re: Chubb’s worst games tend to come when he isn’t used much

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I agree. He gets better and wears down the defense. It's a win/win

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No... It's not. If Chubb isn't keeping us on pace to stay ahead of the chains, then guess what, we go run run pass out just like everyone bitched about in the first 2 game threads and most of last season. If Chubb is consistently getting 4-5+ yards on first or second down, sure... but the reality is that simply hasn't been the case. Look past the raw numbers.

On the surface, Chubb averaged 4.8 ypc to Michel's 5.6 ypc (throw out Swift who only carried twice in that game). Pretty close and one might argue that Chubb's tendency to wear out defenses would have meant that he would have ended up with more ypc with more yards... except let's dig deeper.

Michel's longest carry of the night was 17 yards. Not a homerun, but pretty solid. That means taking away his longest carry of the night he ran 12 other times for 56 yards, or 4.6ypc.

Chubb's longest carry of the night though was 30 yards (it was also his first fwiw). Great boost, but for consistency and sustaining drives, that leaves him with 12 additional carries for 33 yards... or 2.75 ypc. That puts us regularly in 3rd and 5ish rather than 3rd and 2ish when averaged out.

Look... I love Chubb. He's inarguably one of my favorite players for the dawgs ever. Damn near cried when I saw him go down in that UT game. Want nothing more than for him to have a long and successful career. But until we figure out our blocking scheme or a way to consistently get him the ball without initial contact occurring in the backfield, he's shown to be a less efficient running back for us with the offensive scheme that we seem to have to run with a freshman QB.

Perhaps that changes... we're operating on really small sample sizes against one "good" team, a lower tier FBS team (albeit a threat still), and an FCS team that was seriously overmatched. We're hitting the meat of the schedule now, so hopefully Chubb does Chubb things, we give him the ball ~40% of the time that we run it, ~30% to Michel, and then divy up the other roughly 30% to Swift/Herrien/Holyfield. If we can ride those horses to an East championship and/or more, awesome. But I would imagine it's going to mean significantly fewer 1 to negative yard rushes against solid competition for Chubb to see that balance shift. (For reference, 8 of Chubb's 13 rushes against ND went for 1 yard or worse.)