Project 1: 2021 NFL Season Offense Research
An NFL offense has been a mixture of both passing and running the ball, however, as we look back at the 2021 NFL season I want to learn if teams favored one more than the other. From there I also want to learn which player passed the ball the most and which player rushed the ball the most.
Questions to Answer
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Was the 2021 NFL season pass-heavy or rush-heavy?
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Which player passed the ball the most? Which player rushed the ball the most?
The Data
The dataset I will be using is from Kaggle, it is listed as “NFL 2021 season offense data” this dataset was created by Minh Nguyen. The dataset consists of various offensive data from the 2021 NFL season including pass completions, rushing yards, receptions, passing yards and much more.
Pre-Processing the Data
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Looking at the data frame, there are some players listed that did not record any offensive stats, knowing this will not affect the data I remove those players from the data frame using the code below.
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We go from 712 rows to 652 rows which is good, and the rest of the data is correct no nulls and no mistakes, so we can end the pre-processing here.
Data Understanding/Visualization
To understand if the 2021 NFL season was pass-heavy or rush-heavy, I will look at the offensive stats to understand what teams relied on the most.
I look at total attempts at both rushing and passing and we also look at total yardage for both passing and rushing. We use the code below to process this data.
Looks like there were more passing attempts than rushing attempts and way more passing yards than rushing yards.
Using this data I make pie charts to compare the data from both passing and rushing attempts as well as passing and rushing yardage.
To understand which player passed the most we have to look at the quarterbacks and figure out which quarterback had the most pass attempts. I used the following code to help me find who it was.
No surprise here, in his 22nd season Tom Brady of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers leads all NFL quarterbacks in passing attempts.
Which quarterback led the NFL in passing yards?
Once again no surprise here Tom Brady of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers leads all NFL quarterbacks in passing yards.
Using this data I create bar graphs to show other quarterbacks in comparison to Brady in terms of passing yards and passing attempts.
To understand which player ran the ball the most we have to look at the runningbacks and figure out which running back had the most rush attempts. I used the following code to help me find who that was.
The running back with the most rush attempts was Jonathan Taylor of the Indianapolis Colts.
Which runningback led the NFL in rush yards?
The rushing attempt leader leads the NFL in rush yards, Jonathan Taylor.
Using this data I create bar graphs to show other runningbacks in comparison to Taylor in terms of rushing yards and rushing attempts.
Storytelling
Looking at the pie charts you can clearly see that the 2021 NFL season was all about passing the ball. In the 2021 season, there were over 100,000 yards passing compared to a mere rushing yard total of just over 60,000 yards. Of the total yards of offense in the 2021 season, 68% of total offensive yards came from passing the ball while the other 32% was rushing the ball. And of course, with a higher percentage of yardage, it means the passing attempts were higher with 56% of offensive attempts being passing attempts while the other 44% were rushing attempts. With this data, you can clearly see that the 2021 NFL season was pass-heavy.
According to the passing attempts leaderboard, we can see that Tom Brady leads quarterbacks in passing attempts with over 700 attempts. Clearly, we can see that the Tampa Bay Buccaneers like passing the ball. The passing attempts leaderboard can also foreshadow what happens on the passing yards leaderboard as we can see Tom Brady once again leads quarterbacks in total yards passing with over 5000 yards passing. From this data, we can clearly say that the player who passed the ball the most was Tom Brady. Some of the reasons he was the leading passer in the NFL were his receivers, they are stars on their own and possibly one of the best receiver cores in the NFL and also he had one of the best offensive lines in football, which would give him time to throw which is very important.
According to the rushing attempts leaderboard, we can see that Jonathan Taylor leads runningbacks in rushing attempts with over 300 attempts. Clearly, we can see that the Indianapolis Colts liked running the ball. The rushing attempts leaderboard can also foreshadow what happens on the rushing yards leaderboard as we can see Jonathan Taylor once again leads running backs in total yards rushing with a little over 1800 yards rushing. From this data, we can clearly say that the player who rushed the ball the most was Johnathan Taylor. Some of the reasons why he was the leading rusher in the NFL was his offensive line on the Colts, which is probably one of the best in the NFL and unfortunately, the Colt’s quarterback was very poor at passing the ball last year.
Impact
The impact of this research of the NFL offensive system. Can give teams a chance to see what makes a modern-day offense move the sticks and the research clearly shows passing the ball is the way to go. This can help teams make decisions on how to help make their offense more pass efficient. And this can be done in a lot of ways. For example, helping the quarterback with better receivers or helping the quarterback in pass protection with good offensive linemen. Or just getting a better quarterback to increase pass production whether that's through the draft or in free agency.
References
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NFL Logo Picture from NFL Website