Emmitt Smith: Meet Your Pro Football Hall Of Fame Inductee

The knocks on Emmitt Smith were that his frame wouldn’t allow him to take the punishment of a long NFL career and that his lack of speed would limit him against fast NFL defense. It is safe to say that criticism looks a little silly now.

Smith will be inducted to the Pro Football Hall of Fame tonight as the NFL’s all-time leading rusher, having earned those 18,355 yards on an NFL-record 4,409 carries, almost 600 more than the next player on that list, Walter Payton. It’s a record he earned with toughness and resilience: He had just one carry of over 70 yards in his career and averaged more than five yards per carry just once, in 1993, but had 11 straight seasons of over 1,000 yards from 1991 to 2001. (For comparison, both Chris Johnson and Adrian Peterson have seasons with more than five yards per attempt.)

His legacy as the ultimate workhorse back is a product of his dependability. From his rookie season in 1990 to his last season in Dallas in 2002, Smith played in 201 of the Cowboys’ 208 regular season games, never gaining fewer than 937 yards on the ground in a season. Even in his twilight in Arizona, Smith produced: Though he started just five games in 2003 due to injury, he turned in a workmanlike 937 rushing yards—the same number he gained as a rookie—for the Cardinals in 2004.

But Smith also has one of the more impressive (or insane) moments of toughness in NFL history on his resume.

After separating a shoulder against the Giants in the first half of the final game of the 1993 regular season, Smith missed just two plays, ultimately rushing for 168 yards and gaining another 61 as a receiver. The 42 touches he got on that cold day in the Meadowlands would be a career high.

Smith was also the centerpiece of the Dallas Cowboys dynasty of the early 1990s. He won three Super Bowls with the team, and was named MVP of Super Bowl XXVIII, rushing for 132 yards and two touchdowns. That capped a magnificent 1993 for Smith: He led the league in rushing and was named both NFL MVP and Super Bowl MVP, becoming the first running back to accrue all three honors in a single year.

Smith’s post-football career has been less uniformly stellar. Though he won his season of Dancing With The Stars and earned a bit of non-football fame for it, his misadventures as an announcer are well-documented. And anecdotes like once giving teammates copies of his autobiography as a Christmas present don’t help. But many will also remember Smith as the person who has been a tremendous friend to Darryl Perry, his lead blocker in college at the University of Florida, as Perry, once pronounced dead, makes his way back to health.

Those knocks on Emmitt Smith were more or less right: He never did get faster, or bigger, or stronger. But he was as tough as football players came, with a penchant for breaking tackles and churning out yards, and his resilience and durability made his career one of the most decorated in NFL history.

Our Cowboys blog, Blogging the Boys, has more on what Smith did in Big D.