It is a football truism that the team that wins the rushing battle wins the game. The causation arrow also runs the other way, of course: the team that wins the game usually wins the rushing battle.

Since 1950, how successful were teams that won the rushing battle? Those teams won 72.9% of the time. That number is 72.7% since 1970, 71.9% since 1990, 71.3% since 2002, and 70.5% over the last 10 years. And the numbers are nearly identical, of course, if we ask the question the other way (among teams that won, how often did they win the rushing battle?).

Now, there are obviously key factors that drive both of these results: number of carries and leading late in games. The number of carries a team has is highly correlated with how many rushing yards a team gains. And the number of carries a team has is highly correlated with what the score margin is late in the game. And, finally, the score margin late in the game is highly correlated with how often the team wins the game.

That’s a few steps, but given the strong correlations, it makes it difficult to really evaluate a team’s rushing game and the causal relationship between rushing and winning. In a lot of games, you can see something like this:

Team that is winning late –> is team that runs more late in games –> is team that finishes with more runs –> is team that finishes with more rushing yards –> is team that wins.

But what if we flip the script and look at games where that’s not true. Specifically, I’m thinking of all games where the team that wins the game was losing at the end of the third quarter. In that universe, we have a much more even environment to examine the rushing game. For example, since 1950, there have been 2,085 games where a team was losing after three quarters and won the game. On average, those teams trailed by 5.4 points after three quarters, but of course won every game.

Now, what percentage of the time do you think the winning team — that is, the team that trailed after three quarters — won the rushing battle?

This isn’t just a rhetorical question. I want you to think about it. On average, over these two thousand plus games, the winning team trailed by 1.5 points after the first quarter, (4.6 to 3.1), by 3.8 points at halftime, (12.0 to 8.2), 5.4 points after three quarters (17.1 to 11.7), and then was ahead by 4.2 points (23.7 to 19.5) after the fourth quarter.

Knowing this, how often do you think the team that won also won the rushing battle?

I’ll give you another minute to think about it.

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The answer is 54% since 1950, 53% since 1970, 52% since 1990, 52% since 2002, and 53% over the last 10 years. On average, the winning team (since 1950) had 30.95 rushing attempts for 123.25 yards (3.98), while the losing team had 28.63 attempts for 114.01 yards (3.98).

Over the last 8 years, the winning team has rushed 27.36 times for 111.15 yards per game, compared to the losing team having 25.58 carries for 108.71 yards per game. But most notable, perhaps, comes in terms of first downs, where the winning team had 6.15 and the losing team 5.71.

What do you think?