Tapp-ing into the Numbers: 40 Packers Stats Until Opening Kickoff (No. 26)
By JERRY TAPP
Having a solid running game is important in the NFL (or is it? That’s a topic for another blog!). Sometimes, however, it isn’t always the running back that provides the running game spark.
Handing the ball off to a fleet-footed wide receiver can be just the ticket to the end zone. To illustrate this point, let’s look at the players who have the highest yards per rushing attempt in the NFL and with the Packers.
For the Pack, James Lofton holds the Packers record for highest yards per carry (minimum of 30 career rushing attempts). Every time Lofton carried the ball for Green Bay he averaged 7.9 yards (31 carries for 245 yards).
Here are the four Packers players with the highest yards per carry average (minimum of 30 career carries to qualify for the list).
James Lofton 7.9 … Randall Cobb 6.7 … Donald Driver 6.4 … Ty Montgomery 5.9.
Cordarrelle Patterson of the Minnesota Vikings has the highest yards per carry average in a career for the NFL. He is averaging 10.7 yards per carry in his career (31 carries for 333 yards).
Patterson is followed by Ernest Givens (9.9 yards per carry) and Curtis Conway (9.3 yards per carry). Lofton, with an NFL career yards per carry of 7.7, ranks 17th on this list. He is the only player in the top 20 with ties to the Packers.
Jerry Tapp
Jerry Tapp is a freelance writer from Racine, WI with a major concentration on sports statistics and numbers that define sports teams and players. He began his foray into sports stats-focused writing as a regular contributor to the “Numbers” column in Inside Sports magazine in the mid-1980’s and then began writing a weekly “Stats on Tapp” column for the Racine Journal Times. That column was eventually nationally syndicated by Universal Press Syndicate. He later wrote sports stats items for the Washington Post under the “Stat of the Day” heading. After launching his blog, www.statsontapp.com in 2011, Jerry turned his sports stats attention to sports websites. He wrote regularly for Bleacher Report, BallHyped, football.com and Heavy.com. Today he keeps busy writing weekly columns of stats-centric articles for three sports websites, Today’s Pigskin (NFL), Today’s Knuckleball (MLB) and Today’s Fastbreak (NBA), and as a monthly contributor to the Milwaukee Brewers “GameDay” publication that is distributed to fans attending games at Miller Park.