top 5 running backs all time
craig44
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in Sports Talk
we havent had a list thread for a minute. top 10 sounds too easy, so i dropped it to top 5.
I think there are a few locks for the top 5: Jim Brown, Barry Sanders, Walter Payton.
the other 2, at least for me are a little more difficult. So many deserving players: Emmitt Smith, Ladanian Tomlinson, Eric Dickerson, Adrian Peterson, O.J., Marshall Faulk etc.
I think that my top 5 rounds out with Ladanian and Emmitt.
but, if you ask me tomorrow, that answer could be different...
George Brett, Roger Clemens and Tommy Brady.
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1-Barry Sanders
2-Jim Brown
3-Walter Payton
4-Erik Dickerson
5-Emmitt Smith
I love Earl Campbell but he didn't play long enough
Potentially could have been in top 5 was Gayle Sayers or Bo Jackson but too short of careers
This is a tough one. I think I have to have Earl Campbell in my top 5. I would have him above Smith and Faulk.
Ill never understand the Barry Sanders hype. Sure, he had a lot of highlight plays, but he isn't even in my top 10. Dude was more interested in big, showy plays than in running. It's why he's the all time leader in being tackled for a loss: 336 times for an incredible -952 yards.
The hardest of passes.
I do not have time for ignorant trolls.
ignore list: 1948_Swell_Robinson, Darin, bgr, bronco2078, dallasactuary
that's your subjective list and opinion, so naturally i'm not going to knock that. i'm simply going to add that of all the players to rush for 10k+ in their careers, Sanders is 2nd in YPC to only Brown. he had over 3k carries for his career and on average he got his team halfway to a first down with every single one of them. not to mention he ran behind horrendous o-lines. give him the Cowboys' front 5 from that era and his records would have been out of reach
you'll never be able to outrun a bad diet
How does everyone treat the dual threat RB's? guys like Marshall Faulk, Thurman Thomas, Ladanian Tomlinson etc. they maybe didnt lead the league in rushing all that often, but had huge yards from scrimmage numbers. Payton would be included in that as well, but he did have big rushing yard seasons.
George Brett, Roger Clemens and Tommy Brady.
To add to this, he played 10 seasons, had over 1k yards in each and AVERAGED a tick over 1500 yards per season for his career. simply unbelievable. I didnt rank my list, but I have Barry at number 2, just behind Jim Brown.
George Brett, Roger Clemens and Tommy Brady.
Difficult to quantify Sanders as his YPC was steller but his deviation from the norm was huge. Not a guy to grind out 3 yards for a first down. Might score a 30 yard TD play or get nailed in the backfield. Consider him to be the best athlete that the game has known and top 5 in the category. Maybe more importantly, Barry was a gentleman. Handed the ball to the ref and tithed 10% to his faith. An asset to Detroit when such attributes were in short supply.
In looking at my top 5, I considered the players receiving as well as rushing and also looked at how often they fumbled.
1 Jim Brown,
Yards per touch 5.7, fumble % .0211
2 Barry Sanders
Yards per touch 5.3 fumble % .0131
3 Walter Peyton
Yards per touch 4.9 fumble % .0206
4 LaDainian Tomlinson
Yards per touch 4.9 fumble %.0078!
5 Adrian Peterson
Yards per touch 4.9 fumble % .0152
Jim Brown fumbled about 3 more times a year than Sanders on about the same number of touches, but his .4 more yards per touch makes him a little better in my thinking.
Honorable mention, Marion Motley.
Didn't begin playing until he was 26 years old.
Yards per touch 6.4 fumble % .0067
He almost never fumbled!
Emmitt needs some love too. His Yards per touch is a little low at 4.4, but he didn't fumble very often, about 5 times per 370 touches or .0135%
I have Earl Campbell slightly below Emmitt.
Dickerson and Simpson fumbled more than most. Eric's fumble % .0235 (about 9 per year on 382 touches), OJ's was .243.
excellent point on the fumbling aspect. I had not put much thought into that, but it is an important part of the game. especially for players who touch the ball as much as backs. I did not realize Ladainian was such an outlier for this.
George Brett, Roger Clemens and Tommy Brady.
I would not have considered him top 5 until I looked at fumbles. He dropped the ball about 3 times a year (per 380 touches) one third the amount of Eric Dickerson, who I would have placed higher on first thought.
Also just looked at Marshall Faulk, not sure why I didn't before. He's #3 in Total Yards behind Emmitt and Walter. Higher Yards per touch than either of them. He seems very under rated when it comes to best running back discussions, I am sure guilty of that.....until now.
I have to put him at #5 over Peterson, higher Yards per touch at 5.3 and he only fumbled about 3 times a year (.0086%).
Marshall was a great dual threat. I agree he is underrated and accumulated lots of yards through receiving and rushing.
I felt the same way when I did a deep dive into jim browns numbers a few years ago. that guy was amazing
George Brett, Roger Clemens and Tommy Brady.
Jim Brown was amazing.
At a time when every defense was designed to stop the run and every team focused on stopping Jim, no one could.
the man played 9 seasons in the NFL and led the league in rushing in 8 of those. If memory serves, in the one season he didnt lead the league, he had an arm injury and could not carry the ball in his dominant arm but played through it. no doubt a fully healthy Brown would have led the league again.
George Brett, Roger Clemens and Tommy Brady.
1.Sweetness
2.Brown
3. Sanders
4. Smith
5. Simpson
Best Post-season RB - Franco Harris
Terry Bradshaw was AMAZING!!
Ignore list -Basebal21
I give them a boost. Theyre just way harder to game plan for with how they can beat you in any way. Hell Tomlinson even had 7 TD passes in his career as well. That extra catching threat helps out the rest of the team too. Im not sure how I would rank them order wise but LT is definitely in my top 5 with Peyton and Sanders
Wisconsin 2-6 against the SEC since 2007
Dual threat Running Backs should have their own list
1-Christian Mccaffrey
2--Marshall Faulk
2-Thurman Thomas
3-Ladainian Tomlinson
4-Lev Bell
please list the teams they played for , then the fast food joints where they later emptied the rubbish
hey ya Perkdog...
You forgot to add Roger Craig...1st one to go 1,000 --1,000 Player....
Cool..Cool..Cool...🧊🧊🧊
I totally forgot about Rodger Craig, He was a great dual threat back for sure
Yep with Wendell Tyler.
Terry Bradshaw was AMAZING!!
Ignore list -Basebal21
If we pretend football is a team game - I know, I know, that's ridiculous, but let's just pretend - then Earl Campbell is a lock for top 5 along with Simpson. Put together a good enough OL and even a perfectly ordinary RB like Emmitt Smith can look great, and he can play forever. Gaining 4 yards per carry is not that hard when you don't get touched until you're 3 yards past the line of scrimmage. Campbell would carry two defenders from the backfield to a 4 yard gain all the time. Same for Sanders, who got tackled for lots of losses because he was alone out there. That he still averaged 5 yards per carry over a long career is amazing.
It mixes eras, which is always problematic in the NFL, but my top 5 are:
Jim Brown
Barry Sanders
Earl Campbell
OJ Simpson
Walter Payton
That’s a completely reasonable list. I like the thought process and have a similar view.
When this topic came up I watched some highlights of Campbell and that was a win in itself.
Motley is also under appreciated.
Overall I don’t like lists like this because I think too many great players are left off but I enjoy the thought process.
Earl Campbell would have been among the greatest, but he ended up with a weak team that ran him to the ground before his time.
Similar, but bigger and faster than Earl Campbell, is Derrick Henry. Absolutely carried his offense when the defense knew what was coming....yet not even a mention here.
Five year peak of 100 yds a game at a 4.9 yd per carry rate.
Football is more than just stats though because it is very hard to isolate an individuals' stats in football like it is for a baseball hitter.
Henry's peak is as good as anyone's on this list, and with his size and speed I would be more confident that he(more than anyone else mentioned) was the reason for his stats, as opposed to it being his line or scheme that was responsible for the production.
If he puts up a few more good to excellent seasons, he will be more than just a top peak back, and he will be a must on a top five list.
Payton as an all around back, and with intangibles that are through the roof, is still the benchmark to me....but Henry in his prime may have been better. Henry is an absolute beast.
I didn't want to include any active players since perspectives could change over time, but I agree Derrick Henry belongs in the conversation, too. He is a beast in the Campbell/Sanders mode.
I see many are including or considering putting earl campbell in their top 5. It seems to me he had only 3 great seasons. he had 2 others where he ran for over 1000 yards, but it seems it was more because he had well over 300 carries in each of those seasons and only averaged 4.0 and 3.8 yards per carry respectively. was he washed after only 3 seasons?
do 3 great seasons put you in the all time top 5?
George Brett, Roger Clemens and Tommy Brady.
I hear you, and being that this a 100% subjective exercise, you're as right as I am. But my point with Campbell is that NOBODY can have a long career if they take the beating that Campbell took. Had Campbell had the good fortune to play for the Cowboys in the 1990s instead of the Oilers in the 1970s, the only question, I believe, would be whether Campbell was better than Jim Brown. That the Cowboys had the better offensive line is obvious to everyone. That Campbell was a better RB than Emmitt Smith strikes me as equally obvious.
And I confined my picks solely to how the players performed as a running back. If the question is who were the best football players whose primary duty was to run the ball on offense, I'd have added Gale Sayers to my list, for the same reasons that Campbell made my list.
It is not just difficult, it is absolutely impossible, to objectively determine "better than" at any position in football, because it is a team sport to a degree vastly greater than any other sport. My thinking on this question is how do I think this player would do if you placed him in historically "average" circumstances? The key word there is "think" since there is no way to know, but I think Campbell's greatness would have been a lot more obvious than it is had he played for an average team. And yes, the Oilers were a lot better than average while Campbell was there, but that was entirely because Campbell was there. Absent Campbell, they were a very bad team.
it seems to me that Campbells great 3 year run is almost perfectly mirrored by Terrell Davis's great 3 year run. as in, they are almost exactly the same. Davis played 1 more game and had a few hundred yards more and a few TD's more. their yards per carry are almost exactly the same. it is a little scary how similar those 2 three year runs are.
should we be ranking Davis the same as we do Campbell? why would campell be ranked above Davis? he had one additional 1000 yard season, but it wasnt a great season, he only got 1000 because he carried the ball well over 300 times for a 3.8 average.
I love these conversations
George Brett, Roger Clemens and Tommy Brady.
to add, Terrell Davis was much more effective than Campell as a receiver.
George Brett, Roger Clemens and Tommy Brady.
Earl Campbell and Barry Sanders are my 2 choices if I could pick 2 Backs for my team
No disrespect to Davis, who was great, but no, I don't think he was as great as Campbell. Part of it is he didn't even last as long as Campbell, but mostly it's John Elway vs. Dan Pastorini and a gray-haired Ken Stabler. The Broncos had a legitimate passing game; the Oilers didn't. That meant the Oilers opponents could (and did) devote an extra man (or two) to stopping Campbell, but the Broncos opponents didn't have that luxury trying to stop Davis. Even more subjectively, I think the Broncos had the better offensive line, although I'd hate to try to prove that.
I think Jim Brown and Barry Sanders were the two greatest, and I am very, very comfortable saying that they were, at least, among the top 5. After that, it gets overwhelmingly subjective, and every name in this thread, and a few that haven't even been mentioned, have a defensible case. My default is to favor players on bad teams over players on good teams, if their stats look passingly similar. I know why I do that, I am comfortable doing that, and I think I'm right to do that, but I don't know that I'm right to do that. Maybe it was Emmitt Smith making his O-Line look good, and maybe it was Franco Harris making the Steelers O-Line look good. I really, really think it was the other way around, but in the end there's no way to know for sure since football is a team game.
Not for me. Yes he was a devastating runner for a short period of time.
I remember a discussion about John Brockington, he was the first running back to gain 1,000 yards in each of his first three seasons. One of the guys discussing him said "he'll never last, he leads too much with his head". Sure enough, soon after John was no longer effective.
If we're going to expand the discussion to the quarterbacks they played with, I'm going to put Adrian Peterson higher, maybe as high as #3.
He had one year with Brett Favre where Favre was effective. His other 6 years (in Minnesota) his QB's were; Tarvaris Jackson, Gus Frerotte, Christian Ponder (2yrs), Matt Castle and Ted Bridgewater.
Adrian also missed an entire season because the NFL suspended him for spanking one of his children too hard.
Peterson was nearly an equal to the guys like Jim Brown in power and he was incredibly fast, maybe the fastest ever, other than Bo Jackson.
I have both Campbell and Harris in my top ten.
Terry Bradshaw was AMAZING!!
Ignore list -Basebal21
Missed 2014 and 2016 and then half of 2017. He was trekking as a serious challenger to Emmitt's record too...until those two years happened.
I try to avoid "if's" as much as possible.
Gale Sayers another great example of a superb runner that got hurt.
Billy Simms is another.
Emmitt gets ripped here a lot, but he still must have been one tough hombre!
I remember one game that had playoff implications and Emmitt dislocated his shoulder or something and stayed in the game and tore off a long catch and run to ice the game for the Cowboys.
He was a tough runner and deserves praise regardless if he played behind a great line or not
Some of those backs were real good blockers when a play called for it. That deserves consideration.