That may be why you aren’t in charge of an NFL team.
There were many comments on Palontonio’s excerpt from ESPN.com that were denouncing him as an idiot that knows nothing.
Damn you, ass-games!
You’re blinded by homerism and highlight reels, dude.
I’d be willing to bet that Barry Sanders had more rushes for negative yards than any back in history. I know he led the league in that category in some seasons. If that’s the kind of back you want to build a team around, have fun losing.
I’d rather take a guy who can get me a first down on 3rd and 2 with some degree of regularity.
Let’s put this “Sal Paolantonio’s Opinion” bullshit to bed please. For The Record.
No. I’m really not. I’m not appealing to the exciting plays. I’m saying that the man put up numbers. I’m also saying that if you’re going to argue who the best was, it’s between Jim Brown and Barry Sanders. That’s based on your preference for your style of the run game.
Of note: Barry never got injured and rarely fumbled the ball.
I don’t care that he has the most negative yards in history. Defensive coordinators and defensive players were frightened to play against him. People didn’t have to figure a way to stop Emmitt Smith when he got the ball, but they sure as hell did when Barry or Jim Brown did.
Link to excerpt.
Then you don’t know anything about football.
Right, because that invalidates everything because you say so.
I’m glad people brought up Emmitt Smith, because he really is the Tom Brady of running backs. An above averge running back who benefitted from a wonderful system. If Barry Sanders had spent his career running for the Cowboys, he would have gained 20k yards and would be easily considered the best running back of all time. If Emmitt Smith had spent his career running for the Lions, he would have had a Curtis Martin-esque career.
Good analogy. I think it’s pretty apt. Curtis Martin put up some damn good numbers behind some solid lines.
I’m not so sure. The first caveat is that I don’t think Emmitt is in the top 3 of running backs all time. I agree that he greatly benefited from being in a perfect and consistent system. I also think that there are a lot of other runners who would have been equally successful in that situation.
But…
I’m not sure that Barry is one of them. Barry was in drastically different system with a drastically different philosophy. We’ve only ever seen him run behind a zone blocking system, which essentially allowed him to sit back and pick a hole and improvise. Emmitt’s Cowboys ran exclusively a man-to-man drive blocking system which suited his downhill style.
Barry’s terrible short yardage statistics were a result of his inability to run downhill off-tackle. I’m not sure it’s a foregone conclusion that he’d have adapted to the Cowboys system as well as Emmitt who was a natural in it.
Back to Barry, I came across this article from The Sporting News written right after Barry retired. These numbers are pretty telling.
That’s just atrocious. 48% of his carries were for 2 yards or less! Last in the NFL in converting third and short! They lost yards on 21% of their rushing attempts. You simply cannot win football games that way, and Barry’s career proved it beyond a shadow of a doubt. I’m sorry, I don’t care how thrilling the guy was and how transcendent his athletic gifts were, you’re not the GOAT, you aren’t even in the discussion, if you are that horribly one-dimensional.
It is. I concede that Jim Brown is the GOAT, but I’ll never offer his name up before Sweetness.
In the second half of his career, Mark Messier was the ultimate example of this. He was anointed The Great Leader as a result of the Rangers winning the Stanley Cup - with a team, I might add, that was obviously the best in the NHL - and for the rest of his career was The Greatest Leader Ever. And yet, for all those years, every team he was on underachieved, got worse as long as they had him, and improved after he left.
Sometimes it gets applied even to players who aren’t great. People actually called Paul Lo Duca “Mr. Heart and Soul” when he was with the Dodgers, although the Dodgers didn’t win a heck of a lot. When he was traded midseason to the Marlins, there was a hue and cry that Mr. Heart and Soul had been traded away. Immediately after his departure from the Dodgers, the Dodgers improved, and won their division; the Marlins, defending champions who had been in contention to that point, collapsed. Yet, nobody went back and asked “Hey, what with with all this Mr. Heart and Soul bullshit?” Indeed, they were still saying it about him last year, as he led his team to one of the most comical pennat race collapses in history.
Once the media has tagged someone as a Leader, that’s that. It doesn’t have to be true, if in fact it ever is.
That’s not to say that some athletes don’t obviously work harder than others; Vince Carter is a waste of talent, while Magic Johnson was an example of a maximization of talent. But professional athletes are what they are in large part because of an ability to play reasonably close to the limit of their ability and work ethic, whatever combination that might be, on a consistent basis. It’s hard for me to imagine that any quarterback, center, shooting guard or catcher can arrive in a locker room of veteran pro athletes and somehow unlock talent and drive in them was was not in evidence in their previous 5, 10, 15 or 20 years of high level organized sports. That shit happens in movies, but not in real life.
[Apologies for the continuing hijack re rb’s] Don’t we need to distinguish between pure runners (Sayers, Sanders, Brown et al.) and Running Backs who might be called upon to block, catch passes, and whatever? Walter could do it all.
Minor quibble: Larry Bird was an example of maximization of talent: not particularly fast or big, and with nasty misaligned broken fingers, he almost dominated the league. Magic was big, fast, quick, and all the other things that come with freakish athleticism: sort of meeting expectations.
I’ll concede that my knowledge on this subject is purely anecdotal - I watched them both play in the primes of their careers but haven’t crunched a single # on the subject, but I remember Barry having just atrocious lines, to the point that he was getting tackled as he was handed the ball, while Emmitt would run 4 yards downfield before a defender even touched him. Maybe the years have tinted the 20-20 hindsight, but the fact remains that when you look at the cast of characters, Emmitt had a distinct advantage.
Emmitt:
Troy Aikman, Michael Irving, Mark Tuinei, Nate Newton, Larry Allen, Jay Novacek
Barry:
Scott Mitchell, Herman Moore, Kevin Glover, Lomas Brown
Emmitt’s personnel were better, but not to the degree that you imply. There’s a lot more nuance to the comparison than that. The two team’s systems (largely tailored to each player’s style) had more to do with that appearance than anything else.
Emmitt lined up 7 yards behind the QB and had a fullback in front of him on every snap. On running plays his first move was upfield and the fullback almost always absorbed first contact allowing Emmitt to reach the hole before contact.
Barry lined up 9 yards behind the QB in a single back set on every single play. His first move was almost always a chop step or a counter look in order to get the defense reacting one way or another so that he can read it.
Emmit’s line was a man-blocking group who, at the snap, would fire off the ball to their assigned defender. As a result the first line of defense was typically engaged when Emmitt got to it.
Barry’s line was a zone-blocking group who would step forward and block whomever presented themselves in their zone, and as a result of that reactive style didn’t initiate first contact with the defense.
Both systems can be effective but Barry’s system was more susceptible to overloads and blitzes outnumbering the blockers in a given zone. As a result a good defensive play call would have players in the backfield before Barry was able to get up to speed. On the flipside, a bad defensive play call or a missed first tackle would create a big gain. Emmitt’s system was more predictable since the first action was most often where the run ended up, but a good defensive play call could be thwarted by a good lead block from the fullback, though typically a good play call still kept the gain short. In Barry’s case a good play call was a loss.
The impression that laypersons have regarding “Barry’s awful line” is not entirely true, it’s simply the way that the system was built around him. He was put in a position to be a homerun hitter, and he excelled at it, but homerun hitters by their nature strike out alot. Those jailbreak plays you recall seeing were the whiffs, but a lot of potential jailbreaks ended up being 60 yard runs because the came in the wrong side of the defense.
lmao, I know this doesn’t prove anything, but just for a larf I checked youtube. The first two sites I looked at were this for barry and this for emmitt. The former link is Barry pulling all sorts of amazing moves on defenders, while the latter is emmit smith running straight ahead with no one near him. It epitomizes exactly what I remember about the 2 runners.
Yeah, Barry was amazing to watch and could do things running the ball that nobody before him or after him (yet) could do with it, but if you were to talk to the opposing teams in those years and you were to ask them who they had to key their defense on to win the game, they would all say “Barry Sanders”. How can a man have the respect of every single defensive coordinator and every single defensive player as the best they had ever seen not register with what you’ve seen? Yes, he had a lot of yardage losses, but any time he touched the ball, he could go the distance with it and everyone knew it even when the defense stacked 8 in the box against him. They couldn’t do that to Emmitt Smith. He had Aikman, Novacek, and Irvin working the passing game. Walter Payton is number 3 on the list. That’s not such a bad place to be.
Are you sure yards is the unit you want here?
Yes, I’m quite sure. Thanks for checking.