Chet Mutryn and the Marshall Faulk Number

 By John Turney 

Chet Mutryn

The famed Bill James, a pioneer prophet of sports analytics religion, has inspired more than one generation of fans into developing and refining statistics and metrics, and also challenging and reformulating said statistics and metrics. And it has been good for sports. 

The metrics or sabermetrics movement started by James began with baseball, his area of expertise, and has spread to football, basketball and likely every other sport.

James has developed too many metrics to mention but one we find interesting is his Power-Speed number. 

It was intended to measure a baseball player's ability to hit home runs and steal bases. Rather than just adding up the total of home runs and stolen bases and dividing by two and getting a mathematical mean he used the harmonic mean of the two. 

The mathematical mean would not give the desired result.

 A player with 10 home runs and 50 stolen bases and a player with 30 stolen bases and 30 homers would have the same average or mean. As would a player with fifty dingers and ten swipes of bases.

The harmonic mean solves that issue. 

On the website, Baseball Reference succinctly says, about the Power-Speed number, "To do well you need a lot of both".

PFJ's Nick Webster has used the same method for defensive linemen using sacks and tackles for loss to roughly measure performance in playing the pass and the run—to do well one needs a high number of sacks and a high number of tackles for loss on run plays.

Over twenty years ago Stats, Inc., now called Stats Perform (STATS) used the same method to measure running backs that rushed for a lot of yards and had a lot of yards receiving. They called it the "Marshall Faulk Number" and published it in one of their annual publications called the "STATS Pro Football Scoreboard". At the time Faulk was rushing for 1,000 yards and catching passes for near or over that number so they named it after him.

Why it wasn't called the Roger Craig Number we don't know, he rushed for over 1,000 yards and caught passes for over 1,000 yards in 1985, the first in the NFL to do it. 

Regardless, STATS used the harmonic mean of rushing and receiving totals rather than the mean for the same reasons James did in the Power-Speed number.

Here is a similar example to the home runs and stolen bases graphic—

However, since the turn of the century, we've not seen STATS update their list. 

So we took the liberty of doing so, but also applied the number per scheduled game since schedules have varied over the years from ten, eleven, twelve, fourteen, sixteen, and now to seventeen games. The more games in a season the easier it is to achieve the higher number.

So, Faulk is still at the top but Christian McCaffrey's 2019 season is close. Craig's 1985 season has fallen to sixth. 

There are also names football fans would expect to see as well, all-around backs who run and catch well.

But was is most interesting to us is the player at twenty-six—Chet Mutryn who played for the Buffalo Bills of the AAFC. In 1948 he had 823 yards rushing and 794 yards receiving. When prorated to a 16-game schedule that would produce a Faulk number of 923.7 yards, better, for example, than any season Marcus Allen had in that metric.  

Lenny Moore and Frank Gifford are higher on the list, but they are more well-known. They played in the National Football League, not the All-American Football Conference (AAFC),  and won NFL championships and both are in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. 

Mutryn? Even hardcore fans would have trouble summoning up recollections about him. It's hard to even find a decent photo of Mutryn online.

In many ways, he was typical of many of the players of his era. 

He was a do-it-all star in college and was drafted by the pros, his career was interrupted by WWII, he served in the military, and then returned and played pro football. 

Collegiately he starred at Xavier college in Ohio where he was twice Little All-American and was inducted into the school's athletic Hall of Fame. He was drafted by the Eagles but his Naval service delayed any thoughts of pro football right away, anyway.

After the War, he returned to finish his degree and the Cleveland Browns of the newly formed AAFC acquired him but quickly shipped him to Buffalo to show off his wares. 

Mutryn was a player who could run, catch, block, return kicks and punts with the best of the halfbacks on his era. And like the George McAfees, Bill Dudleys, Whizzer Whites, and others he could throw you a pass or kick the ball if you needed him to.

He played left halfback in the T-formation offense which was the most-utilized scheme of the era. It was a Clark Shaughnessy-developed offense and in it, the backs could run the ball or almost as often motion horizontally into either flat and then turn upfield or sometimes check through the line of scrimmage vertically and then turn horizontally. And if there was time, a route could be up out and up. 

Game films will show teams like the Cleveland Browns, the Los Angeles Rams, the Philadelphia Eagles, and almost everyone but the Pittsburgh Steelers (who still ran the single-wing), doing similar things but Mutryn had the speed to really make it work, to get deep. 

In 1948, his "Faulk Number" season, he helped get the Bills to the playoffs, where they won a game before getting trounced in the championship game by the mightly Browns, and was a consensus All-AAFC. 

Back then there was no award for offensive player of the year but if there were Mutryn would have been a strong contender for it. He tied for the league in rushing touchdowns (with ten), led in yards per reception (20.4), yards from scrimmage (1,617), kickoff return average (26.3), all-purpose yards (2,248), total touchdowns (16), scoring (96 points), and had the longest run (68 yards). 

Yards from scrimmage was not kept as a statistic at the time, it wasn't until much later that Elias Sports Bureau added it to the list of official figures released in the "NFL Record and Fact Book". However, looking back it is interesting to note Mutryn's 1,617 yards from scrimmage would have been a combined NFL-AAFC record until someone named Jim Brown came into pro football and obliterated it again and again.

His 2,288 all-purpose yards, adding yards from scrimmage plus return yardage, again not a thing yet, would have been the pro record until 1962 when the Eagles' Timmy Brown topped it. 

And think about this:  In 1965 Gale Sayers was a rookie, tearing up the NFL running, receiving, returning kicks and punts and being a general menace his all-purpose yardage total was sixteen yards fewer than Mutryn's 1948 total.

It wasn't just about a single season with Mutryn, either. Though his career was just five years he did have other achievements. He was All-AAFC in 1947 and 1949 in addition to his banner 1948 season and after he played a single season in the NFL with the Baltimore Colts (they green and silver franchise than went belly up after the 1950 season) he retired, refusing to play for the Philadelphia Eagles who had obtained his rights.

He finished his pro career with 3,031 rushing yards, 1,850 receiving yards, 1,902 yards on kick returns, and returned punts for 537 yards. At first glance, those numbers don't catch your eye, but he was the first professional player to be part of a 3,000-1,300-1,500-500 club of those respective yardage categories.

And that is important. 

Three years later Hall of Famer Bullet Bill Dudley joined Murtyn in the club. It has been seventy years since Dudley retired and there have only been fourteen more members who have been added to the roster. 

Fourteen. And five are in the Pro Football Hall of Fame - it's a pretty elite group.

Not only are there few new players with those all-around numbers, but Mutryn has the highest yards per rush, yards per reception, and average punt return and has the second-highest kick return average, just one-tenth a yard behind Ollie Matson. 

(click to enlarge)

Perhaps the mostly forgotten Mutryn needs to be remembered a little bit more. And can someone find some good shots of him?