2010 Breakout Running Backs
(page 2)
Second year RBs:
As shown in the first part
of this article, second year running backs have less than a out of
three chance of having a breakout season. In 2009, Ray Rice, Chris
Johnson, Jamaal Charles, Jonathan Stewart and Tim Hightower all had
breakout years. In order to increase our chances of finding the few
that breakout every year, I added the following criteria that the
running backs must have respected in their previous season:
-more than 3.8 yards per carry
-less than 175 carries
These two additional
criteria eliminate 54 second year running backs while only losing 11
that did breakout. Since 1990, this would have allowed us to find 16
breakout RBs out of 35 second year RBs for a 45.7% success rate, a
solid improvement over the initial 27.3%. The second year RBs that
do not respect the criteria only have a 17.2% chance of breaking
out.
The potential candidates to
breakout in 2010 are Arian Foster, Bernard Scott, LeSean McCoy and
Shonn Greene. All four are likely to reach the 250 rushing yards
needed to be included in our analysis and all four seem to be pretty
good candidates to breakout. Foster, McCoy and Greene will all enter
camp as starters while Scott is behind only Benson who has been very
injury-prone in his career. We will evaluate their situation more in
depth later in the summer.
Third year RBs:
Third year running backs are
also excellent candidates to breakout with a 33.3% success rate if
we apply the touchdowns criterion. In 2009, Fred Jackson and Ahmad
Bradshaw were nice surprises from this group and there should be a
few more in 2010. In order to improve our success rate at finding
breakout running backs, I applied two additional criteria:
-more than 4.0 yards per carry
-less than 200 carries
These two additional
criteria serve the purpose of finding the running backs that showed
they could perform at a high level in their first two seasons but
never got their chance to be the feature back in their respective
offense. Although these criteria reduce the number of candidates
from 72 to 28, there are 16 backs that respect these criteria that
did breakout for a very impressive success rate of 57.1%.
In 2010, there are five
third year running backs that respect all of these criteria, many of
which are very good breakout candidates. Felix Jones, Jamaal
Charles, Justin Forsett, Tashard Choice and Tim Hightower are the
candidates in 2010 and if history holds true, three of them should
improve over their 2009 performance by at least 25%. Of this group,
Charles is the only clear number one RB but Jones, Forsett and
Hightower all stand a pretty good chance of starting as well.
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