A look at OSU’s yards-per-carry history

Marcell Ateman doing work (USATSI)

There’s been a lot of talk of late about yards per carry and what Gundy wants that to look like for this year’s OSU squad.

Here was his quote from Monday:

“It’s not good enough. You’ve got to be over five in most cases.”

I don’t know what he means by “got to” so I decided to look back at yards per carry and see if it has correlated to wins in the Gundy Era. Here’s a look at all of the seasons.

As expected there’s a correlation here but not as much as you might expect. That 2005 season (bottom left) is weighing quite heavily on the other eight and in two of OSU’s three winningest seasons it has been right at five or below it.

In fact, of the six times OSU has averaged five or more yards per carry in the Gundy Era it has only won more than eight games in half of them.

I personally think yards per carry is incredibly important and I don’t think this dataset is large enough to draw any large-scale conclusions but I found it at least intriguing.