So here's the distribution of Maroney's carries through week 7, 2009. It shows some interesting things, but we need to look a little closer to understand it.
Most of his carries are for 2 yards, with the second most being for 5 yards. That's a touch boom or bust for my tastes, but it's still good and productive.
As for negative yards, he only ever was tackled behind the line of scrimmage in 3 scenarios: 1) The second half of week 1 versus Buffalo, 2) 1 carry in week 2 against the Jets, and 3) 3 times in week 4 against Baltimore. That tells you a lot about how those negative plays come about. It's either a result of gameplanning or good defensive line play.
5 of his 13 total carries for 2 yards came in the 3rd and 4th quarter in week 7 against Tampa Bay. That skews the distribution a decent amount. Taking those 5 runs away turns the percentage to ~14%. That's still a fair amount of carries for 2 yards, but it certainly smooths the curve some. Is it fair to hand-wave away 5 carries? Possibly if it's more a result of a trend specific to that one game. Belichick has explained Tampa Bay away as their playing a lot of 8 men in the box. Still, we'll count it in his season totals and understand it rather than remove it. We had no carries for a loss like we did against Buffalo and Baltimore. To my way of thinking, that's a good performance.
The number of total carries is somewhat low at 62 so we can expect a lot of smoothing over the course of the season.
So, what does this tell us? In my view it tells us a few things. 1) I don't see a lot of evidence of dancing as a trend - against a good defense like the Ravens or the Bills in the second half Maroney gets shut down a bit, but outside of that he's definitely moving the ball forward.
2) His overall stats are affected when teams aim to stop or slow the run - he's not going to beat 8 men in the box or excellent defensive fronts but we don't ask him to. When that happens we run him a little less. That's to be expected given the offensive philosophy of this team.
3) To be honest I think the relative lack of 3 yard carries is a bad thing, and so far looks to be below the league average. I can't speak directly to the cause of this, but eating up more 3 and 4 yard runs would be nice to have.
Here's the raw data for Maroney's carries grabbed from ESPN's play by play for each game. I came out 2 yards ahead of ESPN's total season yards, but I double-checked the play-by-play numbers and they were correct. I can't explain the discrepancy, but it's not significant.
Carry Index Week Quarter Yards
1 1 1 0
2 1 1 11
3 1 1 8
4 1 1 10
5 1 2 7
6 1 3 -1
7 1 3 -4
8 1 3 3
9 1 4 1
10 1 4 -3
11 2 1 12
12 2 1 -1
13 2 1 4
14 2 2 2
15 2 2 2
16 2 3 4
17 3 1 5
18 3 1 5
19 3 1 5
20 3 1 2
21 4 1 1
22 4 1 -1
23 4 1 1
24 4 2 5
25 4 2 -1
26 4 3 2
27 4 4 -1
28 5 2 2
29 5 2 10
30 5 2 1
31 5 3 5
32 5 3 3
33 6 1 5
34 6 1 7
35 6 1 45
36 6 1 7
37 6 1 3
38 6 1 1
39 6 2 3
40 6 2 7
41 6 3 0
42 6 3 11
43 6 3 4
44 6 3 5
45 6 3 5
46 6 3 4
47 6 3 2
48 6 3 14
49 7 1 2
50 7 1 2
51 7 1 1
52 7 2 4
53 7 3 5
54 7 3 2
55 7 3 2
56 7 3 2
57 7 4 2
58 7 4 2
59 7 4 13
60 7 4 4
61 7 4 1
62 7 4 3
