Here's something I ran across a little while ago covering the production of running backs in the league with a look at where they attended college.
Bama has more players at the position than most giving them the most points in this guys statistical comparison.
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So a few weeks back, there was a thread that asked who some other "position U" Universities Were. Naturally with such a topic and a not clear lack of ground rules, there was a lot of debate, but one of the hottest debates was over who exactly was RB U. Plenty of teams brought up their team and with good points. But I wasn't content with just looking at those arguments, I wanted some numbers. Thus came this, numerically looking at the NFL Regular Season, to determine who, under these guidelines, RB U was for the 2016 NFL Regular Season.
Ground Rules
First things first. The teams that were looked at were teams that had at least 3 RBs in the NFL, with some choice 2 RB teams that had two significant contributors, such as Ohio State and Michigan State.
Second, why just regular season? Well, for one the playoffs are still going on. For two, I wanted to look purely at the individual's performance, not the team's. A team can reach the playoffs without any help from the individual player, and an individual player can thrive while the team isn't as good.
Third, the scoring. The following scoring system was used:
*For every 500 Rushing/Receiving Yards: 1 Point
*For every 5 TDs Rushing/Receiving: 1 Point
*For every 5 Fumbles: -1 Point
These were chosen basically as they seemed like good base numbers to work off of.
You can see the list of individual players and the team total rankings on the following Google Sheet:
Findings
As shown in the documents, the top school in terms of overall points was Alabama. This makes sense as they also had the most RBs in the total list, and had some good quality ones as well. However when taking average into account, the top school was Ohio State, with the driving twin powers of Carlos Hyde and the overall top player, Ezekiel Elliot.
However if you want to look at it a different way and just look at teams that have at least 3 players, thus disqualifying Ohio State, the top school was Miami.
The team with the lowest overall and average were both Arkansas, and the person with the lowest overall points was Antone Smith.
What does all this mean?
I don't know. I did this cause I was bored and I thought about that thread. But if you want actually conclusions, Ohio State right now has 2 of the top RBs in the NFL statistically, but they weren't too far ahead of the number 2 overall in terms of average, Indiana.
List of players was from the ESPN's tracker of NFL players by college, stats were from Pro Football Reference.
So discuss. How flawed was my (albeit simple) system? What other schools do you think can challenge Ohio State for the overall average with this coming NFL Draft? And can Texas and Arkansas properly battle out who is the backup RB U?
Who Is RB U for the 2016 NFL Regular Season
Bama has more players at the position than most giving them the most points in this guys statistical comparison.
------
So a few weeks back, there was a thread that asked who some other "position U" Universities Were. Naturally with such a topic and a not clear lack of ground rules, there was a lot of debate, but one of the hottest debates was over who exactly was RB U. Plenty of teams brought up their team and with good points. But I wasn't content with just looking at those arguments, I wanted some numbers. Thus came this, numerically looking at the NFL Regular Season, to determine who, under these guidelines, RB U was for the 2016 NFL Regular Season.
Ground Rules
First things first. The teams that were looked at were teams that had at least 3 RBs in the NFL, with some choice 2 RB teams that had two significant contributors, such as Ohio State and Michigan State.
Second, why just regular season? Well, for one the playoffs are still going on. For two, I wanted to look purely at the individual's performance, not the team's. A team can reach the playoffs without any help from the individual player, and an individual player can thrive while the team isn't as good.
Third, the scoring. The following scoring system was used:
*For every 500 Rushing/Receiving Yards: 1 Point
*For every 5 TDs Rushing/Receiving: 1 Point
*For every 5 Fumbles: -1 Point
These were chosen basically as they seemed like good base numbers to work off of.
You can see the list of individual players and the team total rankings on the following Google Sheet:
Findings
As shown in the documents, the top school in terms of overall points was Alabama. This makes sense as they also had the most RBs in the total list, and had some good quality ones as well. However when taking average into account, the top school was Ohio State, with the driving twin powers of Carlos Hyde and the overall top player, Ezekiel Elliot.
However if you want to look at it a different way and just look at teams that have at least 3 players, thus disqualifying Ohio State, the top school was Miami.
The team with the lowest overall and average were both Arkansas, and the person with the lowest overall points was Antone Smith.
What does all this mean?
I don't know. I did this cause I was bored and I thought about that thread. But if you want actually conclusions, Ohio State right now has 2 of the top RBs in the NFL statistically, but they weren't too far ahead of the number 2 overall in terms of average, Indiana.
List of players was from the ESPN's tracker of NFL players by college, stats were from Pro Football Reference.
So discuss. How flawed was my (albeit simple) system? What other schools do you think can challenge Ohio State for the overall average with this coming NFL Draft? And can Texas and Arkansas properly battle out who is the backup RB U?
Who Is RB U for the 2016 NFL Regular Season
