Entering Week 9 of the 2011 NFL season, the rushing leaders were as follows:
Fred Jackson And The Unlikely Rushing Leaders: Where Do They Come From?
Bills running back Fred Jackson went undrafted out of a Division III school. He now stands among the league leaders in rushing yards at age 30. Here, we look at the top 10 rushers of 2011 and try to figure out how they got here.
- Fred Jackson, Buffalo (803 yards)
- Adrian Peterson, Minnesota (798)
- Frank Gore, San Francisco (782)
- LeSean McCoy, Philadelphia (754)
- Maurice Jones-Drew, Jacksonville (740)
- Michael Turner, Atlanta (692)
- Matt Forte, Chicago (672)
- Arian Foster, Houston (656)
- Willis McGahee, Denver (623)
- Ben Tate, Houston (623)
Even if we discount the order, we can probably agree that this is not a definitive list of the 10 best running backs in the game today. If it were, Darren McFadden and Jamaal Charles would probably be here. Perhaps DeMarco Murray, whose limited number of carries hurt him here, and maybe even Chris Johnson, despite the disappointing half-season he's had.
From an observational standpoint, though, I like this list, because it’s made up of 10 men who carry very different histories in tow. When Adrian Peterson was selected with the 7th overall pick of the 2007 draft, he was so after an incredible collegiate career at Oklahoma. We all thought he would continue to be incredible, and, yes, he continues to be incredible. He is not a surprise.
Everyone else on the list, to one extent or another and for one reason or another, is a surprise.
(click to enlarge)
An unsurprising take-away from this chart is that these guys had good-to-great rushing numbers in their college days. That, though, is the most normal observation we can make. Some of these players have just recently made their footing in the league; others have played for eight years, which equals out to roughly a million running back years. Some began their careers by exploding out of the gate, and others had to wait years for their turns to come around.
If the draft histories are any indication, the NFL’s decision-makers didn’t see some of these guys coming.
Predicting the future is very, very difficult work, and so it's to be expected that teams will make plenty of unsuccessful draft decisions. That teams chose Ronnie Brown and Eric Shelton before Frank Gore in the 2004 Draft isn't necessarily a grand collapse of calculations, it's simply a testament to the magnitude of the unknowns at play.
Let’s take a minute to review some of these stories:
Arian Foster. No team thought he was worth a draft pick, not even in the late rounds. One year later, he led the NFL in rushing.
Willis McGahee. Was expected to be an early first-round pick until the 2003 Fiesta Bowl. I remember watching that game with my roommates. When we saw his injury, we were convinced that his leg was so badly destroyed that he would never play again.
Sure enough, he recovered and developed into a serviceable starting running back, only to fall out of favor when he suggested the Bills should move to Toronto and resume his career in Baltimore. Despite suffering a spate of other injuries throughout his career, he's still an effective back at 30 years of age.
Michael Turner. After being one of the very most effective rushers in all of college football, Turner was drafted by the Chargers... and then sat on the bench. He spent four years taking behind superstar LaDainian Tomlinson on the depth chart, taking the ball only three to five times a game. In 2008, he signed with the Falcons and put up 1,699 rushing yards once he finally had the chance to start.
Maurice Jones-Drew. Standing at 5’7”, Jones-Drew almost slipped all the way to the third round of the 2006 Draft because teams believed he was too short. He is now an all-purpose back who seems likely to surpass 1,300 rushing yards for the third consecutive season.
Fred Jackson. Jackson’s story is surely the most unlikely of the bunch. He spent his collegiate career at Coe College, a school with an enrollment smaller than most high schools. After being completely passed up in the 2003 Draft, he spent two years playing indoor football with the Sioux City Bandits, reportedly making about $200 a week.
After playing a year of football in Europe, the Bills invited him to training camp. In his third year as their primary running back, he leads the league in rushing. He turns 31 in February.
Obviously, a running back’s value isn’t usually limited to his rushing ability. The concept of the “receiving back” has been utilized for decades, but in the age of specialization, there seems to be a little more room for one-dimensional players than there used to be.
Here’s how the rushing yards of these 10 fellows stacks up as related to their total yards from scrimmage.
The most dramatic outlier here is Michael Turner, a run-only power back who catches a pass every other game at most. Having led the league in carries twice over the last three years, such an absence is excusable. It just isn’t his game.
In the middle you have Maurice Jones-Drew, who has been able to make his receiving yards account for about 27% of his total yards from scrimmage despite a serious height disadvantage.
And at the bottom of the chart, there’s Matt Forte. He hasn’t missed a game since entering the league in 2008, he’s averaging 5.4 yards per carry, and he has a decent shot of surpassing 1,000 receiving yards on top of that. He’s 26, he has no significant NFL injury history, and he’s versatile. Five years from now, most of these guys will not rank in the top 10 anymore, but all signs point to Forte sticking around for a long while.
So! These are who these guys are: different guys with different backgrounds and different skill sets who manage to produce similarly effective results. At least one was impossible to miss from the get-go, but more often than not, they’re impossible to see coming.
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