That's surprising considering how many times he's stopped behind the line
I guess I wonder how people come to these conclusions. I mean, every back gets stopped in the backfield sometimes, but how many times do you have to see it before you think this is true? Have you compared it to others in the league? How does one reach this conclusion?
FWIW, Football Outsiders came up with a stat called "success rate" for RBs. This doesn't measure the talent of a back or his explosiveness or anything like that. All it measures is how effective they are at getting certain % of yardage per down to keep an offense "on track" for a first down. And in this regard, Blount has been great. Here are his rankings while with NE:
2013: 3
2014: 19 (breakdown between Pittsburgh/NE not available)
2015: 6
For context, DeMarco Murray's fantastic 2013 season with the Cowboys where he was credited with keeping the offense on track throughout had him finish 5th in success rate, 2 spots behind Blount.
Now how many times is he stopped behind the line? Let's look at his 165 carries from last year, not his best year but seems to be the year everyone started turning on him.
In 165 carries, he had 10 carries for minus yardage, or 6% of his carries. Another 9 went for 0 yards so if you want to group those in, he's around 11.5% not gaining yards.
Compare that to Dion Lewis, who had much smaller sample sizes. He had 4 carries with negative yards (8%) and 2 more with 0 yards (12.2%) out of 49 carries.
For some additional context, Thomas Rawls finished 1st in success rate last season. He ran the ball 9 times for lost yardage (6%) and 9 times for no gain (12.1%) out of 148 carries.
Again, we are not talking about the best backs in football. We are simply looking at the incorrect statements that he is caught behind the line a lot. Maybe in a vacuum where you only watch those few plays, but compared to the rest of the league, he's actually been really good about not losing yardage consistently despite playing behind a banged-up offensive line and without fullback Develin.
You can say he's slow. You can even say he's not good. Those are subjective opinions. But saying he's caught in the backfield so many times is just wrong. He's well above league average in that regard.