Dowdle is a High Variance Rusher

Compared to Warren, Dowdle is a high variance rusher. Almost 50% more variation in rush attempts and rush yards than Warren;




(Coeff. of variation = measure of the spread of data expressed as a %)

 

Are you looking at his variation carry to carry?

Or the variation in yards game to game? <-- I think this is what you mean.

Variance by itself isn't bad in a RB. Since the game breaking runs that you want from a RB are uncommon, high variance in itself might be a good thing. As long as the success rate is acceptable / high. We could imagine a back who always gets at least 50 yards a game, but every second game gets 100 yards. He'd have high variance, but would be a pretty good back (~1250 yards).

The thing I worry about Dowdle, is that his success rate last year wasn't good 47.9%. But it was good in 24 @ 53.6%.

This is something that Warren has been good at...basically always at 50% or more on the season...technically only 49.7% in 23. He was 54.5% last year and 50.0% the year before.

Dowdle's success rate last year is about where Najee was in years 1-3 (47.6%, 46%, 48.2%). Before he cratered in year 4 to 43.7%.

Aside: I think variation per carry is probably more important. Because per carry is a better "rate" than per game (since number of carries per game will change). I wish there was a site we could go to that published the distribution of carries that all RBs have. I think this would really help with the confusion that some people have re: what YPC is and why succ% matters. I also think it would be really interesting to overlay distributions of two guys (e.g. Warren and Dowdle) to really see how long and fat the positive tail is (what YPC tells us) and how many low yardage carries they get (what succ% kind of tells us...although succ% is better that this because it's relative to the objective of the play).