Ian Allan

It’s been a popular notion in recent years: to complain that the “Running Back By Committee” approach has damaged fantasy football. The idea is that more NFL teams are using a RBBC system, and that it’s causing there to be fewer of the full-time, coveted backs that power championship runs for fantasy teams.

But is it true?

I rolled out some numbers a few months back that indicated that it really isn’t. You see just as many 1,000-yard rushers today as you did back in the so-called golden years. Running backs seem to be just as successful as ever.

In back-to-back seasons, we’ve seen teams with multiple 1,000-yard rushers – Brandon Jacobs and Derrick Ward with the Giants two years ago, and then DeAngelo Williams and Jonathan Stewart in Carolina last year. But this isn’t new. Back in the ‘70s, the Dolphins put Larry Csonka and Mercury Morris both over 1,000 yards, and the Steelers did the same thing with Franco Harris and Rocky Bleier. Kevin Mack and Earnest Byner did it for Cleveland in the ‘80s. Washington always rotated their backs in the ‘80s as well. Go back and look at the numbers for those teams in the mid-‘80s, and you’ll see John Riggins getting a big assist from Joe Washington, and then George Rogers and Kelvin Bryant sharing time later on.

I don’t believe the so-called RBBC approach is new at all. It’s my belief that maybe – maybe – we’re seeing a little more of tailbacks sharing time, but it’s more than made up for by the disappearance of fullbacks from team’s offenses. It used to be that most teams had a fullback who’d run for 400-500 yards and 4-5 TDs in a season. Now that position has really disappeared. So maybe we’re just seeing those No. 2 tailbacks pick up some of that workload – it’s just not physically possible for one running back to handle the ball over 400 times in a season.

I was messing around yesterday with one of the 100-yard stats of the last 30 years. One of the tech guys put all of the 100-yard games into a sortable database, dating back to 1978 (the year they moved to a 16-game season).

Looking at these numbers, I see that five of the top 6 years (the seasons with the most 100-yard rushers) have come from the last seven years. So at the same time that everyone is complaining that there’s too much RBBC, we’re seeing more 100-yard rushing games by individuals than ever.

For the numbers below, the figures before 2001 have been adjusted upwards to account for there being fewer teams and sometimes fewer games. There were strike-shortened seasons in 1982 and 1987, and there were fewer than 32 teams until the Houston Texans joined the league, so I adjusted the earlier numbers upwards to provide more of an apples-to-apples comparison.


NUMBER OF 100-YARD RUSHING GAMES, 1978-2009
(League totals, with numbers in the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s projected upwards to account for there being fewer teams and game):

                
        Year    No    
        1978    105.1    
        1979    112.0    
        1980    101.7    
        1981    107.4    
        1982    113.8    
        1983    136.0    
        1984    110.9    
        1985    137.1    
        1986    104.0    
        1987    95.1    
        1988    105.1    
        1989    84.6    
        1990    84.6    
        1991    90.3    
        1992    104.0    
        1993    100.6    
        1994    93.7    
        1995    109.9    
        1996    109.9    
        1997    129.1    
        1998    152.5    
        1999    110.5    
        2000    120.8    
        2001    124    
        2002    136    
        2003    151    
        2004    179    
        2005    138    
        2006    159
        2007    142
        2008    130
        2009    116

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