Author: Ryan Wollersheim

MADISON – The NFL's end-of-season awards to celebrate the best the league had to offer in 2021 will be tonight at the 11th annual NFL Honors ceremony. There is no shortage of players who had outstanding, breakout performances. From defensive stalwarts like T.J. Watt and Micah Parsons to human highlight reels on offense in Deebo Samuel and Cooper Kupp, there are many candidates deserving recognition for their awesome individual seasons.

If the 2020 season awards taught us anything, however, it is that non-quarterbacks are virtually off-limits from consideration for the league's Most Valuable Player award. Therefore, perhaps none are more deserving of recognition for the league's Offensive Player of the Year award than the former Wisconsin Badgers and current Indianapolis Colts running back Jonathan Taylor. The second-year running back was the best at his position by a wide margin. Although his campaign was brought to a bitter end after late-season team disappointment, he has made a convincing case to be honored as the most outstanding offensive player.

Taylor was the engine that drove the semi-truck that was the Colts running game in 2021. His 332 carries accounted for 66.5% of the team's carries while his 1,811 yards made up 71.3% of its rushing yards. Beyond playing like the league's best running back, Taylor registered an NFL-best 2,171 yards from scrimmage thanks to an additional 360 yards on 40 receptions. This added receiving also increased Taylor's total touchdowns on the season from 18 to 20.

However, to say that Taylor is solely responsible for this production would be to ignore the five other players whose performances directly determine the outcome of any given running play: the offensive line. The Colts offensive line has been lauded over the past few seasons as one of the best units in the entire NFL, and with good reason.

Coming into this year, three out of five starters were multi-time Pro Bowlers. This includes left guard Quenton Nelson who, in four professional seasons, has been named to the All-Pro team every year except for 2021. His absence from this year's team was not entirely due to poor performance, however. Nelson came into the 2021 campaign fresh off foot surgery and later missed three games in the month of October while on injured reserve with a high ankle sprain. The guard would go on to miss one more game due to COVID-19 complications, all the while playing through a laundry list of injuries when in the active lineup.

This cycling in and out of the starting lineup was indicative of what the entire Colts' all-world offensive line went through in 2021. All five starters missed games in 2021 with three – starting right tackle Braden Smith, Pro Bowl center Ryan Kelly, and Nelson – missing at least three contests.

So, while Taylor routinely dealt with week-to-week inconsistency with the unit blocking for him, he consistently performed at an NFL-best level. While running behind an offensive line that had to mix-and-match parts throughout the year, Taylor not only led the league in rushing but his 1,272 yards after contact would also have led the NFL in overall rushing yards this season. Per PFF, he broke 65 tackles and gained a first down or touchdown on 31.9% of his carries. His 107 rushing first downs made him the first player to eclipse the triple-digit mark in this category since Shaun Alexander in 2005 (109 rushing first downs on 370 carries).

If that's not impressive enough, Taylor, according to NFL's Next Gen Stats, also led the league in rushing yards over expected (RYOE) with 481 and was third in RYOE per attempt with 1.48. The two running backs that finished ahead of Taylor in this category, Rashaad Penny of the Seattle Seahawks and D'Ernest Johnson of the Cleveland Browns, carried the ball for just 119 and 100 attempts respectively. This further reflects Taylor's irreplaceable value that took the Colts' running game to an elite level from start to finish last season.

Such value was never on better display than when the Colts turned to their superstar running back to help put games away late in the fourth quarter. A perfect example came in Week 15 with Indianapolis up 20-17 with 2:11 left in the fourth quarter against the New England Patriots. On 2nd and eight, In the middle of a desperate playoff push and with the fate of the season more or less on the line, Indianapolis turned to Taylor for the 29th time in the game. It was in this moment that Taylor showed his superstar abilities by taking the handoff to the left of a well-blocked defensive front hell-bent on keeping the Colts from rushing for a first down. Two Patriots defenders and previous All-Pros, safety Devin McCourty and linebacker Dont'a Hightower, were both in position to fill the gap made by the Colts' offensive line and limit the play for a marginal gain on first down.

Instead, Taylor made a perfectly-timed jump cut that caught Hightower, still flowing over into the sizeable gap, off-balance which allowed the back to break into the open field for a 67-yard touchdown that iced the game. Just one example of Taylor's greatness leading directly to a win for Indianapolis. The run went for 65 yards over expectation and would go down as just the sixth-longest such rush of the season. Taylor also accounted for the two longest rushes over expectation of the season, making his game-deciding run against the Patriots just his third-longest run over expectation of his season! Eye-popping plays like these seemed almost commonplace for the back in 2021 and helped vault Indianapolis in a position to make the playoffs with just three games left in the season.

Measuring the exact value such contributions have on winning can be difficult using traditional yardage metrics. A statistic that seeks to put any given play in perspective relative to the approximated winning value it brings to a team – based on contextual circumstances such as field position, down and distance, time, and more – is expected points added (EPA). According to rbdsm.com, the Colts' offense finished the season with a rush EPA of 0.060 – more than twice as much as the next closest team (Philadelphia Eagles, 0.025).

For further advanced context, the Colts were one of just five teams in the NFL to finish the regular season with a positive rush EPA (a reflection of the statistical bias towards passing rather than running the ball in the modern NFL). This was not the case for the Colts offense though as the unit finished with an EPA per dropback of only 0.061 – good for 15th in the NFL. This mark was due, in large part, to stretches of shaky quarterback play that was only exacerbated by inconsistent pass blocking throughout the season. Colts quarterback Carson Wentz was 16th amongst signal-callers in EPA per play and was 26th in completion percent above expectation (he actually finished two percentage points below the completion percentage expected of a theoretically average quarterback).

So, while the Colts' passing game existed in relative mediocrity, it was the running game, built on the legs of Taylor, that brought Indianapolis to the edge of playoff contention. In fact, Indianapolis was 0-7 in games when Taylor rushed for less than 100 yards and 9-1 in games when he eclipsed the 100-yard rushing mark. This lone loss came in Week 17 against the Las Vegas Raiders – a home loss that initiated a two-game skid for the Colts that ultimately prevented the team from making the playoffs in 2021.

This was a disappointing end for a team that rallied back from an 0-3 start to the season in which Taylor only rushed for 57 yards per game on an average of 14 carries. It's highly likely that without Taylor working as the team's bell cow out of the backfield, the Colts would have never even been in a position to fumble the playoffs away at the end of the regular season. Instead, the team likely would have been out of postseason contention long before their Week 18 demise.

Taylor played at a level worthy of a playoff contender but was unfortunately denied just his second opportunity at the postseason tournament in his young NFL career. So long as he continues this level of play going forward, it's very likely that he will have opportunities to return to the playoffs in the future. For now, distinction as the NFL Offensive Player of the Year would certainly reflect the type of play and impact Taylor had in 2021 as the force that kept the Colts on track until a late-season derailment.