| Authored by Scott Essman - 5th February, 2007 - 5:20 pm
 After watching Peyton Manning raise the Vince Lombardi trophy after leading his Indianapolis Colts to win Super Bowl XLI – almost by default – it reminds even the casual sports fan of the obvious: it takes a great quarterback to win a Super Bowl, not a great running back. When the amazing Edgerrin James left the Colts after the 2005 season, many critics left the Colts for dead. Without a great running game, they said, NFL defenses would be waiting for Manning to routinely pass the ball and predict his plays. Alas, the Colts do not have a spectacular running game post-James, but they certainly have an adequate one, which is seemingly all it takes to win the big one in the NFL.
Recent history bears this out. Curtis Martin is inarguably one of the top running backs of the past ten years. Yet the New England Patriots won three Super Bowls with quarterback Tom Brady after Martin left the team and a huge gap in the running game following the 1997 season. Undoubtedly, the Patriots won those Super Bowls because of Brady, with more possibly to follow. Their running game seems to rate a distant second in the offense.
In the 1980s and early 1990s, the San Francisco 49ers won four Super Bowls with quarterbacks Joe Montana and Steve Young anchoring their West Coast offense. Quick – name the running backs on those teams! Me neither. It was the underrated Roger Craig – but he was often used as a receiver – one year, he had over 1000 receiving yards.
Certainly, the great 1970s Pittsburgh Steeler teams had Franco Harris, and their NFC rivals, the Dallas Cowboys, had Tony Dorsett, both key ingredients to those offenses. But defense ruled the day that decade, and those teams surely won their combined six 1970s championships due to Dallas “Doomsday” defense and Pittsburgh’s “Steel Curtain” defenders.
Speaking of Dallas, they prove the exception to this rule – the three Cowboy Super Bowl titles of the mid-1990s were not possible without running back Emmitt Smith. But here, we are talking about perhaps the greatest running back of all-time, in all deference to Jim Brown. Speaking of Brown, the man went to nine Pro Bowls in each of his nine seasons but never won an NFL championship (he played before such a thing as a Super Bowl).
On that same track, O.J. Simpson was surely the greatest rusher of the post-Brown era of the late 1960s through the 1970s. How many championships did he win? Zero, despite six Pro Bowls. How about Barry Sanders? Without Emmitt Smith on the scene, Sanders would have certainly been crowned the greatest rusher of the 1990s, even though he retired prematurely at 31 after the 1998 season. The man went to ten Pro Bowls in his ten seasons. He was likely within range of Walter Payton’s all-time rushing yards record with another season of peak performance (Smith later broke Payton’s record in 2002). His Detroit Lions failed to even reach one Super Bowl during Sanders’ unbelievable tenure.
And what of Payton, who did win a Super Bowl, with the Chicago Bears in 1986? Certainly Payton was a top performer, but his legacy is longevity over productivity and the Bears had a destiny based on unstoppable defense and overall team balance over a mere running game.
Yes, the quarterback is the most high-profile position in NFL football, but it’s for a reason – you need a great one to win it all; you might not win anything even with the greatest of running backs regularly getting the ball for your team. |
