In 2018, there were over 80 games where a running back had at least 20 carries in the game. How would you expect those carries to be distributed?

I don’t think you would expect him to have 10 carries in each half, or 5 carries in each quarter, or to average 1 carry every 3 minutes. I would expect a number of those carries to be at the end of the game, because these are games the team usually won (I also eliminated all games that went to overtime, to limit the sample to just 60 minutes of regulation) and running backs tend to get carries late in games when they are ahead.

That…. isn’t quite the case. Below are the average number of carries by these running backs over every minute of the game. It’s true that these running backs with 20+ carries in the game are often getting carries in minute 56, 57, 58, and 59, but not to an extreme level (also interesting although not surprising: there are very few carries in the final minute of the game; that’s because teams typically kneel in this situation).

The X-Axis shows each minute (minute 1 is the first 60 seconds of the game, and minute 60 is the final 60 seconds of the game). The Y-Axis shows the number of carries the average running back in this sample had in each minute of game time of regulation.

What do you think?