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Peterson with a rare cameo by a good quarterback.

After a ten-year career with the Vikings, Adrian Peterson is now headed to New Orleans where he will get to play with Drew Brees.  It will be the second time Peterson has played with a Hall of Fame quarterback, after Brett Favre’s stint with the team beginning in 2009.

In ’09, the Vikings had a Relative ANY/A of +2.05, easily the best passing game the franchise has produced in the last decade.  In fact, the only other time in the last ten years that Minnesota had an above-average ANY/A was last year, when Peterson rushed for just 72 yards in three games.

Most of his time in Minnesota, though, the team’s passing attack has been below-average — or outright bad.  For example, in 2012, Peterson rushed for 2,097 yards.  That represented 17.9% of his career total, and it came when the Vikings had a Relative ANY/A of -0.94.  Overall Peterson has a weighted average RANY/A — i.e., the Vikings RANY/A in each season of Peterson’s career, weighted by the number of rushing yards Peterson had — for his career of -0.52.  Take a look.

Two years ago, I looked at which running backs played with the best passing games. I used the same formula described above, where I calculated, for each running back, his team’s average weighted RANY/A. I have re-run the numbers through the 2016 season for the top 150 leaders in rushing yards.

With an average RANY/A of -0.52, Peterson has the third-worst RANY/A of any running back in the top 20 in career rushing yards, behind only Walter Payton and Steven Jackson.

What do you think?

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