Maze Runners

I hope everyone has been enjoying the QB Maze. I know the QB position is the most important position on the roster,some might argue otherwise. Today we are going to look at another position that I think is important, we are going to look at the running backs. We will look at their numbers in the running department, they are called running backs, right? This is all info everyone had access to but I figured let us do some graphs and rumble about the numbers. Should have had this up before the season rolled over but the weekend got here.

The first thing we are going to look at is the number of attempts the backs took. I figured this is worth looking at because the more you try the higher the likelihood you are going to get the job done right.

Antonio Bergeron tried and tried and tried. This guy was out there trying to move that ball. All season he had more than 400 rush attempts Kenny Holmes tried also but not as much as Antonio. I know it is too late now for some of these guys to go look them up and see what made them tick and who did they play for. The gentlemen listed above are just the top 20 from the entire list of people whoever ran the ball in season 129 from all the conferences. It was fun going and collecting this data. So now we have a list of who tried to run the ball, i think we should try and figure out how schools did in the rush attempts too, right?

So it turns out Army really tried to run the ball, who knew, well Army knew. The list above is the sum of the rush attempts. I looked at all the schools, human coached and Sim AI coached schools and then summed up their rush attempts. There is a school on the list that surprised me, Alabama, made the top 20 total rush attempts. Think about that a school coached by awags made this list. Everyone knows he likes to throw the ball but it seems like this past season he was keeping the ball on the ground. Is this a shift in coaching philosophy? Is it a change caused by the talent available? awags what's up man? I am sure this was just a bleep year. So now we know the attempts stuff, but how about the yards stuff.

Antonio sits upon the top of the mountain again. I guess it is true, try and try again until you succeed. This guy with all those attempts he managed to get them yards and by a bit of a ways. This guy managed to get more than 2000 yards, 2000 yards! I do not think I have ever had a running back with more than 2000 yards. I should have looked at what made Antonio tick, I hope I never have to face him. This guy will try to run the ball and he will get his yards. So we know the names of the individual running backs, how about the top 20 schools with the most yards.

California is sitting at the mountain top, just chilling and breathing the cleanest air there is. Right on their tail is Army, and we have seen them before. Army topped the rush attempts list and it seems they also got yards. Ball State is also on the tail of Army and on the tail of Ball State is Arizona. This group of schools are bunched together and then there is a drop to the next school Arkansas State and from there it is a steady decline until we get to number 18 and then another drop to 19 and 20. I wonder how these schools would cluster together. If we know how the schools cluster together we can figure out what makes them tick and I can then try to pick some tricks from them. All this running is useless if you can not turn it into points, so why don't we look at that.

Surprise, surprise Antonio is at the top of the list. So i think the trick is to really try to run the ball, because you will get plenty of yards and you will also score TDs. Antonio again is miles ahead of everyone and also from the looks of things it seems like there might be some clustering to be seen here. At this point i know looking at the individual RBs does not make sense but well I like the graphs. We are going to look at the schools for the same thing.

The same schools that are towards the top of the previous lists are again towards the top of this list. I guess we should not be surprised about that. I know i am beginning to sound like a broken record but I think we should do some cluster analysis on these schools and see who is similar and who is not. Nobody managed to get 50 rushing TDs and with that i would like to challenge team in the upcoming season to get at least 50 rushing TDs as long as non of them are against me. I think if chrondon was at the D-1A level in Wilkinson he would have more than 50 rushing TDs.

I think i will stop here for this little Maze run and try to answer some of the question i posed about the clustering. That is going to be fun to do. As soon as i have something worthy to share with you guys I will. Oh and do not forget to keep track of new coaches coming into the world. It should be a good season again. Until the next time, keep checking the website for more content, we have an intriguing series from Pistol Pete, we also have stuff from JAG, JeffC and bigkeithdog. There is some much to keep everyone happy but until the next time keep them legs ready for another Maze run.