Jim Brown? Please. I'd have settled for Dillon of 2004 or Forte of 2008. Don't even make a ridiculous comparison to legendary players.
I didn't expect Maroney to be legendary, but at pick #21 he should have played to the level of at least an above average NFL RB who puts up 1,000 yards per year. Instead we got, well, history speaks loudly for itself doesn't it?
I can't believe I'm defending Maroney out here, as I have been pretty critical of him before this thread. I just get honked off when people are jumping all over a guy, calling him a "bust" and whatever.
The bottom line for me is that he hasn't produced the way we would have liked or expected. He's injury prone and dances around rather than running downfield. But, he is still going to be a productive NFL back for the forseeable future.
When we look at the stats for 2006 and 2007 (leaving out his injury year of 2008), his biggest problem is his number of carries:
If you look at the top 32 NFL backs, their median carries were 225 and 255 respectively in 2006 and 2007. Their median yards per carry were 4.2 in each year. During those two years, Maroney had 185 and 175 carries, with yards per carry of 4.5 and 4.3.
So, the legitimate knock on Maroney is that he is injury prone. He's still a solid runner and will give you 10--12 good/very good games a year. He's just going to be limited in that way.
Does that make him a "bust?" I guess that's a matter of how you define the term and also a matter of how he evolves and lasts in the NFL. For me, he's not a "bust." For you and others, he is. So be it. What I think and what you think really don't matter. It's what Belichick and others who evaluate talent in the NFL think that does matter.
I took a closer look at the data and compared the Rushing Production of the top four rushers (excluding the QB) for the 16 AFC teams and the Yards Gained by the Leading Rusher on those teams in 2007, the last year that Maroney was "healthy," at least by his standards. The data show that the production of the Pats Four Rushers was 1,605 yards, vs. a median of 1,635 yards. So, the Pats were below the median, but well within one Standard Deviation (251 yards). This is probably not surprising, given their record-setting Passing Offense that year.
I then looked at the distribution of the Rushing Production (as defined) and found that it very neatly fits a bell curve. However, when you look at the distribution of the Leading Rushers on each team, the data are skewed towards the upper end, drawn there by a few high producers. The Median is 1,091 Yards, but the Standard Deviation is 274 Yards.
The most interesting thing is when you correlate Rushing Production (as defined) with the Yards Gained by the leading rusher. When you do this, you find that the yards gained by the leading rusher statistically only explain 57% of Rushing Production, suggesting that almost half of the factors that go into overall Rushing Production are independent of the yards gained by the leading rusher on the team.
This is based only on 32 data points and I would be very interested to see if it holds true over 32 teams over 10 or so seasons (640 data points) and whether there is any change in this over time. My hypothesis would be that overal Rushing Production has become less and less dependent on the productivity of the Leading Rusher over time.
What does this have to do with our current discussion? In my view, it suggests that it's hard to describe as a bust a solid RB who delivers 800 or so yards a year with an average rush of 4.3--4.5 yards (leaving out the 2008 injury year). He might be a disappointment in terms of what we (all, including myself) were hoping to see from him. But I just don't see how you call the guy a "bust."
Finally, please spare me the rhetoric. Brady deserves to be considered as "legendary" and Moss would be in that category too if he hadn't sleep-walked through a few seasons before he came to the Pats, so saying we might be comparing to a legend at RB is not "ridiculous"...exaggerated I'll grant, but not ridiculous.
And I don't think there's anything magic about the 1,000 yard hurdle in today's NFL. 16 players ran for 1,000 yards or more last year, about half of them on teams with little other offense.
