Facing Eight in the Box

Sometimes you get an idea in your head. Whether it be commentators telling you something or whether it’s you looking to make some logical assumptions, ideas and theories stick.

On Tuesday, the PFF twitter feed was inundated with messages telling us that the Chiefs' Jamaal Charles (who had himself a very good year) constantly faced eight men in the box. Now I’ll be honest in that I watched a fair few Chiefs games and did differing types of analysis on them, but it didn’t strike me as right that Charles faced any more than the league average.

So I decided to look at what the numbers said, and while it started off as more of a rebuttal to some criticism, it developed into an interesting look at which players faced the most defenders in the box.

With that in mind, I bring to you what I think is the first real look at players facing eight or more men in the box to see which players truly had to overcome it.

The 49er Way

If you’ve missed our tweeting on it, there really was only one contender to this crown and his name was Frank Gore. An astonishing 42.25% of his runs saw him face at least eight defenders in the box, although we’ll explain why some of this isn’t down to the schemes and offensive formations used by the 49ers.

But for now here’s the entire list of rushers with at least 100 designed carries. The league average came out at 23.25%. Stay tuned because tomorrow we’re going to add some more data to the mix when we look at how the use of offensive personnel impacts this.

[table id=848 /]

Follow Khaled on Twitter: @PFF_Khaled