by Chase Stuart
on February 1, 2015
Bettis ran for only five yards on this play
Congrats to the newest members of the Pro Football Hall of Fame. You can read my thoughts on the candidates here; while this class is not exactly the one I would have picked, Jerome Bettis, Tim Brown, Charles Haley, Junior Seau, Will Shields, and Mick Tingelhoff were all outstanding players. In addition, Bill Polian and Ron Wolf were the inaugural selections for the Contributors spots, so congratulations to them as well.
The Bettis candidacy is an interesting one. Many want to focus on his underwhelming 3.9 career yards per carry average. But as I have written many times, I am not keen on putting much weight on YPC as a statistic. Brian Burke has also written about how coaches don’t view running backs in terms of yards per carry, but rather by success rate (which correlates poorly with yards per carry). Danny Tuccitto calls yards per carry essentially “a bunkum stat.” [continue reading…]
Tagged as:
Jerome Bettis,
Yards per rush
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by Chase Stuart
on August 9, 2014
Jerome Bettis is a polarizing Hall of Fame candidate. I’m on the fence with the Bus; I don’t think he’s as deserving as Steelers fans think, but he’s a more deserving candidate than those who mostly remember end-of-career-Bus remember. One thing I’ve heard from time to time about Bus is that he was the greatest “big” back of all time. That’s undoubtedly true, assuming you set the weight high enough. Bettis had an official playing weight of 252 pounds, and no running near that weight can match his resume. Cookie Gilchrist, Pete Johnson, Marion Butts, Christian Okoye, Natrone Means, and Mike Alstott had short bursts of success, but they can’t match Bettis’ longevity. Players like Jamal Lewis, Michael Turner, Larry Csonka, Eddie George, Jim Brown, Franco Harris, John Riggins, and Earl Campbell carried the “big back” label, but all were 10-25 pounds lighter than the Bus.
I looked at every running back in history, and calculated his number of rushing yards over 500 in each season (to avoid giving undue weight to compilers). After adjusting for season length, I then calculated career grades in this statistic. In the graph below, the Y-Axis shows this career rushing grade, while the X-axis displays weights. Bettis is represented on the far right with the code “BettJe00.”
[continue reading…]
Tagged as:
HOF,
Jerome Bettis
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by Chase Stuart
on February 1, 2014
Tonight, the newest members of the Class of 2014 will be announced. Here are the 15 finalists:
[continue reading…]
Tagged as:
Aeneas Williams,
Andre Reed,
Charles Haley,
Claude Humphrey,
Derrick Brooks,
Eddie DeBartolo,
Jerome Bettis,
John Lynch,
Kevin Greene,
Marvin Harrison,
Michael Strahan,
Morten Andersen,
Ray Guy,
Tim Brown,
Tony Dungy,
Walter Jones,
Will Shields
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