2009 Breakout Running Backs
(page 2)
Second year RBs:
As shown in the first part of this article,
second year running backs have about a one out of four chance of
having a breakout season. In 2008 Pierre Thomas is the only second
year running back who had a breakout year. In order to increase our
chances of finding the one or two 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 49 second
year running backs while only losing eight that did breakout. This
would have allowed us to find 14 breakout RBs out of 31 second year
RBs for a 45.2% success rate, a solid improvement over the initial
24.7%. The second year RBs that do not respect the criteria only
have a 13.8% chance of breaking out.
The potential candidates to breakout in 2009 are
Darren McFadden, Jamaal Charles, Peyton Hillis, Ray Rice and Tashard
Choice. Hillis and Choice probably won’t reach the 250 rushing yards
needed to be included in our analysis but McFadden, Charles and Rice
could be some good candidates but we will evaluate their situation
more in depth later in the summer.
Third year RBs:
Third year running backs are the most likely to
breakout with a 32.8% success rate if we apply the touchdowns
criterion. In 2007, DeAngelo Williams had an excellent season in his
third year and there will probably be some more surprises from this
group in 2008. 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 67 to 25, there are 14 backs that respect these criteria that
did breakout for a very impressive success rate of 56.0%.
In 2008, there are three
third year running backs that respect all of these criteria, two of
which are very good breakout candidates. Ahmad Bradshaw, Fred
Jackson and Michael Bush are the candidates in 2008 and if history
holds true, two of them should improve over their 2007 performance
by at least 25%. Bradshaw is now the number two RB in New York and
Fred Jackson could get his chance to shine early in the year with
the probably suspension to Lynch.
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