RALEIGH, N.C. _ Barring the intervention of terrible luck or this terrible virus, one of the longest-standing and most hallowed records in ACC football will fall this season, and probably relatively quickly. Clemson's Travis Etienne is a mere 565 yards behind N.C. State legend Ted Brown for the career rushing record, only a few games away at Etienne's pace.
But it's far from apples to apples: It will have taken Etienne far more games to break the record than Brown ever played, and some of the games Brown did play don't count toward his career yardage but do for Etienne.
Compared under the same rules _ the NCAA started counting bowl game stats in 2002, but not retroactively _ Etienne would be either 1,190 yards behind Brown heading into this season (if none of Etienne's 11 postseason games counted) or 964 yards behind (if all three of Brown's did).
And on a truly level playing field, Etienne has played 43 career games over three seasons, the exact same number Brown played over four regular seasons, and is still more than 500 yards behind.
All of which raises the question: When is a record really a record? And when is a record really broken?
That existential quandary recalls a conversation with the baseball historian and groundbreaking sabermetrician Bill James more than a decade ago, when Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa and other steroid-fueled athletes were laying waste to the traditional high-water marks of the baseball record book.
The question posed to James was slightly more elaborate: Do the old records, the beloved and revered marks set by giants like Babe Ruth and Hank Aaron (and the slightly less gargantuan Roger Maris), still mean what they used to mean in the wake of unprecedented pharmaceutical (to say nothing of technological or biological) innovation?
"Well," James said, "the records never meant what they used to. Records last a while. Then somebody breaks them. Athletes will use any resource available to them to break the records. It's always been that way. There has never been any time when the world of records was pure and simple. It's just that new generations of fans, coming into the sport, read a simplicity into its past."
If N.C. State fans read a simplicity into the past when it comes to Brown's record, it is understandable: It is one of very few totems attached to a football program that hasn't won an ACC championship since the 1970s and is one of only four teams not to appear in the 15 ACC title games played. By virtue of that, and its newly threatened permanence, it also carries with it a slightly outsized importance.
Yet even if Etienne has unquestionably benefited from circumstances Brown could not have fathomed four decades ago _ schedules are longer and postseason games count and Etienne has already played in 11 postseason games _ that's always the way of the world.
Brown, unlike his predecessors only three years earlier, was allowed to compete as a freshman. And several players who could easily have broken his record (under current circumstances) turned pro after their junior years instead: Dalvin Cook, A.J. Dillon, even Lamar Jackson. Etienne, returning for his senior season, is as much of a modern rarity as Brown's productivity was in his era.
There's a pointlessness, an artlessness even, in trying to draw direct comparisons between them. Each remains a singularity in his era for his relentless productivity, each a product of his times, each exceptional in his own way. But still we count and compare, as futile as it may really be.
For there is no more purity in the record book than there is anywhere else in sports. Playing styles change. Training methods change. The human body itself changes. By the same token, it's equally remarkable that any rushing records would even be threatened in the pass-happy era of the spread offense, when ground-pounding backs are as much a relic of the past as the 10-game regular season.
If Etienne stays healthy and the season is played through its full postseason with Clemson a full participant, he is likely to set a record that may not have much in common with the record Brown set, but will also never be broken _ at least without yet another change in ground rules.
