The Lessons of Trent Richardson

On August 31, the Oakland Raiders waived running back Trent Richardson, becoming the third team to give up on the former No. 3 overall pick of the 2012 draft. Richardson's fall has been sudden and surprising.

But there are two lessons to take from Richardson's disappointing NFL career. Both of them are simple, although one of them is as complex as talent evaluators want to make it.

Lesson No. 1: The devaluation of the franchise running back

Last summer's draft brought one of the most highly-regarded running back crops in years. In response, I spent an entire offseason pounding out piece after piece about how the NFL's valuation of running backs has dwindled. To sum up part of the reason why, let's look at this chart of recent first-round running backs.

Look upon these players and despair. Some of them have failed because of injuries. Some of them have had amazing years and then faded into obscurity. Scheme limited others. Others were undone by clashes with coaches or organizations. Every one of these first-round picks since Chris Johnson has been a bust by the standards of a franchise back. When even savvy front offices like Pittsburgh and Indianapolis get in on the act, you start to wonder how this could even be possible? How could every NFL team guess wrong on running backs so many times?

Now let's look at the best-case scenario. The Minnesota Vikings wound up with the best running back in the NFL when they drafted Adrian Peterson No. 7 overall in 2007. Yet they've been irrelevant throughout his career, sans Brett Favre's best year. From the perspective of advanced efficiency, Peterson's talent actually didn't translate to phenomenal numbers, which is somewhat surprising given his skill.

I'm not going to use these numbers to convince you that I think Peterson's overrated. That's not the right way to read them. It's something more like "even with the transcendent talent that is Adrian Peterson, this is the best the Vikings could do."

NFL teams are going to continue to try to find the next Adrian Peterson for a simple reason: there aren't enough good quarterbacks. In situations where coaches can't find a franchise quarterback, they look for a fallback plan. Ergo, coaches will continue to try to create the best running game they can.

But Richardson's failure is one of the reasons that rookie backs Todd Gurley and Melvin Gordon didn't go in the top 5 this time around. The lesson Richardson taught us is a little more complex than this, but it's impossible to tell his story without this context. Every NFL columnist tarred and feathered Colts general manager Ryan Grigson for trading a future first-round pick for Richardson. Future first-rounders never get traded — so it was a lightning rod. But Grigson is hardly the last one on to make this choice. And many other will do the same until we have 32 great NFL quarterbacks.

Lesson No. 2: What does Richardson's failure mean?

Richardson's failure is a reminder that scouting remains a human endeavor.

Two writers I have a ton of respect for, Matt Waldman and ex-NFL player Ryan Riddle, went back and watched Richardson at Alabama. The startling conclusion is … Trent Richardson looked damn good at Alabama.

I'm assuming you won't watch two guys talk about Trent Richardson for an hour-and-a-half, because you aren't me. But in going from highlight to highlight, Waldman and Riddle didn't find much wrong with Richardson.

Teams and draftniks like to condense scouting into a list of player attributes. But the submerged part of the scouting iceberg is the psychological evaluation. There are a lot of ways to mess this up. Teams love to do background checks and find out everyone's dirty business, but that's not exactly a best practice.

When Richardson went to the Colts, he became a more tentative back that tried to rely on his shiftiness. I can't tell you how and when things changed. I don't know that anyone can tell us but Richardson himself. The culture around the game conditions NFL players from day one to close ranks. That's why personal issues rarely become public, and we may never know Richardson's full story. At least not until Richardson stops trying to catch on with a team.

Richardson was a can't-miss prospect that missed. The only person I could find that was down on him in the pre-draft process was Jim Brown, who tends to get cranky around draft time.

The lesson that we should learn about his failure is that there's a whole underworld of the NFL that we aren't privy to. Speculate as wildly as you'd like. Bad relationship. Weight problems. A hit that changed it all. It's all just guesswork fed by a few team sources willing to be generally vague about Richardson.

The lesson of Trent Richardson is that you aren't dealing with a 228-pound running back with a chiseled body and a 4.45 40-yard dash.

You're dealing with Trent Richardson, a human being, and how he intuitively chooses to play the position with those tools.