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2010 Breakout Running Backs

Every year there are running backs that come out of nowhere and are amongst the best fantasy performers. Although the performance of the offensive line has a big impact on a running back’s statistics, I believe there are still certain statistical criteria that can increase the chances of finding a breakout running back. Over the past two years I have developed a set of criteria that help us find those breakout running backs and the success rate has been excellent. Over the past two years, 14 of our 19 predicted breakout running backs have beaten their average draft position and the average improvement of all our candidates was 45 points.

First of all I just want to clarify that I am using the term breakout a little loosely and I still include RBs who might have had a strong rookie season, struggled in their second season and had a solid third season. The two criteria that a running back had to respect to be considered a breakout running back are: 

-At least 150 points in a point per reception scoring system
-An increase of at least 40 points per 16 games or a 25% increase in points per 16 games.

Since 1990, there have been 88 running backs that had a breakout season in their second, third, fourth or fifth season out of a possible 375 which is equal to 23.5% of them. To qualify amongst those 375, the only criteria were that the player had to have at least 250 rushing yards and play at least 10 games in two consecutive seasons. The following chart has the breakdown of the breakout running backs by year:

As expected the most likely breakout candidates are second and third year running backs but there are still quite a few fourth and fifth year backs that do breakout. However, even for second year running backs, there are only 27.3% that do have breakout seasons so I decided to look at criteria to attempt to increase these percentages.  The first criterion I applied to all the running backs is that they must have had less than 12 total touchdowns in their previous season. By applying this, no running backs who did not respect this criterion were considered breakout running backs while 55 were not. This increased the percentage for running backs in seasons two through five from 23.5% to 27.5%:

I decided to take this one step further and try to find more criteria individually for each year to increase these percentages. Since we are dealing with relatively small samples, this is a little tricky and I had to make sure the percentages were real and not simply a random coincidence. To make sure of this, when looking for more criteria, I made sure that I used rounded numbers so that I would not have criteria such as fewer than 233 carries or more than 567 yards. The other rule I used is that I could remove players from my sample at both edges but not in the middle such that I do not have a criterion that says a running back must have fewer than 200 carries but more than 150. Although some of the criteria I will find may still be a random coincidence, I think that by using these two rules I will limit that chance.