Travis Etienne is the exact reason why the DRBR is such a good tool to have. Last season, questions about his inefficiency as the season wore on came up quite a bit. A lot of people chalked it up to injuries, others to the offense, and some just felt like Travis Etienne wasn't the guy to continue to carry the workload. The only people that thought that are Tank Bigsby truthers, and they're all wrong anyway.
But the DRBR shows us that Travis Etienne was actually highly efficient for the entire year. Very good scores in yards after contact and receiving yards after the catch, and an excellent score in tackles avoided per attempt, show us that when Travis Etienne had the ball in his hands, he was making things happen.
Now, his yards per carry finished under four, which you never want to see for a running back because you should be able to get four yards per carry at the NFL level. But that tells us a little bit about what was happening with the offense. It means Travis Etienne was getting hit in the backfield or at the line of scrimmage quite a bit because he was making people miss and picking up yards after he made contact with people. He just wasn't picking up a whole lot of them because he kept getting hit at the line or behind the line of scrimmage.
Travis Etienne is such a dynamic running back that he was still making at least a little something out of nothing. Not only that, but he was one of the rare running backs last season that saw really good numbers all the way across the board. He saw good numbers in all of his volume categories. He saw good numbers in all of his dynamic categories, which is excellent to see because it means Travis Etienne is doing everything that we need him to do and he should continue to be a topic of conversation when discussing RB1s this season.
Now, I will say something nice about Tank Bigsby because I never have anything nice to say about Tank Bigsby. A 71 in tackles avoided per attempt is not a bad score. It's just too bad that other than that, Tank Bigsby is no good and he certainly isn't good enough to take the job from Travis Etienne. So I wouldn't even be worrying about that. Maybe a little less volume than we thought, but hey, if these efficiency numbers can keep up and he stays healthy, a little less volume probably isn't that big of a deal because he should still have really good upside every single week.
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