December 31, 2012

Good, but not Chris Johnson good

There's a lot of loose talk about Adrian Peterson's fine season.  I was curious though - just a priori, does his outstanding 2012 campaign come up among the best rushing seasons ever?  I did little scanning at Pro-Football-Reference.com to find out.
  • First of all, I'm not interested in trick-or-treat backs, or guys who get hurt all the time.  A truly great back is there almost every game.  So I first limited the candidates to players who had started 14-16 games in the post-merger era.
  • Second, we want production, at least 100 yards rushing per game.  But we don't want 33 1/3 three yard runs, either, we want guys who get yardage in chunks, let's say 5 yards per attempt.
  • Running backs don't just run - the man has to be able to catch the ball, too, to be a great back.  Let's plug in a minimum of 30 yards per game.
And we're already down to seven seasons (link to query results):


Of these, the guy who really ran amok was Johnson, 5.6 yards per rush and 10.1 receiving.  If I had to pick one running back season as the best, that's probably the one I'd take.

But if you want two, Mr. Tomlinson is the only game in town.

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