1,000 Yards Ain't What It Used To Be

As long as I can remember, the measuring stick that indicted a great season for an NFL running back was 1,000 yards total rushing in a season.  It is still something that writers, broadcasters, and assorted talking heads point to and tell us that "RB Jacques LeStrapp has had a terrific season with 1,105 yards gained rushing", but did he really have great season?  Of course he did, but consider the following.

In 2024, sixteen NFL running backs finished with at least 1,000 yards gained, led by the Eagles' Saquon Barkley with 2,005 yards, and he sat out the 17th game of the season, and that brings me to my point.  Up until 1961, the NFL played a 12 game season.  In 1961 that number went up to 14 games.  It went to 16 games in 1978, and 17 games in 2023.  To achieve a thousand yards rushing back in the days of a twelve game season, a back had to average 83.3 yards a game.  When the season increased to 14 games, the average dropped to 71.4, then to 62.5 over 16 games, and then to the current number of 58.8 over 17 games.

I think that you see what I am getting at here. 

Jim Brown had seven season wherein he gained 1,000 or more yards, and he led the league in rushing in all but one of his nine seasons. Those two seasons when he didn't gain 1,000 yards?  He scraped by with 942 and 996 yards; one of those season was a twelve game season.  Three of his 1,000 yard seasons were achieved over twelve games.  Only five - Barkley, Derrick Henry, Brian Robinson, Jonathan Taylor, and Jahmyr Gibbs - of the 16 players who rushed for 1,000 yards in 2024  had a per game average that would have achieved 1,000 yards in a 12 game season.  

I mentioned sixteen players rushed for thousand yards this past season.  I pulled one season of Jim Brown's at random, 1958.  Brown ran for 1,527 yards (5.9 per carry) that year.  Not only was he the ONLY back to gain a thousand yards that year, but the guy in second place, Alan Ameche, amassed a total 791 yards, just slightly more than half of Brown's total.

In 1973, OJ Simpson became the first RB to crack the 2,000 yard barrier  when he gained 2,003 yards over 14 games, an average of 143.7 yds/game.  Pretty impressive.  2,000 yards has since been achieved seven other times, and all of them have exceeded Simpson's 1973 mark.  The record is held by Eric Dickerson with 2,105 over 16 games, 131.6 yds/game. 

When the NFL went to a 14 game schedule back in 1961, Pete Rozelle became the anti-Ford Frick and declared that there would be no asterisks in the NFL record books.  Season records would be season records regardless of the length of schedule, and good for him.  (For you kids out there, just Google "Ford Frick asterisks" if you don't understand what I just said.)  None of this is meant to denigrate the achievements of players who run for a thousand yards in the current day, but maybe it will just rekindle the respect for the achievements that guys like Brown, Dickerson, and Barry Sanders in earlier days.

I came up with all this by just sitting at the ol' iMac and cruising through Pro Football Reference for about thirty or so minutes this morning.  One of the things that this site does is that it will pro-rate a player's career stats over a 17 game schedule. So I just picked out ten guys at random to see what they would have averaged over a 17 game season.  This is not all inclusive and I obviously left a lot of great players off of the list, but consider these figures:

	Per Season, pro-rated over 17 games
Jim Brown	1,774
Barry Sanders	1,697
Eric Dickerson	1,544
Walter Payton	1,497
OJ Simpson	1,415
Earl Campbell	1,391
Emmitt Smith	1,381
Tony Dorsett	1,252
Jerome Bettis	1,210
Franco Harris	1,101
Barry Foster	1,081

These are the conclusions that I came up with after looking at these numbers.  (1) Jim Brown was the GOAT, and (2) Barry Sanders was and is under appreciated.

Now you know why their pictures grace the top of this post.