Since Jeremy Hill came into the league. . .

[BengalChris]

(04-23-2016, 04:25 PM)TheLeonardLeap Wrote: No matter what your rookie year was, 3.6 yards per carry is always bad.

More cow mutilations were blamed on Eddie Lacy's stomach last year than all of the UFOs in history combined... and he still had a 4.1 YPC.

Did it look even worse because he had a good rookie season? Yes. Was it still a truly bad year regardless of that? Most certainly.

He still had bad games when he got the ball more. (The lack of getting the ball is often due to his ineffectiveness, you generally can't sustain offensive drives long enough to give a guy a ton of carries if he's getting 2 yards per carry.)  He had 4 games of at least 19 carries, which would get you 304 carries over 16 games, 300 generally being the "heavy workload" territory.

In those 4 games, he averaged 3.23 YPC. Noticeably worse than his season average of 3.56 YPC.

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I will agree with you that Gio was the better back last year in all phases, though.

It still baffles me that in the three games against Pittsburgh in 2015, he only had 13 carries and 7 catches despite taking those 13 carries for 80 yards (6.15 YPC) and those 7 catches for 51 yards (7.29 AVG), while remembering that one of those catches was for 1 yard and a Shazier crown of the helmet to the face. (8.33 AVG without that)... yet they just refused to use the guy.

The Bengals have rarely used Gio in a way that maximizes his talents. His talents aren't running up the middle into the teeth of a defense. He needs to be used in space. The problem with that is that when he's on the field defenses pretty much know how to defend him. He's just not a 3 down back.

If you compare him to a guy like Jamaal Charles, who is a 3 down back, you can see the difference between the two.

I, for one, believe a team is better off having a 3 down back as the starter and a different style back to come in and change things up. Only we don't really have a 3 down back on the roster. Hill is pretty good when he's not coughing up the ball, but we don't throw it him very much, so teams play him tight and his yards are tough ones.