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The NFL Isn't Swinging Back to Superstar RBs Anytime Soon

In this week's mailbag, Chris Harris answers your questions about workhorse running backs making a comeback, what John Ross will do in Cincinnati, and the best concert ever.
Matthew Emmons-USA TODAY Sports

Welcome to the NFL Underground Mailbag. Ask Chris your question about the NFL, general sports, or cultural minutiae at HeyHarris@HarrisFootball.com. Follow him @HarrisFootball.

Sam P.: Do you think offenses like the Cowboys—where one workhorse running back is featured—are remnants of the past, or will the NFL eventually swing back to workhorses?

Everything goes in cycles. First we aren't wearing shower caps as part of our outfits, then we are, then we aren't again. What makes strategic NFL sense in 2017 will look like the Wildcat in 2027, by which time our robot overlords will control flesh-and-blood quarterbacks via joysticks and rectal implants.

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Right now it's hard for you to imagine a pro-football-viewing public that doesn't prefer the five-wide, spread-out offenses of today, but that's only because you don't realize that we're just a couple years away from letting defenders carry homemade implements to snip the Achilles' tendons of opposing receivers. That oncoming trend will simultaneously slow down passing games and indulge in our collective bloodlust. Win-win.

Ezekiel Elliott

Just gotta break through. Photo by Kim Klement-USA TODAY Sports

For as long as the NFL remains incredibly pass-happy, though, NFL teams aren't incentivized to build around a single expensive running back. Better to employ a team of interchangeable parts, none of whom carry the full burden of surviving 20-plus car crashes per week.

Frankly, you don't need to be excellent to play running back in the league right now. There are great rushers, but perhaps only…five of them? If that? Most teams have a bunch of meh in their backfields and shuffle them around both to keep them healthy and to lessen the impact when one of them decides he's worth a mint.

As recently as 2012, five running backs eclipsed 300 carries in a single season; six RBs have done so over the four combined seasons since. Ten years ago we used to talk about the Curse of 400! Zeke Elliott was excellent as a rookie—and the only rusher to top 300 totes last year—but he has two possible career paths: one where he's a bell-cow for a few years, gets hurt and/or expensive, and flames out early, and one where the Cowboys prolong his career while also giving sportsball morons an excuse to gripe about the old days.

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I guess I do believe that everything old is new again, and eventually NFL offenses will realize they can kill dime defenses with great power rushing like Dallas did last year. When that happens, RBs will be superstars once more—but we're not there yet, and we're probably not close. Wake me when the Achilles' snipping starts.

Taylor C.: I'm curious about John Ross with the Bengals. Do you see him having a similar effect as Tyreek Hill did with the Chiefs last year, or is their only similarity that they can each outrun a train?

On my podcast, one of the most annoyingly incoherent things I regularly say—among many!—is "We can't legislate usage." Especially when it comes to one of the NFL's daffiest franchises, it's impossible to definitively state how John Ross's rookie season will go. A.J. Green gets fed first in Cincinnati, but I just got through talking about how insanely pass-happy the NFL is. Even if Green stays healthy and tops 180 targets, there'll be 400 more available for everyone else.

John Ross

John Ross with the Bengals. Photo by Sam Greene/Cincinnati Enquirer via USA TODAY NETWORK

Ross is probably faster and quicker than Hill. His one year of collegiate dominance featured dozens of highlights showing off ridiculous acceleration and change-of-direction that remind me of Antonio Brown. What's interesting about the Hill/Ross comparison is that each guy had a tough time finding a position: Hill was a too-small running back who gradually shifted to a utility role, while Ross was a corner in his freshman year. As such, neither guy is a finished product, but each is a total game-wrecker with the ball.

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The questions about Hill are whether he can become polished enough getting off the line as an outside receiver to become an Odell Beckham–type superstar, and whether the conservative Chiefs will give him the chance; in '16, 27 of his 83 targets were thrown behind the line, making him the screen-heaviest WR in the NFL by percentage.

I have more faith that the Bengals will give Ross more clear-out duties, and that he'll make big plays down the field (whereas last year Hill had only 11 targets that traveled 20 or more air yards). Of course, I can't know whether the Bengals will bomb it to Ross as a rookie any more than the Chiefs did for Hill last year, because—say it with me now—we can't legislate usage.

Mike M.: What's the best concert you've ever been to?

In researching my big music novel, War On Sound, I saw hundreds of shows and talked to dozens of bands. Many of the stories I experienced myself or heard about wound up in the book. Who am I kidding: most of them did. I'm not that creative.

I wish these stories made me look cool (Milla Jovovich once stepped on my foot at a Toad The Wet Sprocket show—hi, I'm old!), but that's not my lot in life.

My standard response to this question has always been: Cracker. This was the mid 90s in Austin, at the long-gone Liberty Lunch. Counting Crows opened, and nobody had ever heard of them, and we thought they were pretty good. (As it turned out, we were probably wrong.) Then Cracker came on.

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They rocked, but as the show wore on, it became obvious they couldn't hear themselves very well. David Lowery launched into "Eurotrash Girl," a deep cut hidden on their "Kerosene Hat" record that made me feel cool for knowing it. But the band stopped partway through, and Lowery shouted into the microphone, "These monitors are for shit!" Then he picked up one of the monitors (speakers that face the musicians so they can hear what they're playing or singing) and passed it into the crowd, where we surfed it out over our heads into the middle of the club.

The Liberty Lunch bouncers were not amused. They tore into the audience, shoving kids aside, punching one dude who was unlucky enough to be holding the monitor over his head, and wrenching away the speaker. Someone reinstalled it back on the stage, and Cracker somehow wasn't kicked out of the club, and resumed their set.

It was great. They said thank you. They did an encore. They said thank you. They did another encore. The Liberty Lunch lights came up, everybody yelled and turned away from the stage, the crew relaxed as we beat our retreat…and then the band came out again. Lowery said, "We never finished this song," and proceeded to play "Eurotrash Girl" from the beginning, an eight-minute number, as one final fuck-you to the L.L.

Being a drunk idiot who fancied himself an anti-establishmentarian, but who was actually a wet-behind-the-ears school newspaper editor, I shouted along gleefully and went home happy. And with some of my hearing intact!

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Tore B.: How well do you think you'd do as a real-life NFL GM?

I'm sure I'd suck.

My NFL analysis often amounts to: stop retrofitting reasons for things. Usually good players play well and bad players play poorly, and good teams play well and bad teams play poorly, and usually the reasons those things happen don't involve where the game was played or who had extra motivation or which players can't stand each other or any other of the million clichés with which sports fans are bombarded because the media is basically a bunch of lazy assholes who don't think you can tell when they're picking stuff out of their asses.

Don't get me wrong. The interpersonal stuff does matter. It matters bigly! My point is just that we never get the real truth. As fans, we're privy to lies and political answers and little else.

John Elway

A leader of men. Photo by Brian Spurlock-USA TODAY Sports

The hardest thing to do is to get the members of any complex organization to pull in the same direction, let alone a complex organization filled with violent alpha males with the collective IQ of a loaf of raisin bread. You have to do stuff like bury footballs and chop off your punter's foot in the name of motivation.

It takes a one-in-a-million leader to be able to spout that garbage or just flat-out scare players into fucking up less than their opponents. I think I have a pretty decent handle on the talent evaluation side of the NFL, but managing to keep 53 knuckleheads out of prison is almost certainly beyond me.

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Michael R.: How in the world are the NBA playoffs more popular than the NHL playoffs? Has the world suffered a collective massive head wound?

The NBA playoffs blow. They are terrible. Super-teams often make for exciting finals but everything before those finals are a joke. Nice of the Rockets to show up Thursday night, huh? Nice of the Bulls to look like they gave a crap, too. Home teams on the verge of elimination are now 0-10 this year. The average margin of victory in those ten games is 16.2 points. Overall, 17 games have been decided by at least 20 points. Warriors–Cavs III has been foreordained since last June, and the media have been trying to distract us with MVP talk for months.

By contrast, the NHL playoffs are awesome. The games are close. Road teams sometimes win. Underdogs sometimes win. For a fan of the two teams, a hockey Game 7 is the closest humankind has yet come to collectively shitting out its own heart. If you like the NBA playoffs more than the NHL playoffs, you're (a) a hopeless idiot; (b) Charles Barkley; or (c) both.

Tom M.: You planning on coming back to Austin in 2017?

It's already over 90 degrees there, with three months of 100-plus looming. Cracker better be doing a fantastic version of "Eurotrash Girl."

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