Decline of the RB

Good teams just don’t run that often

Again, you see some notable drop-offs from the conference level teams to the Super Bowl participants.  Of course, you have a huge 2005 outlier in which the Steelers and Seahawks ran their way nearly off the graph.  You’ve still got things trending downward toward a greater share of passes versus the run.  So to simplify let’s look at a couple different sets of data and then wrap this up.  Let’s break both categories, % of yards from the run and % of rushing attempts from total snaps, by 5-year intervals and decade according to playoff depth, and then just break each down year by year among total playoff teams:

Here’s where the movement 2005 until now becomes even more obvious.  You can see the difference between Super Bowl teams in the last decade versus all other playoff teams: they’re passing heavier than everyone else.  And not just that, but Super Bowl teams since 2005 are running less, and for less yardage, than all previous teams, previous Super Bowl teams included.