Syracuse Football: Jordan Fredericks Among Most Explosive Backs in FBS

Syracuse Orange running back Jordan Fredericks was one of the country's most explosive running backs last season... when he got the opportunity, that is.

Today, Bill Connelly provided data on every rusher in college football from 2015, specifically honing in on each player's ability to generate highlight rushes (carries of at least five yards), how that stacked up against total carries and how many yards they gained on highlight rush opportunities.

Confused? Here's a better explanation of these metrics from Bill:

Opportunity Rate. This is the percentage of a runner's carries that gain at least five yards. Like, Success Rate, it is a decent measure of efficiency, though it is quite difficult to get at a runner's efficiency without in some way gauging the success and quality of the offensive line blocking for him.

Highlight Yards Per Opportunity. I use Opportunity Rate instead of Success Rate here because it meshes nicely with my explosiveness measure of choice: Highlight Yards Per Opportunity. Highlight Yards are the yards that aren't credited to the line per the Line Yardage formula; you divide that by highlight opportunities (i.e. the number of carries going at least five yards), and you get a pretty clean, easy way of looking at how big a runner's big plays are.

Combine these two measures, and you get a nice look at how frequently a runner was generating big-play opportunities and how big those big plays were. That's the essence of being a good running back, no?

Of ball-carriers that amassed at least 100 carries of any sort, Jordan Fredericks is actually tied for 19th in the country at the most important metric: highlight yards per opportunity. The freshman gained 7.77 yards per play on his 37 big-play opportunities. He was within reasonable shouting distance of the 14th spot on the list (Georgia Southern QB Kevin Ellison), who gained 8.10 yards per big-play opp. Fredericks also had one of the lowest counts (37) in terms of highlight opportunities of those included in the top 100. The full top 25 is below.

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Fredericks wasn't the only player to run the ball for Syracuse, either, as you already knew. Below you'll find the full data for all Orange ball-carriers last season (sorted by highlight yards per opp).

Of the regular runners, Fredericks was far and away the most explosive, while Mahoney an Dungey may not have been as effective as we thought in those situations. In terms of quarterbacks with at least 50 carries, Dungey's pretty far down the list (47th) compared to the rest of the country -- so yes, there's something to him running less. Additionally, this gives some credence to Erv Philips moving to wide receiver. As much as we raved about his supposed explosiveness over the past couple years, the numbers don't back it up.

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Anything else you've noticed above, or perhaps within Bill's larger data set? Chat all about it below.