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The Running Busts
Authored by Andrew Perna - 15th November, 2007 - 7:50 pm
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Heading into the 2007 NFL season few things seemed certain. We knew the Colts and Patriots would battle for the right to be called the AFC’s best team and that the NFC would spend several months just trying to keep up. We also figured we knew the names of football’s best rushers.
LaDainian Tomlinson was coming of a historic, record-setting season, Steven Jackson and Frank Gore had enjoyed breakout years in 2006 and Larry Johnson was still dominating defenses Kansas City. It was widely believed that they’d all be MVP candidates in 2007 and safe top-tier picks for your fantasy team.
Boy, were we wrong to assume.
Ten weeks into the season, only Tomlinson’s name appears on the list of the league’s top-fifteen rushers, and he’s not even featured in the top-five. Vikings’ rookie Adrian Peterson leads the NFL in rushing with an incredible 1,081 yards. Rounding out the top-five are Pittsburgh’s Willie Parker (873), Washington’s Clinton Portis (766), Indianapolis’ Joseph Addai (760) and Buffalo’s Marshawn Lynch (751).
Tomlinson, seventh on the list, is on pace to rush for 1,303 yards and 14 touchdowns this season. That’s not too shabby, unless you consider his performances from 2002-2006. He hasn’t accumulated less than 1,300 yards since 2001, his rookie season, and ran into the end zone 28 times last year. There’s no doubt that he’s still one of the NFL’s premier backs, but 1,300 yards and 14 touchdowns would certainly help bring L.T. back down to earth after his other-worldly 2006 campaign.
Scanning down the list of the league’s leading rushers, Larry Johnson is the next of the four mentioned above that appear. He’s currently fifteenth on the list but will continue to fall as he recovers from an injury to his right foot. Johnson, who rushed for over 1,700 yards in both 2005 and 2006, has just 559 yards in eight games this season. L.J. is expected to miss at least the Chiefs’ next two games, which would give him just five games to reach the 1,000 milestone.
Assuming he plays in only five more games this season and keeps up his current level of production, he’ll fall short of the 1,000-yard plateau by a handful of yards in 2007. It’s not as though Johnson has capitalized on his 183 carries this season either. He’s reached the end zone just three times – the worst ratio of his career.
Next on the list is San Francisco’s Frank Gore, the league’s twenty-fifth best runner. Gore has played sparingly in eight games for the 49ers this season, rushing just 123 times for 507 yards and 3 scores. Gore was never a huge end zone threat but tallied nearly 1,700 yards in 2006. Assuming he regains his health through the season’s final seven games, he’ll probably end up with roughly 950 yards for the entire season. Eight players will likely have surpassed that mark in just a few weeks. Gore hasn’t looked like an elite runner, injury or not.
Of the “big” four Steven Jackson is struggling the most. Thirty-four running backs have run for more yards than Jackson, including the Colts’ Kenton Keith, Patriots’ Sammy Morris, Bengals’ Kenny Watson and Buccaneers’ Earnest Graham.
Injuries have hit ‘Action’ Jackson as well, limiting him to just five games this season. On 99 carries Jackson has 350 yards and two touchdowns. You can blame some of the struggles on his health, but he wasn’t exactly rippin’ up the turf before the injury bug hit. Through the first three games of season Jackson was averaging just 77 yards a game and had scored zero touchdowns.
Rarely do preseason projections come to fruition, but I don’t think anyone expected to see these four so far down the list of the NFL’s leading rushers. They’ll have to overcome injury (in the case of Johnson, Gore and Jackson) and a tough schedule (Tomlinson) to reverse their fortunes during the second half of the 2007 season.
If anyone is capable of turning things around, it’s the stars of the not-so-distant past.
