Where The Hell Are We? Part 6: Running Backs

(I’ve decided to do a pre-draft series taking a look at the Lions position by position while I’m still upbeat and motivated and before being a Lions fan leaves me feeling depressed and incapable of stringing words together besides “fuck” and “this”. Each section will take a brief (lol sure) look at the team’s history at the position/notable players/etc., a look at more recent years and, finally, the situation as it stands today on the eve of the draft. I’ll do something like two a week, starting with the defensive line and ending with quarterback. Today, we're talking running backs, which means we're talking Barry Sanders, which means we're all about to cry. Consider this a quasi-draft preview/history lesson/idiot gibberish. Cool? Cool.)

Ancient History Because I Believe In Psychic Energies: Normally, I do this in roughly some sort of chronological order, but this feels impossible here because Barry Sanders just overshadows everyone and everything. The entire time you’d just be waiting for me to get to Barry Sanders, and cursing me for talking about dudes you’ve never heard of. I mean . . . it’s Barry. He’s the alpha and omega of whatever meager greatness we have to cling to.

People, including me, have written and talked about Barry so much, though, that it’s hard to come up with anything original or new to say. I wrote something years ago for my buddy Ty Schalter’s site, The Lions in Winter, back when he was doing that and wasn’t a big shot Twitter blue check. Start there, I guess and then come back to me here. Or don’t, I don’t know. What does strike me about that is that I wrote it eight goddamn years ago, and even that had been an epoch after Barry retired. That’s why this is all going down in the “Ancient History” section. There’s something almost shocking about that to me, but it’s true, Barry’s been gone for 20 years now. That means an entire generation of Lions fans have no living memory of him. He’s just a name to them. A legendary name, yes, but still, just a name.

This, uh, this has me feeling shook. Even worse is that the game I built that piece for Ty around, the 1991 playoff game against the Cowboys, when Barry disappeared in a mass of Dallas players only to reemerge streaking towards the end zone like some fantastic wizard, was 27 years ago. 27 years! That game and that moment was formative in my Lions fandom. It is a touchstone that I go back to again and again and again. It is my heart and it is my soul as a Lions fan, and I barely know what to do with the revelation that anyone younger than me – and I’m creeping up on 40 – doesn’t remember it. 27 years! That’s more than a quarter century.

But this is all threatening to spin off into another post that I have planned on the sheer scope of our misery, and so I’ll try to move on and actually, you know, talk about Barry Sanders and other notable backs, which pretty much just means Billy Sims.

How much does Barry Sanders dominate our history? The 7 best single season, uh, seasons in rushing yards in Lions history belong to Barry. 9 of the top 10 are his. He averaged over 1,500 yards a season for his career. He rushed for 5.0 yards per carry. This is the greatest running back not just in Lions history, but NFL history and I’ll hear no backtalk about this. I mean, he fucking AVERAGED more than 1,500 yards per season!

But even more than that, there was something magical, something otherworldly about the way Barry Sanders ran that sets him apart from anyone else in NFL history. He wasn’t human. Sure, he was flesh and he was bone and he was blood, and in the end, his heart and his soul proved all too devastatingly human, but when he had that ball in his hands, he was a different species. He was something evolved, or some weird mutant branch of humanity that made him closer to an X-Men member than just a regular dude. I keep going back to that run against Dallas in that playoff game. To watch it on television or in the highlights is one thing – you see him crowded by pretty much the entire Cowboys defense, only for him to mutant juke his way past them all – but seeing it live was something else altogether. All you could see was a mass of Dallas players. It looked like Barry was underneath them, completely buried. The play was dead, over. And then suddenly he was 10, 20 yards behind them, running for the end zone and nobody knew what the fuck happened. It is the damnedest thing I’ve seen a football player do (I also saw Charles Woodson’s one-handed leaping interception against Michigan State in person, but this was even more amazing. I’ve been blessed.) Hell, it was the damnedest thing I’ve ever seen a human being do.

And yet, there is something painful about the memory. Not just because it was the apex of my football fandom and it happened when I was a child, but because there is something painful and tragic about the entire Barry Sanders mythos. I mean, right? He left before his time. He’s unfinished to us. For years after his retirement, people whispered that maybe, just maybe, he could come back, and then we looked at the calendar one day and realized he was 45 years old and that our dreams were dead. That too is Barry Sanders’ legacy, that unfinished symphony. He is Brian Wilson’s Smile album, only Barry can’t go back and finish it when he’s 60.

It’s hard not to feel at least a little bitter about that, and isn’t that fucked up and tragic? The most beautiful, unearthly football player who ever lived belonged to us, to our hearts, to our hopes and dreams, and when we say his name, we’re left with a sigh and a shake of the head. If anything sums up the brutal pain of being a Lions fan, that might be it. I love Barry Sanders, but I’m also a little pissed at him, which is extraordinarily unfair, but this is the psychic weight that drags us to the bottom of the sea. It is a genuine tragedy.

I could write all day about Barry Sanders, and as much as I’d love to, this isn’t really about him. It’s supposed to be about the running backs, and about who we are and where we’ve been, and even though Barry Sanders obliterates the rest of it, overshadows our whole world, there is more to it than just him.

Billy Sims was the proto-Barry. Okay, okay, that’s overstating things ridiculously because, come on, there could never be another Barry before or after him. But what Billy Sims did, like Barry, is represent Hope to Lions fans. He entered the league and was immediately maybe the best running back in the NFL. And then halfway through his fifth season, he torched his knee and never played another down.

Four and a half years. That’s all we got from Billy Sims. If Barry Sanders’ time was all too cruelly brief, then what the fuck was Billy Sims’? His time was almost 35 years ago. I have no memory of him. Most of you reading this probably have no memory of him. He’s a ghost, like so many other ghosts in our history, and it’s hard to talk about someone who you only know as a ghost. In 10 years, Barry will be a ghost too. This is the sort of thing we have to deal with and it’s no wonder we’re all half-mad.

That stat I mentioned earlier about Barry having 9 of the 10 best single season rushing yards in Lions history? Yeah, Billy Sims has the other one. He could maybe have been one of the all-time greats. Or perhaps Lions Disease would have proven fatal to him, just as it has everyone else. It took Barry. It took Calvin Johnson. Why not Billy Sims? We don’t know, and maybe that is Billy Sims’ true legacy. He stands as the one great What If that we have. We know what happened to Barry. We know what happened to Calvin. We know how the story always ends. But perhaps, in some alternate universe Billy Sims kept going, the Lions built up a monster team around him and things were different. Probably not, but hey, Wonder is a powerful thing, and that’s what Billy Sims will always represent to us.

It’s kind of cruel – what else could we expect? – that since we were blessed with two unreal talents in our history, we were left with almost literally nothing else in our history here. I mean, this is it. Barry Sanders, Billy Sims and sorrow. And given that both Barry Sanders and Billy Sims are painful tragedies themselves, that makes this whole goddamn thing just heinously cruel, the sort of thing that makes otherwise normal men and women tear their flesh, weep and throw profane gibberish at the sky and a god who may or may not be there and if he is, he’s clearly a sadist of some sort. What did we do to deserve this? How do we make sense of any of it? The only answer I have for you is that the universe is cruel and indifferent and these things happen. But even that is insufficient because why does it keep happening to us? I just shrugged. In real life, writing this, I literally shrugged. That’s because I don’t know what to tell you. I’m at a loss just like you are, and I suppose the only comfort that we can take from all this is that we’re not alone and that we’re in this together. We’ll figure it out. One day. Hopefully.

But yeah . . . nothing. Steve Owens was the first 1,000 yard rusher in Lions history. His career immediately tanked after that. That was all the way back in 1971. There are only 3 other running backs other than Barry and Billy Sims in Lions history with 1,000 yard seasons. Their names? James Stewart, who did it twice, Kevin Jones and Reggie Bush, who barely cracked it in 2013. This is obscene. It is emotional violence.

This entire section, the tragedy of it all, is almost art. You could hang it on the wall at the fucking Louvre. It is the universe’s cruel masterpiece, and we’re all a part of it, twisted screaming faces in the background somewhere, mute witnesses to the horror of it all. And yet, we’re also here, living, breathing, continuing to absurdly hope that somehow, someway, it will be different in the future, that another savior will come. But our savior already came, and we fucking killed him.

Recent History: After Barry sagged on the cross and died of Lions Disease, what could we do? What could we possibly feel? It didn’t matter who came after because they would always be swallowed up by Barry’s tragedy. This is when James Stewart had those two 1,000 yard seasons, but nobody cared because he wasn’t Barry. His presence was little more than a cruel mockery. He wasn’t horrible. He was just okay, and “just okay” was an unforgivable sin in the wake of Barry’s brilliance. He was, is and always will be just a reminder of everything that we lost.

After him, we managed a couple of one-year wonders. Kevin Jones had one good season. Kevin Smith tried but was sucked into the hurricane of 2008 and lost forever. Jahvid Best was already half-dead and witless when we drafted him. He died quickly. So did Mikel LeShoure. Virtually everyone that came along failed in some way, whether they were taken by injury or their own incompetence or simply swallowed up in the horror of it all. Reggie Bush looked like he might be the answer, or at least half an answer, but he had his one decent season and then he was done too and history will judge him for two things: 1) getting stripped of his Heisman and 2) rolling in the filth of a Kardashian. This is his legacy and we wash our hands of him.

All this helps to explain that mind-boggling stat. You know the one. The one that they’ve taken to showing and discussing in every Lions game, the one that says we haven’t had a 100-yard rushing game from any single player in roughly 10,000 years. This is Not Good. Even in the brutal death march of our history, our 60 years wandering in the desert (take that Moses), this is something that stands out as particularly pathetic and fucked up. Ameer Abdullah is the latest in a long line of failures, and so we turn to the future and we hope and we pray and we trust in deliverance because that is what people do. That is what people must do. Because the alternative is too dark and full of terrors and I’m not walking back across that desert, man.

Where We Are Right Now: Ameer Abdullah is finished. That much is pretty clear. He tried, he failed, and it’s time to move on. Theo Riddick is a great receiver out of the backfield, but that’s it. He’s not really a running back because he’s not that good at, you know, the whole running out of the backfield part. And so the Lions signed LeGarrette Blount, two time defending Super Bowl champ, and honestly, I’m not really sure how to feel about it.

Blount has never really been a top tier running back and that’s okay. He’s not The Man, and as long as we go into this accepting that, we might be okay. But he’ll also turn 32 this season and the history of 30+ running backs in the NFL is grim as hell. No other position turns you into a senile grandpa faster than running back. On the other hand, Blount’s only carried the ball 200+ times twice in his career. Normally, 30+ running backs have an entire history of workhorse back-breakage behind them, which helps explain why they get old so fucking fast. Blount doesn’t really have that, and so maybe, just maybe, his legs aren’t as old as most 32 year old running backs’.

Is this me desperately searching for reasons to Believe? Probably. I mean, even if Blount still has fresh legs, it’s not as if he’s suddenly going to break out and become a monster. He has two 1,000 yard seasons in his career, but for the most part he’s been the 2 in the 1-2 punch most teams favor these days at running back. He’s a time-sharer, and that’s okay as long as the Lions have somebody else for him to share that time with.

This means the Lions probably need one other featured back. Preferably someone with some shake to him. I’m mildly intrigued by Tion Green who had some good carries late in the year as an undrafted free agent, but I also don’t want to put all my hopes in him. That would be absurd. And besides, Blount probably makes him redundant.

Zach Zenner is forever intriguing to Lions fans because he’s a scrappy underdog type (a.k.a. he’s a white dude) but he’s probably run out of time and I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s gone soon. So, what all this means is that the Lions need another dude and they need another dude with talent, not some Scrappy-Do type who gets fans excited during preseason and then runs for 90 yards at the end of blowouts during the regular season.

This means that, yes, the Lions probably need to draft a running back like Nick Chubb or Sony Michel or the list goes on and on, which is good. It means that there are options here and that the Lions don’t need to reach too early in the draft. But they do need someone, probably somewhere in the first 3 rounds. And if they get the right guy, we might finally – finally! – start to move on from Barry’s long shadow. But probably not. After all, it’s been more than 2,000 years and we’re still trying to dig out from the shadow of that other savior we fucking killed. And yet, we’ll keep on and we’ll keep on and we’ll keep on because that’s all we can do. It’s all we know how to do. Goodbye Barry. I loved you.