Saquon Barkley Pulls Out: A Thanksgiving Weekend Stat-tacular!

Thanksgiving preview article time! Should probably start with some Jordan Love passing splits. There are usually weird and fun, with Love ranking second or 39th in some wacky category. Everyone relishes a good Jordan Love (or loves a good Jordan Relish?) debate.

Love’s on-target pass rates are generally really low. Harping on that should get the Cheeseheads riled up!

Hmm, it seems Love’s on-target pass rate of 76.8%, per Sports Info Solutions, ranks ninth in the NFL. Ninth? That’s a perfectly normal place for the quarterback of a defense-first team dealing with lots of playmaker injuries to rank. No juice there.

Let’s head over to Next Gen Stats, which has a funky “Expected Completion Percentage” stat, as well as a “Plus-Minus” figure that compares the expected rate to a quarterback’s actual completion percentage. That could provide a fun/controversial split for Love, who has a habit of missing open receivers and throwing low-percentage moonballs.

Oh, bother. Love’s Expected Completion Percentage is 4.2 points higher than his actual completion rate. That’s the sixth-best figure in the NFL. He has been more accurate than usual this year. But not accurate enough to rank first (Sam Darnold at 8.8), which would make a fine article hook in its own right.

Eh, I will circle back later. Let’s rile up some neighbors.

Saquon Barkley Pulls Out

Is Saquon Barkley to blame for the Eagles’ (relative) offensive misery?

Not according to the stats.

Barkley averaged 3.8 yards before contact per carry in 2024, per Pro Football Reference: a very high figure. (Think about it: a running back falling forward for one yard the moment he is hit on every carry would average a Pro Bowl-caliber 4.8 yards per rush in this situation.)

This season, Barkley averages 2.3 YBC per carry, a rate much closer to the league average. These figures suggest that Barkley is a victim of weaker blocking, less effective play calling and/or even more stacked boxes.

Barkley averaged 2.0 yards AFTER contact per carry in 2024. He averages just 1.4 YAC per carry this year. So he’s not generating as much yardage on his own as he did last year. Yet, per Sports Info Solutions, Barkley’s broken-plus-missed tackle rate of 16.8% this year is higher than his 11.9% in 2024. Yards after contact can be distorted by a handful of breakaway runs, and Barkley indeed had a heaping handful of those last year.

Seeking deeper answers, I sorted Barkley’s rushing data every which way. It didn’t take long to find a startling split: Barkley averaged 7.2 yards per carry in 2024 on runs marked “left inside” or “left off tackle” in the SIS database. He averages 2.9 yards per carry on such plays this year.

Barkley gained 1,077 yards running left (including outside runs, not counted in the 7.2 figure) in 2024 but has just 277 yards running left so far this season. His splits to the right are far less pronounced: 928 yards to 407, 4.6 yards per carry to 4.2.

Sports Info Solutions keeps track of all sorts of run types and blocking schemes, including running plays where one or more offensive linemen “pull” (leave their gaps to block on the outside, essentially). Here are Barkley’s splits on every rush to the left featuring some sort of pulling-lineman tactic:

• 2024: 43 carries, 446 yards, 10.3 yards per carry, 2 touchdowns
• 2025: 13 carries, 51 yards, 3.9 yards per carry, 0 touchdowns

So the Eagles took a tactic that averaged 10.3 yards per play last season and all but erased it from game plans this year. CLEVER.

Add runs to the right and playoff statistics into the data and Barkley went 112-813-7.3-4 on pulling-lineman runs last season: 5.6 carries for 40.7 yards per game. This year, he’s 33-131-4.0-0: 3.0 carries for 11.9 yards per game.

I don’t think the Eagles have cut back on pulling-lineman tactics due to injuries on the offensive line. It looks more like a symptom of an offense that has a little less of everything: a little less presnap motion, less misdirection, less play action, less of an identity. (And yes, this can be a cyclical situation: an offense with few wrinkles that keeps going three-and-out, giving it fewer opportunities to introduce wrinkles.)

Here’s another notable example of the less-of-everything phenomenon. Barkley rushed 100 times for 435 yards in the regular season on plays labeled as read options last year: runs where Jalen Hurts made some indication that he could have kept the ball. Kenneth Gainwell went 21 for 76 on such runs, while Hurts went 27-96-3.

This year, Barkley is 18-77-0 on read options, while Hurts is 7-38-0.

Were read options de-emphasized for safety reasons? (Watches Tush Push) Probably not. It’s just one more thing that the Eagles don’t do very much this season. Even though it worked very well in 2024. And not nearly as much is working in 2025.

Watching Barkley run, however, I can only place so much of the blame of offensive coordinator Kevin Patullo or head coach Satan McVoldemort. One reason Barkley got four yards downfield before getting touched on his average carry last season is because of his sudden acceleration and jump-cut capability: sometimes he had a wide-open onramp to run through, but he also weaved his way through lots of traffic. There haven’t been many onramps this season, but there has also been less weaving.

Still, if the Eagles coaches are seeking new ways to get the running game going, I would start with a read option or two, and some runs to the left behind pulling linemen. Then I would consider seeing how Tank Bigssy performs on such plays once in a while.

Shocking Jordan Love Stats

Air Yards! That’s always a good Jordan Love conversation sparker. He’s always playing hero ball and taking too many downfield risks.

Let’s see … Love ranks 13th in average throw depth at 8.3 yards. Thirteenth? THIRTEENTH?

Wow, J.J. McCarthy ranks first at 9.5 yards per throw. Bet there’s a story there. But I can’t get distracted.

Ah, but there’s a difference between average throw depth and Completed Air Yards, a Next Gen Stats figure that takes all the 50-yard heaves to nowhere out of the data. Love ranks 21st in the NFL with 5.7 Completed Air Yards! I can make chicken salad out of that.

Or can I? There are lots of smaller-sample quarterbacks like Russell Wilson and Carson Wentz ahead of Love in Completed Air Yards. Josh Allen and Patrick Mahomes are below him. His figures are not that far below the league average. This is a bully pulpit that will splinter if I try to pound on it.

Speaking of Mahomes, maybe a Chiefs segment will spark some inspiration.

There is No Chiefs Slot Receiver, Only Travshee KelWorthyRice

Rashee Rice lined up in the slot against Kenny Moore in man coverage late in the fourth quarter of Sunday’s Chiefs comeback against the Colts. Moore is a solid slot cornerback, but Rice is a tough assignment. Rice ran a slant, Moore slipped, and the Chiefs were off to the races with a 47-yard gain.

Earlier in the game, Rice lined up in the slot against zone coverage and sat down between the linebackers in the middle of the field. As soon as Patrick Mahomes began to scramble, however, Rice slipped past the linebackers and into the middle of the field, where the deep safety was about 17 yards behind him and cheating toward Xavier Worthy’s side of the field. Mahomes spotted Rice and floated a completion that eventually netted 42 yards.

That Rice is one heck of a slot receiver! Except that he is not, really. Rice has lined up wide 92 times and in the slot 79 times since returning from his suspension.

JuJu Smith-Schuster is the Chiefs slot receiver. Or is he? Smith-Schuster has 125 snaps from the slot but 151 split wide.

Marquise Brown? Brown has 110 slot snaps but 195 wide snaps. So he’s not really a slot receiver, either.

It can’t be Worthy, right? Pure speed receivers generally line up split wide, as Worthy has 193 times this year. But Worthy also has 106 slot snaps.

We almost forgot Travis Kelce! He leads the Chiefs with 175 slot snaps, to go with 102 wide snaps and 151 snaps as an in-line tight end. So Kelce is the Chiefs slot receiver, tight end and WR4? It is tough to fill all of those roles. Fortunately backup Noah Gray (probably out with a concussion this week) has pitched in 73 slot snaps to go with 39 wide snaps and 122 traditional tight end snaps.

Let’s not overlook Tyquan Thornton, who filled in for injuries early in the season: 83 slot snaps, 145 wide snaps.

The Chiefs are the only team in the NFL with seven players who have taken 70 or more slot snaps, per the totals at Pro Football Focus. Most teams are not even close. The Cowboys, for comparison’s sake, have four players with 70+ slot snaps: Jake Ferguson (211), KaVontae Turpin (132), Jalen Tolbert (100) and Ceedee Lamb (96). George Pickens, a traditional boundary threat, has just 59 slot snaps. The Cowboys, like most teams, have some receivers who rarely venture inside, as well as tight ends who rarely venture outside.

The Chiefs are also the only team in the NFL with four receivers who have taken 100 snaps from the slot and 100 snaps when split wide. Rice may become their fifth player on Thursday against the Cowboys. The closest team I could find was the Buccaneers: Cade Otton, Emeka Egbuka, Sterling Shepard and Tez Johnson all have over 100 slot snaps, but Otton (a tight end) has lined up outside just 72 times.

The Bucs are mixing and matching receivers due to injuries. Given their druthers, they’d line Mike Evans and Egbuka up wide, slide Chris Godwin around and leave Tez Johnson on the practice squad. The Chiefs lost Rice to his early-season suspension and Worthy to injuries in Weeks 1 to 3, but they have been sliding receivers all over the formation for years.

Flexibility and interchangeability at the receiving positions has obvious advantages. The Chiefs were able to get the ball to Rice several times last Sunday without worrying about Sauce Gardner or Charvarius Ward. JuJu and Brown aren’t as good as their name recognition would suggest, but they’ll roast a dime defender if a defense gets too cute about twisting its defense in knots to match up with Rice and Worthy.

On Thursday, the Chiefs are likely to test lanky Cowboys rookie Shavon Revel to determine if he can tackle Rice or keep up with Worthy. And if the Cowboys play zone coverage and dare the Chiefs to search for a weak link, Mahomes and Kelce will find three or four of them.

The Chiefs offense quietly ranks third in DVOA. It may just be coming into its own now that Rice is back up to speed. Mahomes and company don’t have the whiz-bang Cheetah-fueled explosiveness of the early 2020s. But they still pose problems that few defenses are equipped to solve.

Shocking Jordan Love Stats

Pressure stats: they have never let me down! Jordan Love has surely done some goofy things under pressure.

Love’s 2.4 Adjusted Net Yards Per Attempt under pressure ranks 25th among quarterbacks with 50 or more relevant attempts. Gotcha!

Oops, no. Love’s numbers aren’t great under pressure — his completion rate of 41.0% ranks 32nd among 34 quarterbacks — but I am uncomfortable with the sample sizes for guys like Jayden Daniels and Dillon Gabriel. Also, Love has been sacked just 17 times on 125 pressures. That’s a very good pressure-to-sack rate.

Pro Football Reference charges Love with 19 throwaways, tied for third in the NFL. Considering the pressure he’s under, a throwaway is better than a sack or interception. Oh, and he’s tied with Mahomes.

It’s getting so you can’t rip a famous and polarizing quarterback for clicks these days.

Maybe Lamar Jackson and Caleb Williams can pinch hit.

Limpy Gimpy Lamar

Lamar Jackson ranks second to Matthew Stafford through Week 12 with a passer rating of 110.9. But Jackson has the third-worst sack rate in the league at 10.96%. Only Justin Fields and J.J. McCarthy have been sacked at a higher rate than Jackson this year.

Only three starting quarterbacks in history have recorded a passer rating over 110.0 and a sack rate over 10.0%:

• Bart Starr, 1966 (110.1, 10.12%)
• Russell Wilson, 2018 (110.6, 10.28%)
• Lamar Jackson, 2025 (110.9, 10.96%)

I’m comparing full seasons to a partial season and had to set the starter’s threshold way down at 150 attempts to include Jackson, which is a reminder that he was hurt early in the season and the sample size on his rate statistics is small and volatile. Still, it’s a little alarming to see late-prime Russ’ name next to Jackson’s on an oddball split.

(There also appears to be some weirdness in the Stathead database regarding Starr’s sack rate. It’s not worth a deep dive right now.)

I watched an NFL Pro supercut of Jackson scrambles and sacks in search of deeper truths about his sack rate. Veteran left tackle Ronnie Stanley is having a rough season. Whether due to injuries or age, he can no longer handle top-tier edge rushers. Offensive coordinator Todd Monken likes to use tight ends or fullback Patrick Ricard to block or chip on the edge, but that tactic has led to a few catastrophes.

Myles Garrett is responsible for 5.5 of Jackson’s 24 sacks, and the simple fact that 27.7% of Jackson’s pass attempts have come against Garrett’s Browns so far this season may be all the distortion that this small sample can handle.

Jackson is only averaging 5.2 yards per rush, however: his lowest figure since his rookie year. His longest run of the season netted just 19 yards. Jackson looks tentative on both scrambles and designed runs. He isn’t planting/cutting/accelerating with authority in the middle of the field. He now gets caught up in traffic. Linebackers sometimes bring him down in the open field.

Jackson’s on-and-off ankle injury is likely to be a major cause of both his high sack rate and his low rushing total. It is also very possible that he has lost a half step. Jackson is now a very capable pocket passer, and he has a step to lose, but the days of Jackson flirting with 1,000 rushing yards each year may be over.

Either Jackson’s sack rate or his passer rating will inevitably decline in the weeks to come. His sack rate may decline during Thursday night’s meeting with the defenseless Bengals.

It’s also possible that both figures will drop; central tendency does that to small samples. The Ravens would probably accept that trade-off. The Ravens can reach the playoffs with a less-efficient Jackson. They aren’t going anywhere without him.

The Cutlerization of Caleb Williams

Caleb Williams’ completion rate is 59.2%. Thanks to some Tyler Bagent cameos and trick plays, the Bears’ team completion rate is 59.3%. Only the Browns have a lower rate through Week 12. Yet the Bears are 8-3 entering their toughest test since early in the season: a Black Friday matchup with the Eagles.

Since 2010, only 20 teams with completion rates lower than 60.0% have won more than nine games in a season. Here’s the list:

• 2015 Panthers: 15-1, 59.9% (Cam Newton)
• 2013 49ers: 12-4, 58.5% (Colin Kaepernick)
• 2011 Ravens: 12-4, 57.7% (Joe Flacco)
• 2023 Browns: 11-6, 56.9% (Various)
• 2017 Ravens: 11-4, 58.5% (Cam Newton)
• 2014 Cardinals: 11-5, 56.3% (Various)
• 2012 Colts: 11-5, 54.0% (Andrew Luck)
• 2010 Bears: 11-5, 59.2% (Jay Cutler)
• 2010 Jets: 11-5, 54.9% (Mark Sanchez)
• 2019 Bills: 10-6, 58.3% (Josh Allen)
• 2015 Jets: 10-6, 59.9% (Ryan Fitzpatrick)
• 2012 Bears: 10-6, 59.2% (Jay Cutler)
• 2012 Ravens: 10-6, 59.6% (Joe Flacco)
• 2010 Chiefs: 10-6, 57.7% (Matt Cassel)
• 2021 Saints: 9-8, 58.1% (Various)
• 2016 Broncos: 9-7, 59.5% (Trevor Siemian)
• 2016 Texans: 9-7, 59.5% (Brock Osweiler)
• 2015 Texans: 9-7, 57.8% (Various)
• 2012 Giants: 9-7, 59.9% (Eli Manning)
• 2011 Bengals: 9-7, 57.6% (Andy Dalton)