Three years ago, I wrote this post titled “Take Away His X Best Carries and He’s Average.”  I did the same thing last year, too. The idea was simple: Suppose you sort each running back’s carries in descending order by yards gained. How many carries would we need to take away from him to drop his production to at or below average?

There were 47 running backs last season who had at least 100 carries in 2017, those players averaged 4.08 yards per carry last season.  The best running back by yards per carry last season, by far, was Alvin Kamara, with a remarkable 6.07 average gain.  Kamara had just 120 carries last year, but he was remarkable at producing big runs. He had 13 carries of 15+ yards last season, an unfathomable (and unsustainable) rate of one 15+ yard run every 9.2 carries.  Kamara’s lofty YPC number wasn’t the result of one big run, which is often the case for a player with a high YPC average on a low number of runs: sure, Kamara had a 74-yard run, but no other run went for more than 25 yards.

In fact, if you removed Kamara’s 12 best runs, he would have still averaged 4.083 YPC, a hair above the 4.078 average among all running backs with 100+ carries.  So in order to bring Kamara’s YPC below-league average, you need to remove his 13 best runs of the season.

The next best player by this metric was Patriots RB Dion Lewis.  You might be surprised that Lewis — who had a 4.98 YPC on 180 carries — would be higher than Chiefs RB Kareem Hunt, who averaged 4.88 YPC on 272 carries.  All else being equal, this metric rewards players with higher averages on a larger number of carries. But that’s what made Lewis’s season so impressive: he averaged 4.98 YPC despite his longest run being just 44 yards, and his second-longest topping out at 31 yards.  Hunt had runs of 69, 58, and 53 yards.  Take away Lewis’s best 5 runs, and his YPC drops to 4.26; take away Hunt’s best five, and he drops below average to 4.04.

The table below shows for each RB how many of their best carries you need to take away to bring their 2017 YPC average below 4.08. [continue reading…]

As a rookie, New Orleans running back Alvin Kamara averaged a whopping 6.07 yards per carry, leading the league in that metric by just about any measure. But given the large amount of regression to the mean involved in yards per carry, what would be a reasonable projection for Kamara in 2018?

I looked at the top 50 players in yards per carry from 1960 to 2016, among players who had (1) between 75 and 175 carries and (2) had fewer than 15 pass attempts. There were 13 players who averaged more than Kamara’s 6.07 YPC average (based on 120 carries for 728 yards), and the group as a whole averaged 110 carries for 641 yards, a 5.85 YPC average. So this group was slightly less effective than Kamara. The next year? They averaged 115.3 carries for just 503.8 yards, a 4.37 yards per carry average. That’s a drop of 25%; if Kamara had a similar drop, he would be at 4.53 YPC next season.

The table below shows those 50 players plus Kamara, and how they fared the next season: [continue reading…]

There have been many great running back pairs in NFL history. The standard bearers when it comes to running back pairs both played in NFL at the time the AFL was born: Jim Brown and Bobby Mitchell in Cleveland, and Paul Hornung and Jim Taylor in Green Bay. Any great running back pair needs more than one season, but when it comes to just one year of dominance — since the AFL/NFL merger — I am not sure if any pair can top what Mark Ingram and Alvin Kamara of the Saints have done this year.

Kamara is currently 4th among running backs in fantasy points using 0.5 points per reception (the middle ground between PPR and non-PPR leagues) with 252.1 fantasy points.  Meanwhile, Ingram is just behind him in 5th place with 247.6 fantasy points (awarding 1 point for every 10 yards rushing or receiving and 6 points for every touchdown).  Todd Gurley, Le’Veon Bell, and Kareem Hunt are your top three running backs with 355.3, 303.1, and 261.2 fantasy points, respectively, and then Melvin Gordon (243.7) and LeSean McCoy (231.9) are the only other running backs with over 200 fantasy points.

So no matter what Kamara and Ingram do this weekend (and the Saints are playing for the NFC South title this weekend, so the incentive is there for them to do well), they will both finish in the top 7 among all running backs. And guess what: that has never happened since the AFL-NFL merger.

In fact, just 8 times has a team had two top-10 running backs over this time.  In reverse chronological order…. [continue reading…]