LenDale White entered Monday night’s game against the Broncos as the NFL’s 10th-leading rusher. After the Tennessee Titans running back was limited to only 42 yards in Denver’s 34-20 victory, White didn’t drop off the face of the statistical earth, only to 12th place.
No disrespect to Denver’s seemingly revamped defense, but such meager efforts have largely become the norm in the NFL this season.
In 2006, five running backs rushed for at least 1,500 yards, with Pittsburgh’s Willie Parker falling just 6 yards short of that figure. But after 10 games this season, only two players, Minnesota rookie sensation Adrian Peterson and Philadelphia’s Brian Westbrook are on pace to reach 1,500 yards — and there’s some question as to whether either of those two men will get there. Peterson has missed most of the past two games with a knee injury; at a diminutive 5-feet-10, 203 pounds, Westbrook has carried the ball only 200 times in a season once and is in his sixth season.
“That’s a little surprising to hear that,” Broncos safety John Lynch said Monday night. “It used to be that teams had to run the ball, and I think it’s still that way when you get into December and in playoff games, but right now, it seems like teams don’t mind going back and chucking it 50 times a game.”
While the NFL has been known as a copycat league, this may be the first season in which teams try to ape another squad even before the champion is crowned. That would be the New England Patriots, who have rode the arm of quarterback Tom Brady and the hands of Randy Moss, Wes Welker, Donte Stallworth and Ben Watson to a 10-0 record, decimating opponents by an average of more than 25 points a game in the process.
Brady has thrown 299 passes this season, just fewer than half of all of New England’s plays from scrimmage. Green Bay, which has a 9-1 record, has run 576 plays and 354 of them, or 61 percent, have been passes from Brett Favre.
Similar numbers can be found throughout the NFL. Of the seven teams with the best records in the league — New England, Green Bay, Dallas, Indianapolis, Pittsburgh, Jacksonville and the New York Giants, only the Steelers (242) and Jaguars (244) aren’t over, or at least hard against the 300-attempt mark.
That’s not surprising, given that both of those franchises have long forged reputations as two of the toughest teams on the NFL block. Pittsburgh’s Parker has 925 yards rushing this season, second in the league, but Jacksonville is being paced by Fred Taylor, with 604. That figure actually cracks the top 20 in the league, a ludicrous thought even as recently as last season, when San Diego’s LaDainian Tomlinson rushed for 1,815 yards, followed closely by Kansas City’s Larry Johnson at 1,789 and San Francisco’s Frank Gore at 1,695.
This year, Tomlinson has 795 yards; Johnson, who held out at the start of training camp, is at 559 yards — 20 more than Gore’s total.
“When a back has a good season like those guys, the next year, teams will put eight, or nine guys in the box when you play against them,” Titans offensive tackle Michael Roos said. “They focus on the run game a lot more to try and stop it.”
Roos added that inconsistency may be another factor in the halting rushing totals. White, for example, is averaging 66.7 yards per game, but the former Chatfield High star has had efforts as high as 133 yards and as low as 12. Even Peterson has had his ups and downs. The rookie set an NFL record with his 296-yard total against San Diego, and he had a 224-yard effort against Chicago earlier in the season. But there also have been another three games in which Peterson failed to top 70 yards.
“It’s like it’s on a week-by-week basis,” Roos said. “One week a team doesn’t tackle as well and a guy gets extra yards and the next week the team does tackle really well and you don’t get any. It’s a matter of teams going out every week and pushing the run and then making it happen.”
Another consideration is another of the league’s recent trends — the two-back offense. Taylor’s team-leading total in Jacksonville might not be overly impressive by itself, but when you throw in Maurice Jones-Drew’s 569 yards rushing, the Jaguars are averaging 100 yards a game. And as good as Peterson has been for the Vikings, at the start of the season he was sharing carries with Chester Taylor. Taylor has 468 yards rushing this season, including 164 against Oakland last Sunday.
“Everybody’s using a couple of backs, going to some kind of rotation,” Tennessee coach Jeff Fisher said.
That includes Denver, where Tatum Bell led the Broncos with 1,025 yards in 2006, but then-rookie Mike Bell added another 677. This season, Travis Henry has rushed for 580 yards, but rookie Selvin Young has 385. Throw in contributions from the likes of Andre Hall and the team’s average goes up to more than 122 yards rushing per game.
“It used to be that teams felt they had to have the one guy,” Lynch said. “That’s not true anymore around here, it’s two or three.”
