You may have seen that Larry Johnson was released by Washington last week, and there are rumors that he might be signed as a quick fix in St. Louis now.
Larry Johnson was one of the greatest running backs I ever saw. That was mainly the end of 2004 and all of 2005. In 2005, he ran 1,750 yards and 20 touchdowns. He had a great offensive line blocking, but he was still a force of nature, a near unstoppable blend of power and speed. I wrote at the time that he was awfully similar to the great Jim Brown, and I actually heard from two of Brown's former teammates, who agreed.
Now, five years later, he's out of a job. No doubt Larry brought some of his pain on himself with the way he lived his life. He has made his share of mistakes -- on the town, on Twitter, etc.
But I wonder how much his career was bludgeoned by the little fact that that in 2006, the Chiefs ran Johnson an NFL record 416 times. I wrote at the time that backs who were used THAT MUCH tended to fade quickly. Look at the backs who have gotten 400 carries in an NFL season.
1. Larry Johnson, 416, 2005
-- Never again gained even 900 yards, was released less than three years later.
2. Jamal Anderson, 410, 1998
-- Started only two games the next year. In 2000, he ran for 1,024 yards and a blah 3.6 yards per carry. After three more games, he retired.
3. James Wilder, 407, 1984
-- Wilder did carry the ball another 365 times the next year; he was some kind of resilient (though not especially effecting -- 3.8 yards per carry in 1984, 3.6 in 1985). But after that his rushing yards dropped to 704 to 488 to 343 to 244.
4. Eric Dickerson, 404, 1986
-- An exception to the rule ... sort of. Four times in Dickerson's career, he ran the ball 375 times or more. Only one other back has done it more than once -- go ahead and guess. Dickerson still had one more great season, and a couple more good seasons after ;his 400-carry campaign.
5. Eddie George, 403, 2000.
-- George was never a big yards-per-gain kind of back. But after his 400-carry season, he averaged 3.3 yards per carry for the rest of his career.
Running backs, it seems to me, only have so many carries in them. The burst that makes a great running back is slowed just a tiny little bit with every carry -- like sands in the hour glass.* There are some who have more sand in their hourglass. Emmitt Smith led the league in carries three times -- he was a freak (but he was also a different back after he turned 27 than he was before). Walter Payton led the league in carries four years in a row and was still a great older back. Jim Brown led the league in carries six years, and never relented.
*So are the Days of Our Lives.
But it's also true that none of them carried the ball 400 times in a regular season. Jim Brown only once carries the ball 300 times. Larry Johnson never looked the same to me after 2005. His line did deteriorate, as did the team around him. And his head was clearly clouded -- there was a holdout in there too. Still ... I tend to think all those carries took their toll.
The only other player besides Eric Dickerson to get 375-plus carries in a season more than once is ... Ricky Williams. I wouldn't have guessed that. He had 383 and 392 carries in back-to-back seasons. The first season, it should be noted, he averaged 4.8 yards per carry. The second, he averaged 3.5.
Ug. I love football but sometimes it's hard when you see how it chews people up.
ReplyDeleteJust adds more fuel to fire to allow RBs to leave college even earlier and for more platooning at the RB position (Whither our fantasy football rosters!).
ReplyDeleteMakes the 18 game schedule look like an even better idea...
ReplyDeleteI agree with Chris. Share the carries, share the load. It seems silly and immoral to run your best horses to death.
ReplyDeleteJoe,
ReplyDeleteYou're not crazy. FootballOutsiders.com has looked into this a few times (with Ricky Williams as the original muse). Here are some links:
http://www.footballoutsiders.com/2004/07/25/ramblings/stat-analysis/236/
http://www.footballoutsiders.com/2007/01/01/ramblings/stat-analysis/4764/
Footballoutsiders.com did a few reports on this back in '04 and again in '07. They refer to it as the "Curse of 370"
ReplyDeletehttp://www.footballoutsiders.com/stat-analysis/2007/370-carries-revisited
http://www.footballoutsiders.com/stat-analysis/2004/ricky-williams-retires
Didn't Jamal Anderson have an ACL tear in the second game of 1999?
ReplyDeleteWilder caught a lot of passes too with the Bucs, so he had even more wear. I see that his son is one of the nation's top recruiting prospects, also as a running back.
As others have noted, Football Outsiders has refered to this as the "Curse of 370", which is that every rb who exceeded 370 carries in a season sufffered some sort of dramatic fall off after that, excepting Eric Dickerson.
ReplyDeleteChris Johnson is heading this way so far this year so it will be interesting to see whether the Titans ease up his workload.
I have also thought one of the things that made Marcus Allen effective in Kansas City were the years he spent benched behind Bo Jackson for the Raiders. If he had gotten a couple hundred more carries in the black and silver, he would have likely been washed up by then.
ReplyDeleteIncreasingly I think that the more games a college QB has started the better off they'll be as a pro, and the fewer games a college RB has started the better off they'll be as a pro.
ReplyDeleteI don't know squat about the NFL . . . never heard of Larry Johnson, but I wonder . . .
ReplyDeleteIs the wear-and-tear on players (especially RB's and linemen) significantly increased by all the engineering the NFL does to maintain parity (the weighted schedules, the salary cap, the lack of player movement)?
Is running against 16 pretty good to fair defensive lines in games that are so engineered to be consistently competitive significantly more taxing than 16 defensive lines that have a fuller range of effectiveness, from great to crappy, in games that will more often be blow outs?
In short to what degree does the intentionally-engineered hyper-competitiveness more prematurely grind down players careers?
And I am sure none of this has crossed the mind of Todd Haley and Charlie Weis as they continue to platoon Charles and Jones at RB this season.....
ReplyDelete@Cuban X Senators: Hmm, very interesting take. I don't think I agree, but with time -- and maybe some more careful research -- I could come around. My main sticking point would be the decline of careers that were pre-salary cap, pre-parity.
ReplyDeleteI think the main problem with running backs -- especially those like Johnson, Anderson, George, etc. -- is that they were more bruisers that burners. Adrian Peterson is just like this. He had crazy break-away speed for two years, and while it is still there (see: Sunday vs. Detroit) it isn't always there.
With his current workload, and Favre's issues, it may be the beginning of the end for AP.
I look at it like this: there are some guys who can throw 95 and get away with no injuries to an arm (Nolan Ryan). But, most will end up with TJ sooner or later. Some guys (Emmitt Smith) can carry the load for some time, then wear down gradually. Others (LJ, George, every other human being) can't rebound from the beating.
There are also plenty of rebuttals to the Curse of 370, including a persuasive one at Advanced NFL Stats.
ReplyDeleteIn fact, RBs who have between 360-370 carries tend to absolutely explode the next year.
Plus, FO has a convoluted formula for backs who make the playoffs. Essentially, if backs make the playoffs, they can suddenly withstand another big bunch of carries without triggering the Curse.
In another caveat, backs can go way, way over 370 touches as long as many of those touches are receptions. Receivers tend to suffer a lower rate of injuries than backs, but they suffer a higher rate of injury/touch. Therefore, it's highly unlikely that RB touches accumulated as receptions actually have a lower impact.
RBs who carry well over 370 carries are experiencing an extreme outlier season, the kind of season that was extraordinarily unlikely to have happened in the first place. Regression to the mean suggests a huge production drop that is completely unrelated to overuse.
Jim Brown played in the 12 and 14 game a season era. He only carried over 300 times once in his career. Shorter seasons and longer off-season certainly helped preserve his career. Also he was a physical freak for his era. Bigger and as fast as DB's; faster and just as big as most LB's and faster than DL's. In 1958 he averaged 127 yards per game in a 12 game season. And 5 years later 133 yards per game in a 14 game season. That's absurd.
ReplyDeleteEven apart from the 370 threshhold, good old backs are rare - and they tend to be the ones with fewer young carries. Great running backs tend to have four or five great seasons in them, and once they're gone, they're gone... either early or late. There are very few exceptions: Brown, Sanders, E. Smith, Curtis Martin...
ReplyDeleteSomeone mentioned Marcus Allen above. I looked it up: he had only one season where he gained 1200 or more yards (1985), and it was the last season in his career he even reached 1000. For whatever reason, they limited his touches per season, and it extended his career - he wound up in the 700-900 range a bunch of times in a row, scored touchdowns, and made the Hall of Fame.
Imagine if they go to 18 games for the regular season as proposed. People will simply wear out.
ReplyDeleteIs there a higher rate of injury in the NFL postseason than in the regular season?
ReplyDeleteIf not, why do people assume that expanding the schedule to 18 games will trigger a wave of injuries?
Joe please write something about the Chiefs. I've always felt that the trade-off for watching years of terrible KC teams was that you got to read great Poznanski articles when they finally had a good season. Your articles from the 2003 Royals season meant a lot to me.
ReplyDeleteLove the football post Joe, thanks! Nice timing on the LJ discussion as well given the current "controversy" among fans in KC about getting Charles more touches. I think the argument is watered down and that Haley is spot on in keeping Charles fresh. I know you're a "national" guy now Joe, but I truly love reading your KC themed pieces! That Quisenberry post the other day was legendary!
ReplyDeleteEither way he was and is a punk. I'm glad we used him up. Imagine how much better the Chiefs would be if Carl had given Jared Allen that money instead of LJ
ReplyDeleteI know that this is not the kind of stat that will impress Joe, but I am willing to bet that in 2005 LJ was on more fantasy championship teams than any football player ever. His stats during the last eight games were ridiculous. He carried my team down the stretch. LJ will always be my man.
ReplyDeleteBack when Jimmy Brown played, all the teams ran more running plays than the do today. There were at least two running backs on the field, and when the right half back wasn't flanked to the outside, they had three runners in the backfield.
ReplyDeleteOn a per game basis, there were more carries for more rushing yards than there are today. No current team will rush for as many yards as Brown and Mitchell, Taylor and Hornung, McIlheney, Perry and Johnson, or Csonka, Morris and Kick, even with the longer season.
Ever since Fran Tarkenton and the 78 Vikings turned the short passing game into the equivilant of the run game, we've seen less rushing with usually a single tailback who gets over eighty percent of the carries. The success of the 49ers popularized and made this the template that almost all teams today are built around offensively.
As running back is one of the few positions where there seems to be an endless flow of ready talent from the colleges and universities, they become more or less interchangable and sadly, expendable.
Considering the size and strength of the defensive lines and linebackers, short careers will be even more the rule than exception.
@PEFACommish: There was a time when drafting Marshall Faulk was dangerously close to a guaranteed ticket to a league championship.
ReplyDeleteI've written about running back workload just last week when I talked about the Curse of 370, and then introduced my own study on injuries by single game rush attempt game.
ReplyDeleteBasically, I conclude that high rush attempt games are more costly, but there is nothing special about guys who get to 370 versus guys who have less than that but have games where they carry the ball 28 times. Here's an excerpt (after all the data is presented):
However, the “Curse of 370″ is no curse. The players who comprise that group necessarily had high rush totals all year, including at the end of the season. Some, like Jamal Anderson in 1999, did get hurt very early the next year. But Natrone Means never came anywhere close to 370, yet suffered multiple serious injuries after high rush attempt games, and was done by the time he turned 28. Cadillac Williams never came close to 370, but what could he have been if he didn’t start his career with an incredible 88 carries in the first three games of his career, and then suffer a costly foot injury in the fourth game. Ricky Williams took a pounding his rookie year, and missed four games right after a 30-carry outing, and then the next year missed six games with an injury right after a 27 carry game. Olandis Gary, never got to 300 carries. One year wonder, right? He ended that season with a 29-carry game and tore his knee up in the offseason. The examples are numerous, and these guys didn’t need 370 carries to end a career, all it took was maybe one game where they were pushed too far.
But Joe, what kind of face does he make when he gets tackled? And did his ex girlfriend get prettier after he dumped her?
ReplyDeleteI like to play poker
Anon 9/27 8:18,
ReplyDeleteYes, he was/is a punk. You have to remember, though, that the fan base was fit to be tied when Carl was hesitant to pay him to end the holdout. He had a ridiculous 2006, signed his big money deal and then disappeared. By the time Jared Allen's contract came up the following year, the money was already spent. The Vikes took advantage of the fact they had cap room to give Allen $15.5 million as a signing bonus. KC did not. Plus, Allen could give the finger to Carl, which was worth maybe another million in goodwill.
LJ had a lot less effort after signing his big contract. He spent much of his time pouting and the rest of it getting in trouble. In 2009 he claimed that no one could run behind the Chiefs offensive line, making excuse after excuse. After they released him Jamaal Charles ran wild.
ReplyDeleteA great talent, I think his demise was more of a chracter and complacency issue than anything else.
Or maybe no longer being able to watch Priest show him how to do it perfectly?
football just strait sux
ReplyDeleteMy take is that LJ was significantly affected as a running back by toting that fat wallet around. Once he got the money, the incentive was gone.
ReplyDeleteThe Chiefs are the last unbeaten team in the NFL. Will the '72 Dolphins start showing up?
ReplyDelete