C.J. Spiller stats: were the Bills too easy to game plan for in 2013?

As Buffalo Bills running back C.J. Spiller was working through an ankle injury, a decline in productivity, and the shattered expectations of fantasy football owners in 2013, Bills fans quietly and sporadically wondered if the decline was due not just to injury, but to a high degree of predictability that Spiller would end up with the ball when he was on the field. It turns out that that theory has a lot of merit.

In fact, Spiller may have been one of the easiest players to game plan for in the NFL in 2013. By the time the season was over, defenses could guess with 62.2 percent accuracy that the ball would be headed in Spiller's direction if he was on the field - because that's exactly what happened. Spiller played 389 snaps, and was either handed the ball or targeted via pass on 242 of those plays.

Among running backs that saw at least 320 snaps last season (there were 45 of them), only one running back was utilized more often when he was in the lineup than Spiller: Ryan Mathews of San Diego. In essence, that made Spiller the second-easiest running back (if not player) to defend in 2013. He finished the season with 933 rushing yards, averaging 4.6 yards per carry.

In the chart below, I've compiled the play time and intended target data for all 45 running backs that averaged at least 20 snaps per game last year. (Some of them were role players, while others, like Arian Foster, were every-down backs that only played part of the season due to injury.) You'll note that many of the players that ranked high on the percentage list (which takes the sum of runs plus passing targets, then divides by snaps played) had comparatively small sample sizes to some of the bigger-name backs in the league; there were extenuating circumstances for players like Spiller (injury) and Stevan Ridley (Bill Belichick's doghouse), as examples, that likely led to inflated figures.

Lest you be left wondering, Spiller played a fully healthy 567 snaps in 2012 and saw a combined 264 runs and pass targets, putting him at a much more reasonable 46.6 percent likelihood that the ball was headed his way that season. (He was a Pro Bowl runner that year and nearly broke the league record for yards per rush, ending the season at 6.0 yards per carry.) He saw only 22 fewer touches between 2012 and 2013 despite playing 178 fewer snaps, so it's clear that when he was available, Doug Marrone and Nathaniel Hackett wanted to make sure he was getting the ball.

Ideally, Spiller's workload will stay in the same wheelhouse, percentage-wise, as his 2012 usage, while his playing time increases dramatically in 2014. That will lead to a much more efficient player, and hopefully, an offense that is much more difficult to prepare for.