Quote:
Originally Posted by jthig32
He was dancing around in the back field because he ran behind a horrible offensive line, played with an incompetent QB, and played for an incompetent head coach.....for his entire career.
And yet he averaged 5yds/carry for his entire career.
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I don't dispute that Sanders was a great running back, but the extent to which he did it inspite of his teammates is a bit overblown -- the lions had some darn good teams in the 90's. If we ask which running back was faster, which was more capable of juking a couple of defenders out of their jocks, which was more likely to break a 50 yard, then there is no question that the answer is Sanders.
...but, if we ask instead which running back will get you three yards on 3rd and two, which running back will give you 4 yards time and time again when you've got a 4 point lead in the fourth quarter and you're trying to burn some clock, which back is going to nail a linebacker on 3rd and long when you've got to have a first -- the answer is Smith.
It's an oversimplification to say that Smith was a power back and Sanders was an elusive type back...it's an oversimplification because this view doesn't take note of the fact that Smith wasn't any bigger than Sanders, Smith was just a lot slower.
All of this is why I carefully said that Smith was the better
football player than Sanders. Sanders was far and away the better athlete, Smith was just a gamer.
How good of an athlete was Smith? I'm not saying he wasn't a great athlete, just that right now the Cowboys probably have 3 running backs on their rosters with athletic abilities that equal or surpass Smith.
My bigger point -- and it's really for the guys 'round here who didn't see pretty much ever Smith carry during his NFL rushing record setting career with the cowboys -- is that Smith's greatness was in his grinding consistency, not his flashiness. Smith's greatness wasn't in the huge game-breaking run, it was in picking up 4 yards when any other running back would have only gotten 3. He didn't go sideways on the way down. The guy never,
never went backwards when he went down. More than any other back I've ever seen, Smith always picked up an extra yard and half on the way to the ground. Over the course of 4,000 or so attempts in a career that extra yard or so is the difference between being the career rushing record holder and a durable but forgettable running back.
A final note, on the oft cited greatness of the Cowboy's line -- when Smith won the league's MVP in '93 the starting offensive line was:
Tuinei, Newton, Stepnoski, Gogan and Williams
When he Cowboys went 1-15 a few seasons earlier the offensive line was:
Tuinei, Newton, Rafferty, Ker, Gogan
Nobody was talking about that '89 offensive line as a great offensive line--in fact it was abysmal. Williams for Ker was a significant upgrade, but Rafferty was actually a very good center for a decade plus in the league so the addition of Stepnoski wasn't that big of an upgrade over what the cowboy's had when Smith arrived....point being, the Cowboy's offensive line dramatic improvement was one part Eric Williams and one part Emmitt Smith. All the offensive line had to do for years was get a body on somebody, anybody. One can reasonably argue that it was Smith that made the offensive line great and not the other way around.