back.