Here's how rare it would be for rookie Ezekiel Elliott to get 300 carries

The Dallas Cowboys surprised a lot of people by taking a running back (former Ohio State star Ezekiel Elliott) with the fourth pick in this year's NFL Draft. Running backs have fallen out of vogue lately, largely due to the fact that teams now know they have an extremely short shelf life. They've been getting selected later and later in the draft as a result. The Cowboys, though, bucked that trend.

Dallas wants to return to the run-focused offense that led to the best season of Tony Romo's career in 2014, and presumably wants to use Elliott to do it. It's unlikely they'd have drafted him in the top five if they were just planning to give Darren McFadden or Alfred Morris a ton of carries. So it should come as not much of a surprise that DallasCowboys.com writer David Helman said in an answer to a mailbag question on Tuesday that he expects Elliott to "finish with roughly 280-300 carries."

Could Elliott rack up 300 carries in his rookie year? USATSI

That's probably the consensus expectation for most observers, but here's the thing: it would be incredibly rare. Since the AFL/NFL merger in 1970, there have been only 30 rookie running backs that carried the ball 280-plus times, per Pro-Football-Refernece. There have been only 17 backs to tote it 300-plus times.

The sample of players to receive that many carries, of course, is biased toward high draft picks. Of the 17 players to carry 300-plus times, 10 were selected in the first 10 picks of the draft and nine were selected in the top five. Of the 280-plus carry rookies, 14 were top-10 picks and 12 were top-five selections.

Even those players, though, were the exception, rather than the rule. There have been 57 running backs selected in the first 10 picks of the draft since the merger, and 33 selected in the top five. That means only 24.6 percent of top-10 picks got 280-plus carries during their rookie season, and just 21.0 percent received 300-plus.

Narrowing the sample down to top-five ball-carriers raises the percentages a bit, but still to pretty low numbers. Just 36.4 percent of top-five running backs received 280-plus carries during the rookie season, and 27.3 percent received 300-plus.

Elliott, then, would have to strongly buck tradition if he were to actually receive that many carries. The Cowboys will likely set the goal of getting him there, but he's going to have to remain both healthy and effective enough in order to actually do it.