If you want evidence that today's teams are better coached and better prepared, one area to look at is fumbles. Running backs today don't fumble nearly as often as they did in the past.
This started as a little side project I was doing on Stevan Ridley and David Wilson. I find it amusing that Bill Belichick and Tom Coughlin bench a running back who fumbles the ball. (And this is something we saw from Mike McCarthy in Week 1 with Eddie Lacy.)
The NFL Network ran a neat stat during the game last Thursday, explaining that Ridley has lost 5 fumbles in his career, and that after those fumbles, he's had only one other carry in those games. If you fumble for Belichick, you're headed for the bench.
But is that a realistic way to run a team? Should he be pulling Tom Brady every time he throws an interception or fumbles a snap?
What if Walter Payton or Jim Brown played for Belichick or Coughlin? Would they be pulling those guys? Payton fumbled 86 times during his career. And Jim Brown fumbled, on average, once every 46 times he handled the ball.
Nowadays, if you fumble the ball that often, you're labeled a butter-fingers guy who simply can't be an NFL running back.
So I started playing around with the numbers. Ridley is averaging a fumble per 69 touches, so he's far less of a fumbler than Payton and Brown. And he's close to twice as effective as Franco Harris and Tony Dorsett.
My intention going in was to compare Ridley to the top 20 rushers in NFL history. Show that he's actually a reasonable guy and such. But when I started working through the numbers, an interesting trend emerged.
If you look at the top rushers in NFL history, all of the guys who have been the best at avoiding fumbles have been backs who've played in the last 20 years -- Curtis Martin, LaDainian Tomlinson, Fred Taylor, Corey Dillon. All of the guys who have been the worst at fumbling, meanwhile, have been guys who played prior to 1990.
Look at this list. The guys whose names are in bold are the top 10 running backs who played the majority of their ball prior to 1990. The other 10 guys are the top-10 rushers who got most of their careers after 1990. You can see how much looser they were with the ball back in the old days.
| FUMBLES PER HANDLE, RUNNING BACKS | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fumb | Att | Rec | Avg | |
| Curtis Martin | 29 | 3518 | 484 | 138.0 |
| LaDainian Tomlinson | 30 | 3174 | 624 | 126.6 |
| Fred Taylor | 27 | 2534 | 290 | 104.6 |
| Corey Dillon | 28 | 2618 | 244 | 102.2 |
| Marshall Faulk | 36 | 2836 | 767 | 100.1 |
| Jerome Bettis | 41 | 3479 | 200 | 89.7 |
| Barry Sanders | 41 | 3062 | 352 | 83.3 |
| Emmitt Smith | 61 | 4409 | 515 | 80.7 |
| Edgerrin James | 44 | 3028 | 433 | 78.7 |
| Thurman Thomas | 50 | 2877 | 472 | 67.0 |
| Marcus Allen | 62 | 3022 | 587 | 58.2 |
| John Riggins | 58 | 2916 | 250 | 54.6 |
| Earl Campbell | 43 | 2187 | 121 | 53.7 |
| Ottis Anderson | 56 | 2562 | 376 | 52.5 |
| Walter Payton | 86 | 3838 | 492 | 50.3 |
| Jim Brown | 57 | 2359 | 262 | 46.0 |
| O.J. Simpson | 62 | 2404 | 203 | 42.0 |
| Eric Dickerson | 78 | 2996 | 281 | 42.0 |
| Tony Dorsett | 90 | 2936 | 398 | 37.0 |
| Franco Harris | 90 | 2949 | 307 | 36.2 |
--Ian Allan