In the history of the NFL, there have been thousands of players to pass through the league. And for all of those thousands and thousands of players from far and wide, no one has had a season quite like Dolphins running back Kalen Ballage. Ballage, who now infamously told the South Florida media that he had “nothing to prove” when he took over the lead back role in early November, has been Miami’s lead threat out of the backfield ever since the team traded Kenyan Drake and cut Mark Walton.
In all this season, Kalen Ballage has carried the ball 71 times for 135 yards on the season, an average of 1.9 yards per carry.
And, according to Pro Football Reference, Ballage is on pace to finish the year with a historically bad bottom line. No player going back to 1950 has ever had 70+ carries and finished with an average of less than 2.0 yards per carry. None.
And so with the Dolphins continuing to commit to Ballage as the team’s leading back, Ballage must now look to pop a few big runs and avoid the record books for all the wrong reasons. The next worst average yards per carry in a single season for a player with 70+ carries is 2.04 yards per rush, a number belonging to former New York Giants fullback Eddie Price back in 1953 (206 yards on 101 carries). The NFL has seen only one other player with at least 70 carries finish with under 2.5 yards per carry since the turn of the millennium — former 1,000 yard rusher Chester Taylor carried 112 times for 267 yards with the Chicago Bears in 2010. He was out of the league by 2012.
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