Air Force Football: What Does Losing Cole Fagan Mean For The Falcons Running Game?
The Falcons’ leading rusher is no longer with the team, but how significant is his loss for the Air Force running game?
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Does losing a big-time runner mean as much for a team like Air Force?
After releasing their post-spring football prospectus, the Air Force Falcons didn’t officially follow up on one of its most glaring omissions for quite a while.
Cole Fagan, the team’s leading rusher in 2018, was nowhere to be found on the depth chart, and it wasn’t until this morning that the program confirmed he was no longer a part of the Falcons roster. Given the helium that Air Force has received as a candidate to bounce back into contention for a bowl and perhaps more, Fagan’s removal would seem to be a very big deal.
Is it, though? I dove into a decade’s worth of numbers to try and come up with an answer.
1. By traditional measures, Fagan’s overall contribution was almost exactly average.
Air Force, of course, isn’t a typical team because they run the ball so often, and speaking strictly in terms of carries and raw rushing yards, Cole Fagan was right in line with what other leading rushers have done since 2009.
On average, the Falcons’ lead runner has averaged 178 carries and almost exactly 1000 yards, good for 5.72 yards per carry, which means that Fagan’s 5.39 YPC comes in slightly under what Air Force has typically received from its lead back.
2. In terms of team share, Fagan did do more work than the typical Falcons workhorse.
If you reframe the numbers by how production stacked up amongst the whole team, Fagan’s efforts do look a lot more critical.
Without adjusting for sacks, Fagan’s 185 carries and 997 yards represented 25.9% and 29.3% of Air Force’s totals, respectively. The former figure is the second-highest of the last decade, surpassed only by Jared Tew in 2009, while the latter sits behind Jacobi Owens’s 2014 (29.7%) and Chris Getz’s 2012 (30.4%).
It also happened to reverse a recent trend from the last two seasons, when the share of lead back carries fell to 17.2% and 16.7% in 2016 and 2017, the two lowest figures in the ten-year sample. Owens ends up being a fairly decent comp as a result, especially in the 2015 season where Air Force won the Mountain division crown; Fagan was a shade less explosive by Highlight Yards per Carry (how many yards earned after the first five yards) but had a better Opportunity Rate (52.4% vs. 39.6%), meaning he found himself in the second level more often than pretty much any Air Force back of note in the past four seasons.
Furthermore, when you consider that, per Pro Football Focus, Fagan was one of the conference’s best at either moving the chains or finding the end zone, that narrowly defined but critical contribution could be tougher to replace.
3. More advanced measures make the nice clean narrative murky.
To start, here are Air Force’s rankings by Bill Connelly’s Rushing S&P+ from 2009 to 2018: 90, 51, 30, 56, 69, 112, 26, 43, 44, 40.
Second, here are the Falcons’ rankings by Offensive FEI, a metric defined as “offensive efficiency adjusted for the strength of opponent defenses faced” which was created by Brian Fremeau, during that same time frame: 58, 20, 27, 66, 69, 70, 40, 36, 35, 33.
One thing you might notice right away is the significant decline from 2011 to 2014, which happens to coincide with the Falcons having a different lead rusher in each season. From Asher Clark to Getz to Anthony LaCoste to Owens, the diminishing returns — also seen in simple YPC, which fell from 5.66 to 4.46 — reflected a similar decline in the win column… excepting the ten-win 2014 campaign, which happened for a lot of other reasons outside of the run attack.
Owens, then, keyed a revival in 2015 but also established a consistency that has held in both OFEI and S&P+ despite similar turnover in the last few years. He gave way to Tim McVey, who led Air Force running backs in rushing yards but was actually outpaced by Arion Worthman in 2017, and McVey gave way to Fagan.
In other words, they’ve been in the situation they face now twice in the last ten years and seen different results, one positive and one negative, from the running game. If you want to throw your hands up at this point, feel free.
4. So should Air Force fans feel optimistic or pessimistic?
I think it’s worth noting that replacing carries at Air Force typically isn’t as daunting as it is at many other Mountain West schools. Alexander Mattison, for instance, had 58% of Boise State’s carries. UNLV had the second-most carries of any Mountain West team in 2018, and Lexington Thomas ended up with 39.5% of them. Spreading 15 carries per game among four or five other athletes isn’t terribly difficult.
For starters, tailback Kadin Remsberg could be primed to shine after posting the best Opportunity Rate (67%, six percent better than #2 Cole McDonald) among any Mountain West runner with at least 100 carries in 2018. Fullback Taven Birdow improved his own Opportunity Rate to 50% in limited playing time, and he combined with Christian Mallard to create eight first downs in 11 third-and-three-yards-or-fewer situations. Those three, along with Nolan Eriksen and Joshua Stoner and perhaps speedy sophomore receiver Brandon Lewis, are the starter kit from which Air Force can move forward.
In short, don’t count on the Air Force running attack being any less of a headache even without their leading rusher. In the last decade, their average rank by Rushing S&P+ is 56, so setting a top-50 benchmark seems reasonable. After all, they’ve done this before.
