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 running back’s decline; this figure includes NFL regular season totals, college totals and NFL playoff totals
- Yards per touch by NFL year — To evaluate which season we see the decline start (based on the yards per touch career average); figure will italicised
- Average number of touches per season — How many times did he touch the ball per season, on average.