[CTcard]

Two caveats to that analysis, CTCard.  The first is that in prior years, Gerhart, Taylor, and Gaffney had to run against defenses that stacked eight in the box on rushing downs.  Now, most defenses are playing us straight up to counter the fact that we are passing more than in the past.

I wouldn't quite call that a caveat. Getting the defense to do something out of it's base, like stacking 8 in the box, can be an end in itself. That is the sort of thing that allowed our deep passing game to be so effective last year. It's part of the point - run enough to suck up the defenses (which are already thinking they should do so for Stanford) then the passing game opens up a lot.

It's also not exactly true. Taylor in 2010, 2011, with Luck in his college-prime, did not see 8 in the box very often.

The second caveat is that the running stats are heavily influenced by our two games against clearly overmatched opponents, Army and Davis.  Now, we have overmatched opponents every year, but they don't typically make up 40% of our schedule, and Davis, remember is not FBS.

True, but the effect of the two very weak opponents was not as drastic as you might think, or at least as I might think.
Yards/carry by our 3 main RBs:
Davis  6.0
S.-C.  5.3
Army  8.3
UW    4.6
u.n.d.  3.4

[CTcard]

Two caveats to that analysis, CTCard.  The first is that in prior years, Gerhart, Taylor, and Gaffney had to run against defenses that stacked eight in the box on rushing downs.  Now, most defenses are playing us straight up to counter the fact that we are passing more than in the past.

I wouldn't quite call that a caveat. Getting the defense to do something out of it's base, like stacking 8 in the box, can be an end in itself. That is the sort of thing that allowed our deep passing game to be so effective last year. It's part of the point - run enough to suck up the defenses (which are already thinking they should do so for Stanford) then the passing game opens up a lot.

It's also not exactly true. Taylor in 2010, 2011, with Luck in his college-prime, did not see 8 in the box very often.

The second caveat is that the running stats are heavily influenced by our two games against clearly overmatched opponents, Army and Davis.  Now, we have overmatched opponents every year, but they don't typically make up 40% of our schedule, and Davis, remember is not FBS.

True, but the effect of the two very weak opponents was not as drastic as you might think, or at least as I might think.
Yards/carry by our 3 main RBs:
Davis  6.0
S.-C.  5.3
Army  8.3
UW    4.6
u.n.d.  3.4