Yards Per Carry Calculator

Background.

Yards per carry is rushing yards divided by rushing attempts — the number printed in the Avg column of every football box score. This calculator returns it along with the three figures that stop it being misread: yards per game and carries per game, which separate efficiency from workload, and touchdown rate.

It also returns something box scores do not: the average with the single longest run removed. Yards per carry is unusually vulnerable to one big play, because rushing gains are heavily right-skewed — most carries gain a few yards and a small number of them break for fifty or more. When Derrick Henry averaged 5.9 yards on 325 carries in 2024, one 87-yard run accounted for 4.5% of his yardage from 0.3% of his attempts; take it out and the other 324 carries averaged 5.66. That is a real and useful distinction between a back who is consistently productive and one whose average is carried by a handful of breakaways, and it is a single subtraction away.

The leave-one-out figure is not an official statistic and this page does not pretend otherwise. It is a plain arithmetic adjustment offered alongside the real average, not a replacement for it. With only one carry there is nothing left to average, so it reports 0 and the summary line explains why rather than showing an error.

One scope note: a quarterback sack is charged as a team passing loss rather than a rushing attempt under the football statistics rules, so sack yardage never touches a rushing average. That is why a quarterback's rushing line can look far better than his actual net production on running plays.

What is yards per carry calculator?

Yards per carry is a rushing back's average gain per rushing attempt: total rushing yards divided by carries. It is a pure efficiency statistic and says nothing about volume — a back averaging 5.0 on 60 carries and one averaging 5.0 on 300 carries have contributed very differently to their teams, which is why this calculator reports yards per game and carries per game beside it. The average is also strongly affected by outliers, because the distribution of rushing gains has a long right tail: the median carry gains substantially less than the mean, and a single breakaway run can lift a season average by a quarter of a yard or more. The excluding-longest-run figure quantifies exactly that effect. Touchdown rate, rushing touchdowns divided by carries, is included because it is frequently misread as a skill measure when it mostly reflects how often a coach hands a back the ball inside the five-yard line. Under football statistics rules a quarterback sack is recorded as a team passing loss rather than a rushing attempt, so no sack yardage appears in any figure on this page.

How to use this calculator.

1. 01Enter carries and rushing yards from the box score or season table. Negative total yardage is accepted — it happens over short samples.
2. 02Enter the longest run. If you do not have it, enter 0; the excluding-longest figure will then simply drop one carry from the denominator and will not mean much.
3. 03Enter rushing touchdowns and games played to get the per-game and touchdown-rate figures.
4. 04Compare the headline average against the excluding-longest average. A gap of more than about a quarter of a yard means the season is being carried by one play.
5. 05Read carries per game before drawing conclusions about the average. Efficiency on 6 carries a game and efficiency on 20 are not measuring the same thing.

The formula.

Yards per carry is rushing yards divided by carries. Yards per game and carries per game divide the same totals by games played. Touchdown rate is rushing touchdowns divided by carries, expressed as a percentage.

The excluding-longest figure is (rushing yards − longest run) ÷ (carries − 1). Both the numerator and the denominator have to be reduced: removing the yardage without removing the carry would understate the remaining average rather than isolate it. At exactly one carry the denominator would be zero, so the calculator returns 0 for that output and states in the summary that at least two carries are needed. It never returns a division error.

The reason the adjustment matters is the shape of the distribution. Rushing gains are strongly right-skewed: a large share of carries gain between zero and four yards and a small share break for long gains, so the mean sits well above the median. That makes the mean sensitive to its largest observation in a way that, say, a completion percentage is not. Comparing the two averages is a cheap robustness check — if they are close, the average describes the typical carry; if they diverge, it describes a few carries.

What none of these numbers capture is context: blocking, defensive fronts, game script, whether the carries came with a lead or from behind, and how many of them were goal-line plunges where two yards is a success and eight is impossible.

A worked example.

Frequently asked questions.

References& sources.

1. [1]National Football League (2025). 2025 NFL Record & Fact Book — 2024 NFL Top 10 Rushers and AFC individual rushers tables (Derrick Henry, Baltimore: 325 attempts, 1,921 yards, 5.9 average, 87t longest, 16 touchdowns) and the Baltimore roster line recording 17 games played and 17 started. The source of every figure in the worked example.
2. [2]NCAA (2009). Official 2009 Football Statistics Rules (Football Statisticians' Manual). Source for the rushing attribution rules referred to on this page, in particular that a sack is charged as a team passing loss rather than as a rushing attempt.