Running back as Super Bowl MVP; forget it
Share with others:
INDIANAPOLIS -- We're going on 14 years since a running back was the Most Valuable Player in a Super Bowl, and Brandon Jacobs isn't talking like someone who could blow up that trend Sunday.
"It'd be hard for any running back to be the game's MVP with the what quarterbacks are doing; you'd have to have astronomical numbers," said the New York Giants' 265-pound banger. "If you had 150 yards and two TDs, that probably wouldn't get it for you."
You know that's just about dead right.
Terrell Davis needed 157 and three touchdowns to edge John Elway for MVP when the Broncos clipped the Green Bay Packers that day in January 1998.
Those kinds of rushing performances, particularly in postseason games, are burrowing toward the game's archival footage.
Offenses are now almost exclusively airborne enterprises.
When the Giants and New England Patriots convened for Super Bowl XLII in Arizona four years ago, quarterbacks Eli Manning and Tom Brady were capping a season in which they had combined to throw for more than 8,000 yards. This year, they threw for exactly 10,168, or nearly 1,300 yards more than any starting quarterback duo for any Super Bowl.
What's the final destination for this statistical flight? Should we just start measuring passing yards in miles?
For the arithmetic record then, Super Bowl XLVI matches teams who get 78 percent of their production from passers and pass-catchers, some of whom just happen to have jersey numbers like running backs.
So should we classify the archetypal running back as merely endangered, or are they definitively headed for extinction?
"I don't know; they say now running back is a position you can get from anywhere," said Jacobs. "It hurts me to say that because it takes a certain type of player. Nobody on the field gets hit like we do. You have 350-pound guys diving at your legs. It sounds terrible, but it's true. It's not even funny."
First Published February 3, 2012 12:00 am
