Yards per carry can be a bit misleading as to a running back's consistency as it is easily inflated by big runs. Drake and Gore had extremely similar yards per carry but Gore got the rock more regularly because his average carry was far closer to that four and a half yards than Drake.
Nobody has ever trusted this guy to take the lion's share of carries week in and week out and it probably has a lot to do with what I'm describing above.
That was my argument last offseason, that Drake had never been trusted as full timer, and there were reasons for it. This was when we had a thread projecting Drake to receive 2-3 times as many carries at Gore. Made zero sense, given their respective careers and skill sets.
I can't get invested in Drake opinion either way. As soon as you overstate him, his weaknesses are on display. Once he's dismissed as vastly overrated then the big plays show up. I can't hate a player who scores points out of nowhere. That's the Bill Polian philosophy.
The problem is the other guy. Instead of finding a semblance of a younger Gore we've got pitiful traffic instincts in Ballage. As j-off-her-doll posted, it's a weird group.
BTW, I'm glad I was around to appreciate all the years in which running back was the most coveted player on the field. Literally every season from the late '60s through the early to mid '80s the first thing everyone did while following college football was to isolate the freak running backs, and salivate at the prospect of them completely transforming the NFL team lucky enough to have that first pick. You can see how coveted the position was based on that desperate 4-for-1 trade that Shula made in 1978 --- Freddie Solomon and a #1 draft and #5 draft pick, along with lanky safety Vern Roberson -- in exchange for Delvin Williams, a good gliding running back but who was already 27 years old and had a knee injury in his background.
My friends and I hated that trade for a basic reason: Solomon was a better player than Williams. It was clear cut. Shula overreacted to positional need. Besides, Williams was not one of those ultra elite collegians. He was fairly well known in college but a second round pick out of Kansas, and always described as basically a second round caliber back.
As always, the explanation was situational influence. So often that is lost to history. Shula months earlier had just witnessed the Cowboys win the Super Bowl with rookie running back Tony Dorsett, after making a bold move to jump up in the prior draft and grab Dorsett. Shula knew that another freak back Earl Campbell would be entering the league in two weeks, and drafted by a fellow AFC team. He didn't think he could afford to fall behind at that critical position, especially with Griese at the tail end of his career.