RB Ranking, 1994-2006

Interesting article over at Wages of Wins. The one that stood out to me at first was Charlie Garner. He has, according to this metric anyway, the 7th best season (right ahead of the LT's towering performance this year) without even getting 1,000 yards rushing. Garner was an underappreciated RB back in the day, his legs never stopped moving and he never turned it over. Also, I was surprised to see so little of Curtis Martin (#37) and Jamal Anderson (#30), the former a consistently good player for a long time and the latter a really great player for only a few years.

This ranking omits TD's which seems to me is a significant stat. The purpose of the game isn't to run up and down the field, the point is to score touchdowns. It can be misleading like the season Jerome Bettis had a few years back where he had 5 TD's on 4 yards rushing or something wacky like that. Or likewise some workhorse guys that just don't get the ball near the end zone, like Chad Johnson or Tiki Barber. But still, as I much I liked Charlie Garner, he wasn't ever as good as Tomlinson was this year. Tomlinson shattered the scoring record--shattered the record. Garner was a hard working overachiever but he never shattered nothing. Like virtually all work of econo-metric-ists, this ranking strikes me as of a dubious stripe.

Here's the overall chart. Remember how good Marshall Faulk was? RB Ratings 1994-2006