Guest column by Lau Sze Yui
We all know the football analytics talking points: "Running backs don't matter," or "establishing the run is meaningless." But the football analytics community has tended to overlook questions about the correlation of passing and rushing offense that might change the way we see the running game. A better understanding of why pass offense and run offense correlate would lead us to a better understanding of NFL analytics in general.
To demonstrate the correlation, here is a plot of passing vs. rushing DVOA from 2015-2019. There is a pretty significant trend.