Pittsburgh Steelers rookie running back Le\’Veon Bell rushed for nearly 1,800 yards last season at Michigan State and I wanted to have a look at his splits in order to get an idea how he ran directionally.
Being as there isn\’t a site that has those stats, I was forced to scrape them myself from the play-by-play on Yahoo, as they are the only site that I know of that list run directions. Unlike the NFL, however, they only use right, middle and left.
After scraping these stats, I had the right amount of carries, 382, but the total yards are off by 7. This could be that Yahoo might list fumble yardage differently, but it really isn\’t worth tracking down 7 yards.
The directional stats are pretty straight forward and Bell actually had well over a 5.0 yards per carry average to the left.
As far as other splits that I was able to collect after the scrape, Bell only had 21 carries that resulted in negative yardage last year and a total of 40 runs that failed to gain positive yardage, period.
As far as runs of 5 or more yards, Bell had 135 of those. He also had 34 runs of 10 or more yards and 13 runs of 20 or more yards.
In addition to the above, I am also including the distances of his touchdown runs.
| DIR | ATT | YDS | YPA |
| R | 122 | 580 | 4.75 |
| M | 151 | 627 | 4.15 |
| L | 109 | 579 | 5.31 |
| TD RUN DIST |
| 14 |
| 11 |
| 8 |
| 7 |
| 5 |
| 4 |
| 2 |
| 1 |
| 1 |
| 1 |
| 1 |
| 1 |
