College football fact or fiction: The curse of the 2,000-yard running back

Since 1988, there have been 25 college football running backs to run for 2,000 yards in a season but does that workload curse them for the NFL?

Since 1988, there have been 26 running backs to hit 2,000 yards rushing in a season. Wisconsin’s Jonathan Taylor was 23 yards shy in his freshman year of joining Ron Dayne, in that span to hit the 2,000-yard mark twice. Perhaps fittingly, Wisconsin has the most 2,000 yard rushing seasons in the FBS, four, and four schools have two 2,000 yard seasons. All of that is to say the 2,000 yard rushing season is a rarity. What Taylor is doing is unprecedented. Only five schools have had a 2,000-yard rusher since 1988.

Does the collegiate greatness these running backs achieve come at the expense of their professional careers? The logic behind that question seems pretty sound. Running backs, in general, have notoriously short shelf-lives. Their careers are often one injury away from ending, so it only seems logical there is a limited amount of tread on the tires.

So is it true? Are these running backs killing themselves for no money? Are their coaches enabling, or even encouraging, self-destructive behavior by way of the run? We can say, for certain, rushing for 2,000 yards in a season does not guarantee career suicide. But, as with most things in life, it is hard to say what effect running for 2,000 yards in college does to a player’s NFL career.

In a perfect world, we would randomly assign running backs into two categories: 2,000-plus yard rushers and non-2,000-plus yard rushers. We can’t do that, however, and so we have to settle into this lousy second-best (at best) statistical world we live in.

We have before and after statistics. That is, we know what a player looks like in college, and we know what he looks like in the NFL. We also know there is some correlation between the two, but it isn’t one-to-one and being good in college does not mean a player will be good in the NFL.

The point is, we know greatness with the benefit of hindsight, but anyone who tells you they know with 100 percent certainty any particular player will be a home-run coming out of college is delusional. Or a liar. Or both. Just remember, one team was so bad at judging talent and understanding the idea of the value they forced one of the best quarterbacks to come out of college — a sure thing — into early retirement by surrounding him with just enough talent to get him ground into a pulp every season.

And what does it mean to be successful? Is it a long NFL career? Or is it a short, but impactful one? What if we counted Super Bowl rings? Barry Sanders — a 2,000-yard rusher in college, by the way — wouldn’t be considered a great running back, and that is just silly.

Let’s talk about NFL success first, since it is the easiest to address. The fine folks at Pro-Football-Reference have a very helpful tool to help us understand success in the NFL. They call it approximate value (AV), and it is wonderful and succinct and statistically reasonable and what will be used to evaluate professional performance by our 2,000-yard rushers.

Now we need to find out what it means to be an NFL-worthy running back and why running for 2,000 yards in a season might be damning. Is there anything magical about 2,000 yards, per se? No. Consider Usain Bolt, who ran (maybe still runs, no judging here) the 100-meter and 200-meter dashes.

Presumably, throughout the training and competing in a given year, Bolt ran more than 20 100-meter dashes or 10 200-meter dashes (or some combination thereof). And yet Bolt kept winning as his career progressed. So it is definitely not the distance that could be hazardous to running back’s career prospects. It must be something about the way the running back goes about getting those yards (a point to which you must all be saying, “duh.”)

But even then, all yards aren’t the same. Let’s compare two five-yard runs:

• The ball is snapped at the team’s own 25 yard-line and handed off to the running back on dive play between the center and guard. He is tackled at the 30 yard-line. Five yard gain.
• The ball is snapped at the opponent’s five yard-line. The quarterback fakes a fullback dive, only to pitch it to the halfback. The defense sold-out to stop the dive play and the halfback waltzes into the end zone, untouched. Five yard gain.

Both show up as five yards in the player’s 2,000-yard season, but presumably, the first example causes more wear and tear than the second. We don’t have a good statistic that addresses that at the collegiate level, but if we did, we would probably be better able to address the root question of the 2,000-yard season. So here, we are going to use yards-per-carry (YPC) as a proxy. It’s rough and extremely imprecise, but it will have to do for now.

Even still, that isn’t quite enough. Those stats are just accumulations, irrespective of the opponent and don’t really give us an idea of the player’s underlying talent. To address that, we are going to look at the 247Sports composite rankings, when available. Unfortunately, we only have those rankings for 15 of our 25 players.

That’s a whole lot of qualifying and explaining, so let’s go ahead and dive into the data to see what we find.

The 2,000-yard club

There are also some very, very notable members of the 2,000-yard club. Barry Sanders, who rushed for 2,628 yards in 1988, averaging 5.02 YPC, is one of them. His weighted career AV is 121. He is also in Canton and probably the most fun running back to watch on YouTube this side of Marshawn Lynch. There is also LaDainian “Fantasy Football Gawd” Tomlinson, who rushed for 2,158 yards in 2000, averaging 5.85 YPC.

There are also some very notable NFL duds in the 2,000-yard club. Kevin Smith rushed for 2,567 yards in 2007 for UCF. His weighted career AV was 19. Then there is maybe the most famous bust, Ron Dayne, who rushed for 2,000 yards twice, was drafted 11th overall, and accrued a weighted career AV of only 22.

All but one player, Damien Anderson from Northwestern, who entered the 2,000-yard club in the last 30 years was drafted. The latest player picked was Donnel Pumphrey out of San Diego State, who went 132nd. He rushed for 2,133 yards in 2016, averaging 6.11 YPC. More on him in a bit.

Taking the 2,000-yard club as a group, the average weighted career AV (a slight difference from the sum of season AVs), is 31, which is more than double than the weighted career AV of all drafted running backs, which is about 15. If we limit our sample to players who accrued any AV at all, the average increases to 18. That’s a small cut against the “you’re doomed!” angle but is by no means conclusive.

So let’s take an important step now and say a running back is successful if he puts up a more weighted career AV than the average drafted running back.

Talent

The 247Sports recruiting database only goes back to 1999, but it is a really helpful tool in understanding the raw talent running back might have. They aggregate the collective evaluations of high school scouting sites of each player. Sure, these evaluations are objective, but they should be fairly consistent from year-to-year, meaning a two-star player in 2007 should be close to a two-star player in 2017, in terms of potential.

On average, members of the 2,000-yard club had over three stars coming out of high school. The highest-rated of which was Heisman winner Derrick Henry. The lowest were two-stars Matt Forte and Smith. Unfortunately, Sanders predates the database, but we can only assume he earned more stars than the Milky Way.

In total, there is one five-star player, three four-star players, nine three-star players, and two two-star players.

Here is where things get a little tricky. Seven of the rated players are currently active, so their career weighted AV will be skewed down because they are still building up stats. Christian McCaffrey rushed for 2,019 yards in 2015. He was a four-star athlete and, thus far, his weighted career AV is 25. That’s below average for the 2,000-yard club, but he almost certainly will not stop there.

Let’s look at the weighted career AVs by prospect rating, for players who are no longer active. That limits us to the three and two-star players. One out of five retired three-star players outperformed the 2,000-yard club weighted career average, while three of those five outperformed the average drafted running back. As for two-star players, Matt Forte beats the 2,000 club average and the drafted running backs, while Kevin Smith only beats the drafted backs.

Looking at our guys still playing, McCaffrey, Henry, and Melvin Gordon all look poised to be successful, relative to the 2,000-yard club. It is way to soon to say about Bryce Love, who is a former four-star guy, although he’s hurt and playing for a team can’t help but hurt its players, so there’s that.

Easier yards

What about wear and tear? Relative to an average player, all of our 2,000-yard club guys average more yards per carry. But what about within the 2,000-yard club?

Let’s say anyone within the club that has above average yards per carry for a 2,000-yarder is an “efficient” rusher. Efficient rushers should have less wear and tear leaving college, and therefore must end up being better players in the NFL, right? Not really. The relationship actually appears to be the opposite. Inefficient rushers tend to have higher career weighted AVs than efficient rushers (a negative correlation).

Put another way, the more carries it takes to get to 2,000 yards, the better the player ends up being in the NFL. If the 2,000-yard club were a problem, we would really expect to see guys with higher workloads in college be worse in the NFL than those with lighter loads.

That’s a heavy blow to the curse theory.

What the NFL expects

Finally, this brings us to what, at the heart of it, is driving the question of the 2,000-yard curse. What does the NFL expect from these 2,000 rushers?

Generally, the NFL tends to get talent “right,” insofar as more talented players, on average get drafted earlier than less talented players, and vice versa. Are there exceptions to that rule? Holy JaMarcus Russell yes. But we still need to make sure when the NFL guesses on running backs, there is a trend toward being right. And that’s what we see.

To do this, we’re going to take the career weighted AV for running backs by overall pick. This is our expected performance. [Note: this is a simple average, not a weighted average.] We can then compare a player’s AV to the AV expected of him and evaluate where he lands. This is where there seems to be some merit to the curse.

Retired players in the 2,000-yard club underperformed 10 out of 16 times when it comes to meeting their expected AV based on draft slot. As a group, on average, they underperform their draft slot too. In total, retired 2,000-yard club members underperformed their draft slot by 374 points or 23 points per player.

That isn’t to say there aren’t steals in the mix. Sanders, Ricky Williams and LaDainian Tomlinson all outperformed other running backs drafted in their slot. Some of the active guys will also get there. Christian McCaffrey is primed to do it and Derrick Henry probably will too.

So is it a curse or what?

Probably not. The more realistic answer is excellent running backs rush for 2,000 yards in a season and mediocre running backs rush for 2,000 yards in a season. The “curse” is more than likely a result of increased expectations. Rushing for 2,000 yards is hard to do, especially in a short college season. As a result, we — fans, GMs, owners, players — increase our expectations of a player. We become somewhat blinded to the overall talents of the athlete.

Remember Donnel Pumphrey? The knock on him coming out of San Diego State was his lack of size and poor hands. That makes him a one-dimensional player. Ditto Andre Williams. Maybe 30 years ago you could get away with that but not today.

While it is really disappointing to teams drafting 2,000-yard rushers, that’s great news for the rushers themselves! Just think, you could be a less than NFL starter caliber player, but if you hit 2,000, you’ll get a shot. And get paid. That’s a good deal, all-in-all.

Now, this analysis can be done with a lot more rigor. For one, there is more data we can gather from the college level. We can add height and weight for each player, their 40 times and a host of other variables. We would definitely want to control for the type of offense their team ran and the quality of the defenses they run up against.

There are some very neat statistical tricks we can use to create a synthesized control group to compare our 2,000-yarder to. We can estimate the likelihood a 2,000-yarder would be drafted if he didn’t hit the 2,000-yard mark. If what we learned above is true, we would expect he would be less likely to be drafted. There is so much more we can do to answer this. And it would be a lot of fun, but it would take way more space than we’ve already used.

So no, 2,000-yard rushing seasons probably won’t be the end of the Jonathan Taylor. He’s a dynamic back running behind a stout offensive line. If he doesn’t make it in the NFL, it will probably be due to something other than the tread left on his tires. In the meantime, sit back and enjoy the ride. It’s a lot of fun.

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