Emmit Smith and his annual Rushing YardsEmmit Smith announced his retirement on February 3, 2005. It was a very emotional moment for Smith, who played as a running back in the NFL for fifteen years (thirteen of those years for the Dallas Cowboys). As Smith announced his retirement, tears began to stream down his face as he said, “It’s been a great journey. » During his NFL career, Smith accumulated many impressive statistics and awards. Smith played on three Super Bowl championship teams (including an MVP award in 1993). Smith is currently the NFL's all-time leading rusher with 18,355 yards. For my spinoff project, I chose to graph Emmitt Smith's yearly rushing yardage total. Emmitt was drafted out of the University of Florida in 1990 and began his career as an NFL big. As you can see from the graph, Smith started his career slowly, amassing just 937 rushing yards in his first year. However, in his sophomore year, Smith improved to 1,563 rushing yards. In his third season, Smith improved again to 1,713 rushing yards. Smith's decline in production during the fourth and fifth years (1,486 and 1,494 respectively) in the NFL can be partly attributed to Smith not appearing in all sixteen regular season games due to injuries. Smith redeemed himself the following year with a career-high 1,773 rushing yards. Over the next six years, Smith's age slowly caught up with him as he ranged from 1,021 to 1,397 yards. Eventually, after his thirteenth year as a Dallas Cowboy, Smith was traded to the Arizona Cardinals. During his first year with the Arizona Cardinals (2003), Smith was injured and played as a backup for most of the year. This is exemplified by his career-high 256 rushing yards. However, in Smith's final year in the NFL, he racked up 937 rushing yards, bouncing back from a disappointing year. Strangely, Smith finished his final season with the same rushing total as his rookie season. I plotted these points in a graph in an Excel document and created a line of best fit. This line was a cubic equation (f(x) = 1.4228x3 - 8533.3x2 + 2E+07x - 1E+10). To calculate the first derivative, I found the average rate of change in Emmitt Smith's annual rushing yards in the two years surrounding the year I was drifting. Smith's annual yards had an increasing slope in the years 1990, 1991, 1994, 1997, 1998 and 2004.