Upon reaching 1,800 carries, Rushing NEP takes an even steeper fall the following season than both rushing yards and touchdowns. The same occurs when we look at rushing touchdowns.Īnd a look at Rushing NEP (normalized to each running back's best season) reveals the exact same trend as well. What we find is that, when players hit this mark, rushing yards take a sharp decline the following season, and only continues to plummet in every season thereafter. What this revealed was a very interesting and readily apparent trend when players reached the 1,800-carry milestone.

Rather than go into detail on what exactly NEP is, I'll let you read about it in the glossary, but in short, NEP is our in-house metric to measure a player's production above or below expectation. To find the point at which a player's accumulated workload begins to seriously hamper on-field performance, I then plotted the average career carries for this group of backs against their average rushing yards, touchdowns, and Net Expected Points (NEP) for each season of their careers. LaDainian Tomlinson (3,174 carries), Steven Jackson (2,743 carries), Thomas Jones (2,678 carries), Jamal Lewis (2,542 carries), Frank Gore (2,442 carries), Clinton Portis (2,230 carries), Shaun Alexander (2,187 carries), and Willis McGahee (2,095 carries).

This produced a list of the following eight tailbacks: To answer this question I first collected data on every NFL running back whose entire career fell within the past 15 seasons, all while accumulating at least 2,000 carries. If every collision in the NFL is 'like a car crash,' as some players have described it, then there's only so many carries and hits a player can take before they begin to break down and hit that point of 'planned obsolescence.'īut exactly how much is too much? At what point do the touches finally take their toll and push players into the twilight of their careers? The 1,800-Carry Cliff

At around this milestone, most vehicles will hit what many in the industry call a point of 'planned obsolescence', in which general wear and tear eventually renders a car unusable.Īnd when you stop to think about it, running backs in the NFL are a lot like cars. In today's world, the average lifespan of a car is approximately 200,000 miles.

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