NFl: Patriots ink Corey Dillon

The Pats get Corey Dillon in exchange for a second round draft choice.

Call me "Guardedly Optimistic" on this one. Dillon is a 30 year old RB with a lot of carries under his belt. Age 30 is not "prime time" for running backs.

I looked at the top 30 all-time in the NFL in carries (actually, top 31, because Dillon is on the list) to see how they fared in their age-30 season. Of those 30, I had to throw out two because they were retired (Jim Brown, Rodney Hampton), and I chose to exclude Ottis Anderson because he only carried the ball twice that season (and couldn't have been expected to pull a full load, given his injuries). Of the 27 remaining players, 8 had missed significant time to injury within the last 2-3 seasons, and 19 were very healthy.

Overall, the 27 players averaged 877 yards on 220 carries (4.0 avg) and 5 TDs per season. In the "injured" subset (which Dillon belongs to), the average is 735 yards on 173 carries (4.2) and 6 TDs.

Of the 19 non-injured players, 9 gained 1,000 yards in the subsequent season, while Ernest Byner fell just short at 998 yds. Of the 8 previously injured players, only two (Garrison Hearst, 1,206 and John Riggins, 1,153) even gained over 700 yards. All of the "injured" players were playing in 16 game seasons, I should note.

Walter Peyton had the best age-30 season with 1,684 yards in 1984, while Chris Warren had 291 yards in 1998. As noted above, Hearst tops the "injured" list with his 2001 season, while Freeman McNeill managed just 352 yards on 80 carries in 1989 for the bottom of the "injured" list.

Perhaps the two best comps from the injured list are Riggins and Bettis. A season like Riggins' 1979 performance is probably about the best-case scenario, IMO. However, Dillon's coming into this year with the same kind of expectation that followed Jerome Bettis into 2002, and the Bus only managed 666 yds on 187 carries that season. This would be a disappointment.

I think a return to the 1,300-yard production from Dillon is fairly unlikely. I'm going to look for something in the neighborhood of 900-1,000 yards this season, which will no doubt disappoint Patriots fans everywhere.

See "comments" for the players used in the study.