Change of Pace: USC Rushing Yards & Featured Backs, 2001 - 2009

by DC Trojan on Nov 16, 2009 12:29 AM PST Comment 4 comments

I don't know about you, dear readers, but I've had just about as much as I care to read about epochal shifts, historic beatdowns, and the like.

Shit, it's so bad Plaschke almost wrote a couple of paragraphs with more than two sentences yesterday. That's baaaaaaaaaaaad.

So. As we've been hashing over the offensive lacunae of this season, there's been some speculation that part of the problem is the "Running Back by Committee" approach to life. I decided to put together the stats for 2001 - 2009 (to date), to see if they told us anything. The graph is after the jump...

The challenge was trying to figure out how to display this - so what I did was to pick the backs per a given year that had combined to gain roughly around 60% of the net positive rushing yards and break out their contribution relative to the rest of the team. Generally that means we're specifying 2 - 3 backs per season:

(click to see this in a larger size)

What I took away from this was the following:

It's almost pointless to draw conclusions because 2004 and more so 2005 are such outlier seasons
Having more than two featured backs isn't an issue if you're breaking in new backs
The real issue season-to-season is continuity - generally when you see a back run for another season, with the exception of LenDale White taking one for Reggie Bush's Heisman chances, he increases his yardage
However, the last several seasons don't show a lot of continuity except for Joe McKnight
The last couple of years do show an emphasis on two or three backs, but not consistently the same ones were producing from year to year
Consequently, year to year the lack of continuity is not working for the team for overall production number, whereas the distributions don't bear out a view at the season-level of personnel rotation making that big a difference beyond prior years
While that doesn't mean that running back by committee is actually working in-game, that's a different kettle of fish to prepare and represent.

Thoughts and reactions?

0 recs | Comment 4 comments

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Comments

so basically we are on track for our ave. of 2000+ yards

Darn DC there goes that end of the world theory, notice all the slayers wanting and hoping for the big breakdown. But the Ruins don’t understand it is not what we do, it is what they have to do to get better. Sorry little bears we are not satisfied with just being better than you, we want to be in the Top half of life.

Please don't tell me what to do or think, what I might say is a personal opinion.

by so.cal.native1952 on Nov 16, 2009 11:52 AM PST reply actions 0 recs

Committee Effect

Great research and presentation Paragon, thanks.

SoCal I agree – the yardage produced by the Tailback Committee is huge and impressive. What is unquantifiable is how this constant rotation affects our offense’s ability to be comfortable with the running game and execute it superbly when there’s one down where a 3 to 5 yard gain is really desperately needed.

This season we are consistently unable to pull of those key running plays when needed, and we’ve shown some inability to do that to a lesser degree since the Bush/White years.

Paragon’s research shows the overall running game produces great yardage. I submit that in this case statistics do not show the key elements of the story – running back by committee hurts us in key yardage situations.

by uscdude on Nov 17, 2009 6:51 AM PST reply actions 0 recs