Speed Kills…Right?
We’ve all heard the axiom: Speed Kills. Every GM assumes a fast offense equals a productive offense. Burners at receiver, a scatback who can't be caught, a QB who can escape pressure, and Offensive Lineman who are agile and quick off the ball — the second coming of The Greatest Show on Turf. As the draft approaches, we all salivate as those high SPD attributes sitting in the draft file. Surely having an Offense of Ferraris adds up to yards, right? So I pulled the average roster speed for all 32 Offenses and lined it up against total yards per game to see: Just how much does speed actually matters.
Short answer: not much. But with some big caveats.
The Fast Teams
Looking at the 2006 Average Speed for each Offense (see caveats, below) scouting data from the site, the Bills top the speed charts at a whopping 71.9, and they back it up with a solid top-12 yardage offense. But right behind them, the Redskins (2nd fastest) came in at a middling 21st in yards, and the Buccaneers — the 5th fastest offense in the league — were dead last in total yards. Meanwhile the Vikings and Lions, both Top 10 in speed, are also Top 5 in yardage, so it's not like speed is actively cursed. It just may not be the deciding factor people assume.
Here are the Top 10 Fastest Offenses and their Points Scored Ranking
Team Avg Speed Rank Points Scored Rank
Bills 1 5
Redskins 2 18
Falcons 3 13
Patriots 4 6
Buccaneers 5 27
Saints 6 29
Chargers 7 8
Vikings 8 11
Giants 9 26
Lions 10 3
The Slow Teams
This is where it gets funny. The Broncos had the least speed of any Top 10 yardage team on the board, sitting at 24th in speed but 1st in total yards per game. The Rams (30th in speed) were 3rd in yards. The Cowboys, the single slowest offense in the league, still cracked the top 10 in yardage. If speed killed, these teams should be struggling. They're not.
Here are the Top 10 Slowest Offenses and their Points Scored Ranking
Team Avg Speed Rank Points Scored Rank
Dolphins 23 24
Broncos 24 1
Texans 25 20
Eagles 26 7
Panthers 27 30
Chiefs 28 17
Cardinals 29 19
Rams 30 9
Browns 31 25
Cowboys 32 12
So Why Doesn't Speed Have More of an Impact?
At first these results were a bit of a headscratcher. But I soon realized it might be a data problem, not a football problem. In reading more closely I noticed that the way the site calculates "average roster speed" only pulls from whoever is ranked as the number one player at each position on your most recent depth chart. That means injuries, those quick little slot WRs, and depth don't factor in at all — if your starting HB gets hurt and a burner backup takes over, the speed attribute never updates to reflect it. Same for receivers: if your WR1 has a 93 speed but your WR2 and WR3 are both sitting at 99, it appears that doesn’t shows up in the average. Case in point — Broncos receiver Ronnie Brown is a 99 SPD rocket, but depending on depth chart order, he may not even be the one counted as "WR1" for this metric.
Honestly, I didn't realize that's how the number was calculated until I was halfway into writing this. Part of me wants to scrap the whole approach, manually pull full rosters, and build a cleaner speed metric that actually reflects who's on the field. But that's a much bigger project and I have to get to work. For now, this will have to do as a rough estimate to find a correlation between speed and performance.
Also, I was tempted to measure Offensive speed against points scored instead of yards, but went with yards for no real reason beyond it being the more "pure" offensive stat. And I started poking at this data a few days ago, before some recent trades went through, so a few of these rosters — and their speed numbers — are already a little out of date by the time you're reading this. But you get the idea.
The Final Analysis
Speed looks great in a highlight reel. But Speed on Offensive may not win many yardage titles. Maybe it's not "speed kills" — maybe it's "scheme kills," and speed just gets the credit.
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