The 'rushing crown' is awarded to the player who gains the most yardage on the ground each year, and this is what is often used to determine who is the best RB in the league. Yet, when a RB fumbles the ball after a 20 yard gain on 3rd down, we don't cheer for the 20 yards that were 'gained', we lament the 20 yards that were lost on the punt had he fallen down at the line of scrimmage. If we take fumbles into account -- who is the top rusher in the league?
Method:
The difficulty here is figuring out how much to penalize a player for a fumble. A fumble on a first down is clearly worse than a fumble on 4th down (assuming equal return yards), but we don't have access to this data, so this is difficult. We can try to approximate this by deducting how much the average carry would have brought us (~4.2 yards). We then tack on to this how much field position we lost had we simply punted the ball, which is roughly 39.5 yards.
The number of fumbles also seems to inflate the penalty, given the recovery of a fumble is roughly a coin flip. Thus instead of taking the total number of fumbles, we take 50% of the total number of fumbles.
We calculate adjusted yards per carry as follows:
- A.YDS = YDS - FUM * 0.5 * (4.2 + 39.5)
Using this formula we produce a new 2008 rushing leaders list:
RNK | NAME | ATT | YDS | A.YDS | AVG | A.AVG | TD | FUM | LST |
1 | M. Turner RB, ATL | 376 | 1699 | 1,633 | 4.5 | 4.34 | 17 | 3 | 2 |
2 | A. Peterson RB, MIN | 363 | 1760 | 1,563 | 4.8 | 4.31 | 10 | 9 | 4 |
3 | D. Williams RB, CAR | 273 | 1515 | 1,515 | 5.5 | 5.55 | 18 | 0 | 0 |
4 | C. Portis RB, WAS | 342 | 1487 | 1,421 | 4.3 | 4.16 | 9 | 3 | 3 |
5 | Thomas Jones RB, NYJ | 290 | 1312 | 1,268 | 4.5 | 4.37 | 13 | 2 | 1 |
6 | Steve Slaton RB, HOU | 268 | 1282 | 1,238 | 4.8 | 4.62 | 9 | 2 | 1 |
7 | Matt Forte RB, CHI | 316 | 1238 | 1,216 | 3.9 | 3.85 | 8 | 1 | 1 |
8 | Chris Johnson RB, TEN | 251 | 1228 | 1,206 | 4.9 | 4.81 | 9 | 1 | 1 |
9 | Ryan Grant RB, GNB | 312 | 1203 | 1,116 | 3.9 | 3.58 | 4 | 4 | 3 |
10 | L. Tomlinson RB, SDG | 292 | 1110 | 1,110 | 3.8 | 3.80 | 11 | 0 | 0 |
11 | B. Jacobs RB, NYG | 219 | 1089 | 1,023 | 5 | 4.67 | 15 | 3 | 1 |
12 | M. Lynch RB, BUF | 250 | 1036 | 992 | 4.1 | 3.97 | 6 | 2 | 1 |
13 | Derrick Ward RB, NYG | 182 | 1025 | 981 | 5.6 | 5.39 | 2 | 2 | 0 |
14 | Jamal Lewis RB, CLE | 279 | 1002 | 980 | 3.6 | 3.51 | 4 | 1 | 0 |
15 | S. Jackson RB, STL | 253 | 1042 | 933 | 4.1 | 3.69 | 7 | 5 | 3 |
16 | Kevin Smith RB, DET | 238 | 976 | 932 | 4.1 | 3.92 | 8 | 2 | 1 |
17 | B. Westbrook RB, PHI | 233 | 936 | 914 | 4 | 3.92 | 9 | 1 | 0 |
18 | Frank Gore RB, SFO | 240 | 1036 | 905 | 4.3 | 3.77 | 8 | 6 | 3 |
19 | Ronnie Brown RB, MIA | 214 | 916 | 894 | 4.3 | 4.18 | 10 | 1 | 1 |
20 | L. McClain FB, BAL | 232 | 902 | 836 | 3.9 | 3.61 | 10 | 3 | 0 |
21 | Marion Barber RB, DAL | 238 | 885 | 819 | 3.7 | 3.44 | 7 | 3 | 1 |
22 | J. Stewart RB, CAR | 184 | 836 | 792 | 4.5 | 4.31 | 10 | 2 | 1 |
23 | Willie Parker RB, PIT | 210 | 791 | 791 | 3.8 | 3.77 | 5 | 0 | 0 |
24 | Justin Fargas RB, OAK | 218 | 853 | 787 | 3.9 | 3.61 | 1 | 3 | 1 |
25 | Warrick Dunn RB, TAM | 186 | 786 | 786 | 4.2 | 4.23 | 2 | 0 | 0 |
26 | LenDale White RB, TEN | 200 | 773 | 773 | 3.9 | 3.87 | 15 | 0 | 0 |
27 | Larry Johnson RB, KAN | 193 | 874 | 765 | 4.5 | 3.96 | 5 | 5 | 1 |
28 | M. Jones-Drew RB, JAC | 197 | 824 | 737 | 4.2 | 3.74 | 12 | 4 | 2 |
29 | Sammy Morris RB, NWE | 156 | 727 | 705 | 4.7 | 4.52 | 7 | 1 | 1 |
30 | Cedric Benson RB, CIN | 214 | 747 | 703 | 3.5 | 3.29 | 2 | 2 | 1 |
31 | W. McGahee RB, BAL | 170 | 671 | 627 | 3.9 | 3.69 | 7 | 2 | 2 |
32 | Julius Jones RB, SEA | 158 | 698 | 611 | 4.4 | 3.86 | 2 | 4 | 2 |
33 | Pierre Thomas RB, NOR | 129 | 625 | 603 | 4.8 | 4.68 | 9 | 1 | 1 |
34 | Mewelde Moore RB, PIT | 140 | 588 | 588 | 4.2 | 4.20 | 5 | 0 | 0 |
35 | R. Williams RB, MIA | 160 | 659 | 572 | 4.1 | 3.57 | 4 | 4 | 2 |
36 | Fred Taylor RB, JAC | 143 | 556 | 556 | 3.9 | 3.89 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
37 | M. Morris RB, SEA | 132 | 574 | 552 | 4.3 | 4.18 | 0 | 1 | 1 |
38 | Fred Jackson RB, BUF | 130 | 571 | 549 | 4.4 | 4.22 | 3 | 1 | 1 |
39 | D. Rhodes RB, IND | 152 | 538 | 538 | 3.5 | 3.54 | 6 | 0 | 0 |
40 | Joseph Addai RB, IND | 155 | 544 | 522 | 3.5 | 3.37 | 5 | 1 | 1 |
41 | E. Graham RB, TAM | 132 | 563 | 519 | 4.3 | 3.93 | 4 | 2 | 2 |
The list ordering does not appear to change too drastically, but this is somewhat expected since most players fumbled about the same number of times (~60% of the players on this list did not fumble more than twice and ~80% did not fumble more than 3 times).
There are some noteworthy movers, however. Michael Turner is the 2008 rushing king and not Adrian Peterson, whose yards per carry drops from an excellent 4.8 to an average 4.31. NFC West running backs faired poorly as Stephen Jackson drops from 12th to 15th and Frank Gore drops from 13th to 18th.
On a positive note, running backs like DeAngelo Williams are now graded much more closely to Adrian Peterson. Instead of them being ~250 yards different, they are separated by ~50 yards. This makes sense to me at least. If the turnover battle is as big to winning football games as people say it is, we should take that into consideration before naming Peterson the league's best rusher.
References:
The data used above was taken from the 'rushing leaders' list from ESPN.com, meaning that players who were listed below 41 on the original list are not listed here.
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