Emmitt Smith doesn’t know who’s going to break his all-time rushing record if Adrian Peterson doesn’t do it.
“If [Peterson] doesn’t get it, I don’t know who’s going to get it,” Smith said, via ESPN’s Jean-Jacques Taylor. “He’s still got a lot of yards to go. I’m not going to lie to you.”
Smith retired as the NFL’s all-time career leader in rushing yards with 18,355. Peterson, who turns 31 in March, has tallied 11,675 yards over the course of his career, putting him 6,681 yards short of Smith’s mark.
Why does Smith thinks there’s such a dearth of running backs who could break his record? He believes concussions may have something to do with it.
“It’s a reflection of the changing times in terms of how they value the running back position and how the game has changed into a running back-by-committee approach,” Smith said. “It could be because of the CTE stuff, it could be because of how offenses use spread formations vs. the I-formation and it could be the way they rotate players in and out.”
Peterson’s lost 2014 season could end up destroying his chances of breaking the record, and he’s lagging behind the pace Smith set. Smith had already tallied up 13,963 yards through his age 30 season, and from age 31 forward, he only had two more seasons in which he rushed for a thousand yards and none in which he ran for 1,500. Peterson has said that he wants to do it and still believes that he can, but he would have to defy the running back aging curve to do so.
