Running Backs Face Football Flaws: Truly Evaluating Rushing Statistics

The most misguided way to judge a run defense is to base it solely on the number of rushing yards it has allowed.

Say the Chargers allow Panthers running back Jonathan Stewart to rush for 150 yards on 25 carries in a game.  The initial, foolish reaction would be to say that the Chargers rush defense sucks.  I mean, c'mon!  They allowed 150 yards rushing.  That's terrible, right?  Not necessarily. 

What if Stewart had ripped a 75-yard run in that game?  That would mean that he really hadn't done very well.  If you leave out that 75-yard run, he rushed for 75 yards on 24 carries—an average of just over three yards per carry.  Not exactly amazing. 

Turns out the San Diego run "D" was pretty good.

This is why yards allowed by a run defense is such a deceiving statistic.  It counts those gigantic runs that sometimes turn out to be the only great play a back got all day.

Same goes for the offensive side of the ball.  Let's use something that already happened as an example—how about Jerious Norwood's performance against the Carolina Panthers last week. 

Norwood ran for 51 yards on three carries.  Was he really that good?  Not really.

He broke a 40-yard run in the second quarter.  It was by far the longest play of the day for Norwood.  Take that 40-yard run and a carry away from his stats, and what do you get?  Two carries for 11 yards—an average of 5.5 yards a carry.

Granted, that's still good.  But you have to think that his stats would have been even less impressive had he gotten a few more carries.

In other words, yards can increase much more quickly than carries can.  If a running back picks up 80 yards on one play and can't get more than three yards on any of his other carries, he really didn't do that well.  It just looks like he was good.

A rush defense can give up 110 yards to one running back.  But if 70 of those yards were a result of one long play on which one guy couldn't bring the back down, it doesn't mean that the rest of the defense—or even that one player who couldn't make the tackle—is bad.  It just means that the running back made one nice play.

In fact, let's say that those 110 yards were allowed on 15 carries.  The defense, except for that one long run, had only given up 2.67 yards per carry.  That's excellent.

Thus, a run defense that looked horrible at first may actually be great.   

The "yards gained" and "yards allowed" stats distort the talent, skills, and success of running backs and run defenses.  They are the most deceiving stats in football.