I posted this last night at Turf Show Times, and I thought I’d throw it over here too.
The decline of the RB position in the NFL
I started suggesting about a year ago that the Rams shouldn't value the running back position highly. Don't draft for the position with a valuable pick, don't sign an expensive free agent, etc. My reasoning relied on three points. First, the better teams in the NFL don't run as much as their peers or their predecessors. Second, the position doesn't provide value from higher rounds, from the individually talented backs. Lastly, the combined effect of a pair or trio of running threats is greater than an individual star.
I’ll try to make the case conclusively, but the comments should fill in the blanks and hopefully offer some counter-arguments, because my thesis is pretty radical, albeit simple - the running back isn’t that important to the modern NFL offense in relation to many other positions per individual value.
So in three posts, I’ll go through those three points and try to make the case. For this post, I’ll look at every playoff team in the last five years and look at their rushing situation. In part two, we’ll look at the top rushers and rushing teams of the last five seasons, and in part three we’ll take the draft-based approach and see how the highly drafted RBs fared over the past five years.
As always, any criticism is not just welcome, it’s helpful. Football math after the jump.
Just to allow everyone on the same page, here’s the data I compiled for this. It’s a bit messy, but it served the purpose. And while I wish I had gotten this piece out before them (since I’ve been working on this for a couple of weeks), NFL Network had a recent segment on the topic that I should include for some sense of fairness.
First, here's a chart of playoff teams from 2006-2010. Going from left to right, the x-axis goes from teams who exited the playoffs earliest to those who were in the Super Bowl. So for 2008, the orange line, the Colts, Dolphins, Falcons and Vikings all bowed out in the first round of the playoffs. The rightmost plotted point on the orange line refers to the Super Bowl teams, the Cards and Steelers. Vertically, the points refer to what percentage of yards the team gained through the ground out of their offensive yardage (no return yards included):
It's a relatively small sample size, especially for the conference and Super Bowl data because you've only got two teams. For example, the 2009 Jets gained more than half of their offensive yards on the ground (2,756 rushing v. 2,596 passing).
Still, the drop off from the last three years is pretty blatant: Super Bowl teams are relying on the pass much, much more heavily than the run. But that’s just pure yardage that shows over the length of a season, the passing game eats up more field than running. That’s obvious. A 10-yard pass is much “easier” to accomplish than a 10-yard run. But what about frequency?
The number of rushes versus the number of passes should give us an idea of how often teams rely on the run. That reliance should be based on some kind of success rate. If you pass the ball better than you run it, you’re going to pass much more often. If that’s the case, we should see that the superior teams pass the ball much more often than they run it in the modern NFL:
Again, you see some notable drop-offs from the conference level teams to the Super Bowl participants. Of course, you have a huge 2005 outlier in which the Steelers and Seahawks ran their way nearly off the graph. You've still got things trending downward toward a greater share of passes versus the run. So to simplify let's look at a couple different sets of data and then wrap this up. Let's break both categories, % of yards from the run and % of rushing attempts from total snaps, by 5-year intervals and decade according to playoff depth, and then just break each down year by year among total playoff teams:
Here’s where the movement 2005 until now becomes even more obvious. You can see the difference between Super Bowl teams in the last decade versus all other playoff teams: they’re passing heavier than everyone else. And not just that, but Super Bowl teams since 2005 are running less, and for less yardage, than all previous teams, previous Super Bowl teams included.
So here’s where I turn it over to you. You see the trends. And you’ve got the data. So what did I miss? To me, it’s obvious. The pass made teams superior to others since the late ‘90’s, and now we’re on the cusp of a defensive reaction that is centered on QB pressure. But that leaves the running back out in the cold. Is this enough data to support the conclusion?
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