An Analysis of the Running Back Wall — 2022 Update

A couple of summers ago, I wrote an article about the “running back wall”, which is a name for the point where running back’s careers start to decline. While it was a good starting point, it was very far from perfect. The sample size wasn’t large enough, it didn’t take into account playoff touches and had some human error in some steps. In this updated version of that experiment, I tripled the sample size, included playoff touches, more data and ensured the calculations were done correctly at each stage.

In terms of the research, we’ll look at:

Yards per touch (NFL) — To use as the point where we can find his initial decline

Total amount of touches — Touches = hits, which is the #1 factor in a…