Visualize this: David Montgomery and the 100-yard Rushing Club

David Montgomery’s performance on Sunday wasn’t just the silver lining in an otherwise bleak day for the Bears. It was his 6th 100-yard rushing performance, moving him into a tie for 9th place in franchise history.

The 100-yard Rushing Club is anchored by Walter Payton, as all rushing records are with this franchise. I wanted to see if I could capture an amazing franchise history of running backs with one simple visualization using the 100-yard game as the base.

I tried a couple of different approaches but landed on scatter plot with bubbles, a personal favorite. Using time on the x-axis shows this top ten list through the years reading left to right, starting with Rick Casares in the 1950s all the way to David Montgomery today. The size of the bubble relates to the number of 100 yard rushing games with Walter Payton basically acting as the sun in this graph, dwarfing every other bubble. It was Payton’s outlier total that made other visualizations look ridiculous.

The number of games played on the y-axis may look subtle at first, but a close examination may help drive home how many 100-yard games Gale Sayers, Thomas Jones, and even Jordan Howard produced in a relatively short amount of time.

Montgomery looks like the work he put in this offseason paid off and despite the offensive line woes could be looking to stack many more performances like Sunday’s to his career total. He should pass Raymont Harris’s eight games at some point this season and I don’t see any reason he couldn’t challenge Matt Forte’s 24 for 2nd place if he can stay healthy.

Each week, I’ll take a look at a statistic to discuss. If you have something you’d like to see in future weeks, please let me know in the comments below or find me on Twitter @gridironborn.

*Note: A previous version omitted Anthony Thomas.