So since this whole Ezekiel Elliott saga started unfolding, I've seen various internet analysts suggest that Zeke's historic production is due to the volume of carries he receives & not so much his own skill. Their theory seems to be that if you feed any decent running back the ball like we've fed Zeke, they will or would produce similar numbers. Many people suggest that Elliott has only led the league in rushing due to the volume of carries he gets, not because he's genuinely the best running back in the NFL.
The fact that Saquon Barkley was 2nd in rushing, averaged a higher
YPC than Zeke (
5.0-to-
4.7), but had 43 fewer carries on the season, leads people to claim that if Barkley were handed the ball as many times as Zeke then
he would have led the league in rushing --because 'obviously' at a higher
yards-per-carry, more carries would equal more total yards.
But, my own observation of professional football tells me that's not the way it works...
It takes a special kind of back to be a bell-cow, a workhorse, a "franchise" ball-carrier who can provide the direct focus of a ground-based attack & be consistently successful. Not all running backs, even or sometimes especially the ones capable of sustaining a high
yards-per-carry, can be the kind if runner who an offense exerts against a defense week in & week out.
Take Emmitt Smith vs. Marshall Faulk, for example; one of many possible examples.
I would call Marshall Faulk possibly the greatest counterpunch in NFL history, a one-of-a-kind weapon that, nevertheless, needed to be in a system to flourish. Emmitt Smith, on the other hand,
was the system that made the rest of the offense work. The difference is not subtle. Whereas the Cowboys handed Emmitt the ball in order to generate their offense, the Rams formed an aerial attack that made defenses sweat &
then handed (or threw) the ball to Faulk when resources were devoted elsewhere. Against Dallas, most of the resources were devoted to stopping Emmitt --and he continued to dominate anyway.
I'm telling you, backs like
that are few & far between.
When the Colts tried feeding Marshall the ball in year-1, to the tune of
314 carries, he managed barely
4.1 yards-per-carry. The following season, handing the ball to Faulk
289 times, his average fell to
3.7 YPC. The next year he got injured, played in 13 games, and his
yards-per-carry fell to
3.0 flat. Then, after drafting Peyton Manning #1 overall in 1998, they tried leaning on Faulk as a bell-cow once more, handed him the ball a career-high
324 times, and again, he averaged
4.1 yards-per-carry.
Now it's not that
4.1 YPC is anything to sneeze at. It's decent. But it's not really the kind of Hall-of-Fame production that Faulk would ultimately provide, not for the Colts, but the Rams, who instead of trying to build their offense around Faulk as a runner constructed a high-flying, downfield attack that kept the defense on its heels; and then, most of the time they handed Faulk the ball it was out of a passing-formation which isolated him in a mismatch situation --either against a linebacker in coverage or running out of a 3 WR formation that forced the defense to field more secondary members, which of course are easier to run on.
The result?
Faulk averaged
244 strategically-placed carries per-season over the next 4 years, when St. Louis was "The Great Show On Turf" & his
yards-per-carry ballooned to over
5 --amassing
5,075 yards & averaging
5.18 YPC over that span.
This is why I refer to Faulk as the greatest counterpunch in NFL history. There's no denying that he was a sensational, Hall-of-Fame talent. But his was not the
kind of talent that allowed a professional football team to strap on a feedbag & hand the ball to him
300+ times per-year --not and be dominant doing so.
Because no matter how good your o-line might be, the defense can definitely send more than you can block & a lot of what happens on any given run-play is up to the back. It takes a very special kind of back to be the focus of defensive game-plans and continue to produce on the ground at a Hall-of-Fame level anyway. That's
not the kind of back Marshall Faulk was. It was, however, who Emmitt Smith was.
Not for nothing, it's also who Ezekiel Elliott is now --who gained
58% of his yards in 2018 (so
832 yards)
after-contact.
Yes, he led the league in carries. But to suggest that his production is just the result of that volume of carries eschews an understanding of the running game in professional football. You can't just hand a back the ball a bunch and expect that they're gonna produce; and in fact, the more you hand a back the ball, and the more successful they are when doing so, the harder it becomes for that back to continue to produce at the same level --as defensive game-plans, with weeks of film showing not only that you like to hand it off a lot but how, when, where, and out of what formations you like to do so, adjust to take that back away through a variety of means.
It takes a
special back to receive that kind of volume & continue to dominate, not only statistically, but durably.
Christian McCaffery averaged
5.0 yards-per-carry last season, on
219 carries.
Do y'all really believe that if Carolina had handed him the ball
100 more times, in all situations, short-yardage, goal-line, 4th-quarter, you name it, that his average would not have taken a significant hit? Or that he might not have literally
broken himself somewhere along the way? Some people act like it's just automatic that someone averaging a
high YPC would duplicate that if handed a larger workload, and history reveals that nothing is further from the truth.
There's honestly not a ton of backs in league annals who could perform such a task.
Even Barry Sanders was used most often as a counterpunch. I'm not saying he's not one of the most freakishly talented players the NFL has ever seen. But watch his highlights for a glimpse into what a deeper study reveals: the Lions' run-&-shoot offense most often handed the ball to Barry out of passing-formations. This wasn't Dallas' legendary I-formation, lead-draw type of attack. It was a spread, one-back offense that tried to get the ball to Barry in space, maximizing his unprecedented elusiveness.
But
no one mistook Barry for a power-back.
Detroit literally took Sanders out of the game in most short-yardage situations and whenever they got inside the
4 yard-line. No lie. As one of his coaches said,
"Barry is the greatest flag-football player of all-time." Again, this isn't intended to disparage Barry Sanders. I love him. But not all backs are created equal.
Now, how the Lions used Barry notwithstanding, he's actually one of the few exceptions to this rule; a guy who was just SO talented that his stylistic lack of consistency as a volume runner was offset by the BOOM associated with his freelancing, east-to-west proclivities. Not many runners who can't dominate down-to-down have the sheer ability to make up for it with such an uncommon tendency to break big-yardage plays.
In other words, Christian McCaffery would flounder if given Barry's workload on the ground.
Emmitt Smith?
In 1995, he carried the ball
377 times, for
1,773 yards,
4.7 yards-per-carry.
I'm not sure some of y'all appreciate what an astounding feat that is.
Emmitt didn't share the load. Emmitt did ALL the heavy-lifting for his team on the ground, much like Zeke does for his now. Every short-yardage opportunity. Every goal-line handoff, save the occasional quick-insider to Moose. But
*99% of the time (
*that may not be a literal figure but rather hyperbole to emphasize the point), whenever Dallas handed the ball off, they handed it to Emmitt. And Emmitt, handoff-after-handoff, produced at big-time levels. Unprecedented levels. Hall-of-Fame levels.
That's why he kept getting the ball. That's why they never took him off the field. Because even factoring in the short-yardage & goal-line carries he received, we're talking
1 or
2-
yard gains by design, he
still averaged
almost 5 yards-per-carry when calculating ALL his carries across the season. Imagine what Emmitt's average would have been had they subbed him out in goal-line & short-yardage situations --keeping him from tallying a bunch of 2-yard-or-less handoffs that somewhat artificially lowered it. But of course, taking those short handoffs is also a big reason why he scored a then-record
25 TDs on the ground that year.
And that's why the vast majority of backs don't get
that kind of volume: because they
couldn't produce like Emmitt if they did, across all manner of circumstances and being gnashed into the teeth of the defense again & again.
And I'll tell you, my friends, there's not many --maybe any-- who can produce like Zeke, either.
So it's always curious to me when someone dismisses Zeke's production "because he got a lot of carries," as if just anyone could do with those carries what Zeke has done; or what Emmitt did with his. I guarantee you their coaches would tell you they
earned those carries through their stellar play & ability to produce over a broad volume of handoffs. A
300+ carry NFL season is not for the faint-of-heart,
or someone with average ability.
Saquon Barkley, like Barry Sanders (sort of), may well be one of those special players who are used as a counterpunch but able to produce at Hall-of-Fame levels. I'm not denying that Barkley has the physical ability to be the kind of runner that teams build a power-run game around. But I am saying we haven't seen it yet, as the Giants were a pass-first offense (Eli had a career year), while the Cowboys were a ground-oriented attack, and nowhere in his career has it ever been Barkley's style. 2019 will be revealing...
That's why I think Zeke's
4.7 YPC is just as good as Barkley's
5.0 --or Emmitt's lifetime
4.2 to Barry's
5.0, who had
1,347 fewer handoffs than Emmitt & avoided most of the short-yardage attempts throughout his career. Bashing Barry repeatedly into a front-7 that knows what's coming and is all crowded to stop him would have changed the trajectory of his career, not to mention lowered his
robust yards-per-carry average.
Because there's only so many backs God makes who can do it all.
We've got one, and people want to hold it against him that he gets the ball a lot.
Maybe I just watch football differently.
Remember that Saquon Barkley averaged
32.75 yards-per-carry last season on just
16 carries, and
3.19 YPC across the remaining
245. Backs who average
3.19 yards-per-carry on
94% of their touches aren't usually given
250+ carries over a season. You know? Barkley's home-run ability is special & rare, like Barry Sanders' was.
The guy with the 3rd-most carries in the league last year, David Johnson, who took only 3 fewer hand-offs than Barkley, averaged
3.6 yards-per-carry; and he's considered one of the top talents in the league. Which is just to say, you can't write Elliott's Hall-of-Fame-paced production off as volume alone. Although I think it's honest to say that the volume behind his production is due to his Hall-of-Fame talent alone. Only backs who
earn it are handed the ball
300+ times per-season.
Zeke is remarkably productive.
Emmitt Smith is THE most productive running back in the history of time.
Zeke is on-pace to out-produce Emmitt in every way.
He's got a LONG way to go, I know.
While it will take a high volume of carries to achieve it, only his talent will earn those carries.
Emmitt's
COWBOYS career statistics stand out to me as one of the very greatest achievements in NFL history:
4,052 carries,
17,328 yards,
4.3 yards-per-carry,
153 TDs,
86+ yards-per-game
486 receptions,
3,012 yards,
6.2 yards-per-reception,
11 TDs,
15 yards-per-game
TOTAL:
4,538 touches,
20,340 yards,
4.5 yards-per-touch,
164 TDs,
101+ yards-per-game
... over a 13-year Dallas Cowboys career.
Freakish.
No other running back in NFL history comes close.
Zeke is on pace to surpass him in year-11.
Turn up your
VOLUME, brethren!
lmao
