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Bob Sturm 3h ago
Welcome to the NFL 100, The Athletic’s endeavor to identify the 100 best players in football history. Every day until the season begins, we’ll unveil new members of the list, with the No. 1 player to be crowned on Wednesday, Sept. 8.
Any time you talk about someone with all of the records in their given pursuit, there is an instinctive reaction from those who back others in the conversation to try to cheapen those records by saying it is merely a product of longevity.
“He just played longer.”
“He wasn’t necessarily the better player — he just did it for longer.”
The reaction for an NFL running back, especially someone like Emmitt Smith, who has run for more yards and touchdowns than anyone who played the sport, the same in the postseason, won league MVP, won Super Bowl MVP and had more consecutive 1,000 yard seasons than anyone is quite simple.
Exactly right. Part of what makes him special is exactly that. He absolutely did it better because he did it for longer.
Perhaps some are not believers in the longstanding truth in athletics, that “the most important ability is availability,” but they might not be football fans.
Football people know that some of the most special careers were only seen for a flash. What separates Jerry Rice, Tom Brady and Smith from the others is not just flashes of greatness. It is at least a full generation of greatness. That is how records are broken and greatness is cemented.
In the case of Smith, it is best demonstrated by a number of accomplishments:
• From 1991 to 2001, he had 11 consecutive seasons of 1,000 yards. In 1990, he fell 63 yards short of that mark and in 2002 he fell 25 yards short. Otherwise, he might have had 13 consecutive. Still, his 11 seasons in a row are more than any other player has ever had in consecutive fashion or not.
• He ran for 18,355 yards in the regular season during his career and another 1,586 in the postseason. Both of those marks are unlikely to be approached again given the direction and brevity of careers at running back in the modern game.
• In his career, he has over 500 more touches than any other player with 4,924. In 2020, Derrick Henry led the NFL with 397. It would take more than 12 seasons at that league-leading rate to catch Smith.
“They will say he had a passing game, they will say he had a great offensive line. They will come up with a lot of different reasons as to why it was not just him,” Daryl Johnston said.
To understand Smith’s place in the football historical archives is to understand the team he played for is often thought of as one of the most unbelievable dynasties of recent memory. The early ’90s Dallas Cowboys were the only team to have won three Super Bowls in four years until the Patriots did it from 2001-2004. What made the Cowboys the better of the two teams though would be that fourth year. New England did not even make the 2002 playoffs, while the Cowboys lost a close 1994 NFC Championship Game in San Francisco that would have opened the door for an unprecedented four straight titles in a sport that has never seen such a thing. They were close enough that a late-game pass interference no-call on future team member Deion Sanders still gets cited routinely around town.
What made that Dallas dynasty so great was the sum of the parts. Yes, there were huge amounts of Hall of Fame greatness on display, but the full complement was so destructive as a unit that to break into smaller pieces to measure the individual parts missed the point. You could not separate fully the strength of Troy Aikman from that of Michael Irvin or Smith. Nor could you separate their impacts from the performances of Larry Allen or Nate Newton or Mark Tuinei or Jay Novacek. Broadcasters would routinely marvel at the simplicity of the playbook. They seemingly needed fewer than 10 plays in the game plan to destroy and overwhelm opponents. There are stories of even declaring what play was coming to a defense and it not mattering. The result was secured before the snap occurred.
This gained wins and ultimately titles, but individual accolades were often marginalized. The greatness of the quarterback was talked down because of all of his weapons around him. The offensive line was minimized because of the weapons. The weapons were undervalued because they had such great offensive line play. And what about the great coaching staff? Of course, it was a great team with all of these benefits.
This resulted in even more noise around the team. How great would Aikman have been if he had to live in Dan Marino’s reality where not everything is so rosy? What about Smith? Surely Barry Sanders would love to play with this team. And could Smith do all of this in Detroit? Come on.
But all of those conversations are unresolvable and utterly unfair to those who accomplished the climbs up the mountain. Yes, they required teammates and support staff, but to consistently claim that “anyone” could do this robs from those who actually do it.
Smith did it. He did it all. And he did it over and over again.
And because of his ability to do what he did down after down, week after week, and season after season, he was able to deliver dependability that was often not appreciated until it was over.
Emmitt Smith (Tom DiPace / Associated Press)
No player saw it from a closer distance than Aikman and no player is more closely tied to his accomplishments and their partnership. I asked him: What stands out when he thinks back on the NFL’s all-time leading rusher? Aikman didn’t care as much about the miles of yardage for its absurd achievement as much as he did for its signifying traits.
“If you play long enough, you’re gonna put up big numbers,” Aikman said. “But with Emmitt, the reason that his numbers are significant to me is that in order to do what he did, you have to play at a high level for a long time. You can’t miss games. You have to be on the field. So the records speak to his availability and durability. That’s what I think of all those years and numbers. Had Emmitt gone down, there was no plan B, and there just wasn’t really a 1A and 1B with these runners. It was just Emmitt. We just got so spoiled with his durability, and remaining healthy that it was just, it was overlooked. We just took it for granted.”
Aikman thought a moment and continued.
“And then the other part that when I think of Emmitt as a runner and this is not hyperbole: I just honestly don’t ever recall the first man in the hole making a play on him. He had an uncanny ability to just make the first guy miss. It was crazy how good he was at doing that.”
That should not be lost in a study of Smith. A quick trip through his vast highlight film verifies this dozens of times. A deeper dive that involves charting key games during that dynasty will prove the large percentages of loaded boxes he would face. Opponents knew the Cowboys had immense talent, but they also started their game plans by trying to stop No. 22. Easier said than done. Especially since he would not let the first guy ever get him. At least that is what Aikman said.
When I talked to Smith, he was honored to hear his quarterback suggest such a thing — even if he remembered it slightly differently.
“Well, I think I saw one guy get me a couple times! But I get the gist of where he’s coming from. I’ve always tried to develop this in terms of being able to make the first guy miss and calculate two or three moves ahead. That was just something that I believe just started to unlock as I played and got more game experience. As a running back, I started seeing things on the football field before they actually happened and where guys were coming from. I mean, I look at football, from my perspective like an engineer, maybe looking at things and calculating things on the move and processing it that quickly and knowing where it’s coming from. Being able to know what you’re going to do and where you are going to go before you actually get there, that’s just all the mental preparation.”
But, when I spoke to him about the ability to play so many years while missing so few games, despite playing a position where you take collisions more than anyone on the field, I asked if he consciously ran the ball in a way that might prolong his career.
“I think it has a lot to do with genetics and has a lot to do with the gift that you’ve been gifted through our Heavenly Father,” Smith said. “We all got gifts, but some of us have different attributes that afford us to do things completely different for a longer period of time than others. And I think my running style suited me well because I had a low center of gravity and had a great balance with great vision. I can be the low player and get leverage on other players and protect myself at the same time. And so I think the gift of being able to be 5-9 and only weigh so much, and when I’m running the ball, I probably get smaller and when you tried to tackle me, I knew how to just shield my body in a way naturally. I mean, this is not something that I developed, this is something that just came naturally. So I can’t really put into words to describe it to the outsider. I just did it.
“I never thought about it. I really never thought about it at all. I just tried to do everything that I possibly could do to prepare for the upcoming season every year, as if it was my first year. I tried to stay hungry, and stay on the grind, keep pushing and challenging myself to do new things as I got older. That’s the way I approached it. I think that I’ve been blessed by God to have the health that I’ve been able to have.”
Frank Gore has pulled within 3,000 yards of Smith’s all-time record, but at age 38, he doesn’t have a job in the NFL. Adrian Peterson is 36 and needs about 4,000 more yards and also doesn’t have a job. It could easily be the end of the road for those two future Hall of Famers.
Le’Veon Bell is 29 and without a job, but also is barely 35 percent of the way to Smith’s yardage total and his career is likely over. Todd Gurley is 27 and out of work, too, and is 33 percent of the way to the title. Ezekiel Elliott won the 2016 and 2018 rushing titles and is 34 percent to Smith and would need another 12,000 yards to get there, despite folks wondering if he has already lost a step by his 26th birthday. He would need about 10 more seasons, we assume.
Smith played 13 years in Dallas and during that stretch, the Cowboys played 208 games in the regular season. He played in 201 of them and had a contract disagreement (he resists the term holdout) to start the 1993 season for two of those seven missed games. He never played in fewer than 14 games in a season in Dallas and had perfect attendance eight times during that era. He famously played with a shoulder separation in a key stretch in the 1993 finale and through the Super Bowl that he dominated against Buffalo and won MVP.
NFL insiders tell us to cautiously look at the “Curse of 400.” Four hundred touches in a season is usually followed with the disappointment of a career drop-off of significance that should be avoided by a valuable resource. Christian McCaffrey was the most recent victim after a huge 2019 followed by a barren 2020.
Smith had 400 touches in 1991, 1992, 1994 and 1995. The year he fell short in 1993 was because of his contract absence or he would have had it five consecutive years. During those seasons, his worst total yardage was 1,821. He evidently wasn’t subject to curses any more than he was subject to injuries or tacklers in the hole.
“You didn’t get the message?” he asked me with a laugh at the end of our visit.
I didn’t know the message I was supposed to receive.
“That I was Superman? Didn’t nobody tell you that?”
Nobody did tell me, but it was obvious. The record books said it all. There have been many amazing runners in the history of this sport and the beauty and ranks will be in the eyes of the beholders.
But only one of them is the all-time leading rusher in both the regular season and the playoffs, as well.
This one.
