The team with the best record in the NFL runs the ball on more than 50% of its plays behind a rookie back on pace to carry the ball 352 times. In an NFL that had supposedly long-ago become a pass-first league with feature running backs on the path to extinction, the success of the run-heavy Dallas Cowboys is a surprising fact. But then many of us have learned in the past week that everything we thought we knew about the world is completely wrong.
Ezekiel Elliott was the unanimous top-rated back in the 2016 draft, yet when the Cowboys spent the No4 overall pick on him, the common criticism was that it was foolish to use an early pick on a running back in “today’s NFL”. Conventional football wisdom had definitively ruled: running backs are mostly interchangeable (as long as you get one better than Trent Richardson), and using a first-round pick on one isn’t far off from taking a punter, kicker, fullback or center at the top of the draft. The Elliott pick was classic Jerry Jones: reaching for a big-name player when he could have addressed more pressing areas of need.
Six months later, every NFL Sunday is now capped by footage of Jones and his luxury box minions celebrating another win. The latest came on Sunday when Elliott led the way again, going for 209 total yards and three touchdowns – including two rushing touchdowns in the final two minutes – as Dallas escaped Pittsburgh with a 35-30 victory. Elliott now leads the NFL in with 1,005 yards on the ground through nine games, and while he may be the face – or perhaps the abs – of the NFL’s return-to-rushing revolution, he’s not alone. Tennessee has the second-highest rushing play percentage in the NFL this season at 47.3% – up from 38% a year ago – and have won four of six to push into the thick of the playoff race in the AFC. The Miami Dolphins, sixth in the league in rushing percentage at 44.1% – a nine percentage points increase over 2015 despite hiring supposed quarterback guru Adam Gase – have won four games in a row since London-born Jay Ajayi became their lead back in Week 6. In fact, every team in the Top 12 in NFL rushing percentage that has increased its running over 2015 is .500 or better, save the San Francisco 49ers. (Don’t call them the exception that proves the rule. Just call them evidence that Chip Kelly ruins whatever he touches.)
The Chargers have increased their run percentage by almost 5 points this year with Melvin Gordon breaking out as they’ve won three of five. Sunday’s Philip Rivers meltdown, in which he threw four picks in the fourth quarter including a loss-clinching pick six, is all the more reason Gordon should be the one who is trusted with the ball in his hands in crunch time. And at the bottom of the 2016 run percentage rankings we find Pittsburgh, Green Bay and Jacksonville, by any measure the three most disappointing teams of 2016. They are figuratively and literally throwing their seasons away.
The pedigrees of Elliott, Ajayi and Tennessee’s DeMarco Murray are very different. Elliott was drafted early out of a blue-blood college program specifically to be a franchise back on day one, football conventional wisdom be damned. Ajayi, born to Nigerian parents in London, moved to Maryland at age seven and played college ball mostly off-the-radar at Boise State. Despite running for more than 1,800 yards as a junior in 2014 – the same amount as Elliott’s best years at Ohio State -- he was only a fifth-round pick by the Dolphins. He played sparingly last year as a rookie behind Lamar Miller and then lost a shot at the starting job in training camp to Arian Foster.
It was only after Foster was lost for the season, and then subsequently retired, that Ajayi got the No1 job. He’s averaged 152 rushing yards per game since. And then there’s Murray, a mix of Elliott and Ajayi in that he is both a big-name runner and was overlooked. He starred in Dallas for four years between 2011 and 2014, but bottomed out in Philadelphia last year – hey, it’s Chip Kelly again! – and was dealt to the forgotten NFL land of Tennessee for a fourth-Round pick. He looked washed up ane even the Titans quickly showed they didn’t even see him as a clear feature back anymore, using a second-round pick on Alabama running back Derrick Henry.
ESPN’s analysis in May of Tennessee loading up on backs read as follows: “In a passing league, are the Titans spending too much capital on retro concepts?” Now the idea that running the ball is dead looks like a retro concept. Murray is averaging 4.9 yards per carry and on pace for 13 rushing touchdowns and 1,488 yards, and Henry will add close to 500 more. They’ve proven to be exactly what Mariota needed to help him develop in his second year and the Tennessee backfield suddenly looks like one of the best in the league.
Regardless of the paths Elliott, Ajayi and Murray took to become No1 backs, the story is that running still works. The rebirth of clock-eating offenses that can overpower opposing defenses bodes well for Dallas, Tennessee and Miami both in the long-run and the near future, as those style of offense have long proven to be successful in the postseason. But the biggest beneficiaries may well be the college backs entering the 2017 draft. If Elliott was thought to be a risk at No4 last spring, LSU’s Leonard Fournette will not be seen that way in April. He may even go higher, with Dalvin Cook and Christian McCaffrey not far behind. With a questionable quarterback class coming out in 2017, NFL teams could scramble to take feature backs instead.
Running the ball is back. What’s old is new again. Now let us hope it’s the only way America turns back the clock to a past we all believed was over.
