The NFL requires a player to record 6.25 carries per game in order to qualify for the yards per carry crown. Using that cutoff, here were the leaders in yards per carry during the 2013 season.
| Game | Game | Rush | Rush | Rush | Rush | Rush | Rush | Rush | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rk | Tm | Age | Pos | G | GS | Att | Yds | TD | Lng | Y/A ▼ |
Y/G | A/G | |
| 1 | Andre Ellington | ARI | 24 | rb | 15 | 1 | 118 | 652 | 3 | 80 | 5.5 | 43.5 | 7.9 |
| 2 | Cam Newton* | CAR | 24 | QB | 16 | 16 | 111 | 585 | 6 | 56 | 5.3 | 36.6 | 6.9 |
| 3 | Donald Brown | IND | 26 | rb | 16 | 5 | 102 | 537 | 6 | 51 | 5.3 | 33.6 | 6.4 |
| 4 | DeMarco Murray* | DAL | 25 | RB | 14 | 14 | 217 | 1121 | 9 | 43 | 5.2 | 80.1 | 15.5 |
| 5 | LeSean McCoy*+ | PHI | 25 | RB | 16 | 16 | 314 | 1607 | 9 | 57 | 5.1 | 100.4 | 19.6 |
| 6 | Jamaal Charles*+ | KAN | 27 | RB | 15 | 15 | 259 | 1287 | 12 | 46 | 5.0 | 85.8 | 17.3 |
| 7 | LeGarrette Blount | NWE | 27 | rb | 16 | 7 | 153 | 772 | 7 | 47 | 5.0 | 48.3 | 9.6 |
Provided by Pro-Football-Reference.com: View Original Table
There is nothing special about a threshold of 6.25 carries/game (or 100-carries in a 16-game season). If the cut-off was lower, we could have had any of these players be the yards per carry king for the 2013 season:
| Game | Game | Rush | Rush | Rush | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Player | Year | Age | Tm | G | GS | Att | Yds | Y/A |
| Travis Benjamin | 2013 | 24 | CLE | 8 | 3 | 1 | 45 | 45.00 |
| Antone Smith | 2013 | 28 | ATL | 15 | 0 | 5 | 145 | 29.00 |
| Tavon Austin | 2013 | 23 | STL | 13 | 3 | 9 | 151 | 16.78 |
| Cordarrelle Patterson | 2013 | 22 | MIN | 16 | 6 | 12 | 158 | 13.17 |
| Michael Vick | 2013 | 33 | PHI | 7 | 6 | 36 | 306 | 8.50 |
| Terrelle Pryor | 2013 | 24 | OAK | 11 | 9 | 83 | 576 | 6.94 |
| Colin Kaepernick | 2013 | 26 | SFO | 16 | 16 | 92 | 524 | 5.70 |
| Russell Wilson | 2013 | 25 | SEA | 16 | 16 | 96 | 539 | 5.61 |
Provided by Pro-Football-Reference.com: View Original Table
The 100 carries threshold is arbitrary. It does a good job of eliminating quarterbacks, but not a great one: in fact, 8 of the last 16 players to lead the NFL in yards per carry using the 100-carry threshold were still quarterbacks (five by Michael Vick). Any threshold would be arbitrary, though, so what if there was a less black-or-white method to determining the YPC King?
Let’s look back at that 2013 season. Ellington averaged 5.5 yards per carry on 118 carries. Looking at that table, the season that really stands out is from LeSean McCoy. He averaged 5.1 YPC on nearly 200 more carries! Thought of another way, he had 196 more carries than Ellington and gained 955 more yards, an averaged of 4.87 YPC. That’s a really high average, and something that should be seen as a positive, not a negative, when determining the YPC king. [Brief disclaimer: I still don’t like using YPC as a metric to grade running backs, and I find YPC highly overrated. That said, that stats geek in me would prefer to use it in a more elegant way to rank players.]
In the 2013 NFL season, players combined for 13,871 rushing attempts that went for 57,795 yards, a 4.167 yards per carry average. All players other than Ellington combined to average 4.155 yards per carry, or 0.012 fewer YPC than the actual league average. Ellington was great, but his 118 carries can only move the needle so far. All players other than McCoy combined to average 4.145 yards per carry, or 0.022 fewer YPC than the actual league average.
The numbers, of course, are tiny, but but the magnitude is what I’m focused on. McCoy improved the league-wide YPC average by nearly twice as much as Ellington. Would this be a better way to crown the YPC king? The table below shows the league leaders in each season (and in each league) since 1932. The table can be read as follows. In 2017, Alvin Kamara of the Saints rushed 120 times for 728 yards, a 6.07 YPC average. The league had 13,755 rush attempts for 56,170 yards, or 4.08 YPC. The league YPC average without Kamar was 4.07. The next column is the difference between those two numbers multiplied by 100 — because otherwise, this table would have a lot of decimals! Kamara improved the league average by 0.0175, which is shown as 1.75 in the table below. The final column is pro-rated as if each season had 32 teams. This is irrelevant in modern times, but in non-32 team seasons, it’s a lot easier for one player to move the YPC needle, so the pro-rated column is necessary.
What do you think? Also, feel free to sort the table by any category you like: the final column arguably is the best way to view the best YPC seasons in league history.
