Listen to just about any interview with just about any head coach and you’ll hear a lot of the same things: “We need to establish the run; we need to stop the run; we need to control the clock.” These mantras have become ingrained in head coaches at all levels of the sport, but it’s particularly noteworthy in the NFL where there’s nary a coach that hasn’t spent decades with the game embedded in their lives. This is how the NFL has become an echo chamber where new ideas are dismissed out of hand while the prevailing ideals say that toughness and physicality are what wins in this man’s sport. “You’ve got to run the ball and stop the run.” If it worked in the 1970s then it has to hold true today.

Except it doesn’t.

Coaches point to this correlation between running the ball often and winning as all the proof they need that their theory holds up.

According to this graph, a team that runs the ball more should expect to win more. The correlation isn’t strong, but it’s there. The problem that many football guys don’t seem to realize is that this correlation is backwards. Teams don’t win because they’re running the ball more. They’re running the ball more because they’re winning.

To see how much influence running the ball and stopping the run have on winning games, look no further than these graphs from the 2017 season.

There’s no correlation between running the ball well and winning, and there’s no correlation between stopping the run and winning. In fact, teams with worse run defenses tended to be better overall in 2017 than teams with good run defenses. It’s a little quirk, but it goes to show how useless run defense is when it comes to winning games over the course of a season.

So if running the ball doesn’t matter then what does? The answer should be obvious given the climate of today’s NFL - passing the ball better than your opponent. Teams that have efficient passing games tend to win games. Teams that stop their opponents from passing the ball efficiently also tend to win games. Do both, and by golly you’ve got yourself a contender.

The first graph below shows how a team’s ability to throw the ball correlates with winning. The second shows how stopping the pass correlates with winning. The final graph is a comparison between net passer rating (team passer rating minus opponent passer rating) and winning. All of these correlations are much stronger than anything we saw in regards to the run game.

The net passer rating graph is the most telling of them all. 17 teams allowed a greater passer rating than they posted. 13 of them finished at or below .500. Likewise, only 2 of the 15 teams to post better passer ratings than their opposition finished without a winning record, and both of them were 7-9.

It is a simple fact that running the football is not a consistently reliable way of moving the ball. Looking at yards per carry will tell you that the average run goes for 4.1 yards, a comfortable gain that should set a team up ahead of the sticks. But a deeper look into play-by-play data shows that average to be far from predictive. The most common result of a run play is a 2 yard gain. The next most common result is a virtual tie between a 1 yard gain and a 3 yard gain. Over 57% of run plays go for 3 yards or fewer. Here’s the breakdown in histogram form:

Given that information, it’s unsurprising that run plays don’t put teams ahead of the down and distance very often.

According to Football Outsiders statistics:

On first down, a play is considered a success if it gains 45 percent of needed yards; on second down, a play needs to gain 60 percent of needed yards; on third or fourth down, only gaining a new first down is considered success.

Using this metric, we can find that 38.1% of run plays are considered successful. It explains why teams don’t have to be good at stopping the run to win. Eventually running the ball will put any team behind the sticks, and they’ll have to throw to make up for it. That ability to throw the ball makes all the difference.

It wouldn’t be fair to slander running the ball if we didn’t break down passing plays the same way. The most common result of a passing plays is naturally 0 yards, as incompletions happen more often than any specific yardage total. However, even with incompletions factored in, pass plays gain more than 3 yards nearly 50% of the time. Using the Football Outsiders metric again, we find that passing plays are successful 42.7% of the time, nearly 5% better than run plays. That’s even more impressive when you consider that 6.3% of pass plays come on either 3rd or 4th down with more than 10 yards to go. For comparison, here is the histogram for pass plays, with the 0 bar taken out because it’s so big it skews the rest of the graph.

All this isn’t to say that running the football should completely go the way of the dodo. Predictability is always bad, so it is important to toss in the occasional run play to keep defenses on their toes. However, advancements in play design and improvements in overall quarterback play have made the NFL a passing league. The best teams understand that fact and are willing to embrace it.

All information compiled using Pro Football Reference and teamrankings.com.