Futures: Baylor RB Lache Seastrunk
by Matt Waldman
There’s no position I enjoy watching more than running back. One of the reasons I love studying the position is that relative to other roles on the field, there’s a tremendous amount of diversity among players that can excel at the job.
No other position in football has such a wide range of acceptable physical dimensions. There was a time when Brandon Jacobs weighed 87 pounds more than Warrick Dunn. Both players sport multiple 1000-yard seasons. Adrian Peterson is almost a half-foot taller than Frank Gore, but they are about same weight and inspire similar frustration among opposing defenders.
Watch Peterson, Herschel Walker, and Bo Jackson and they seem chiseled from ebony. By comparison, Jerome Bettis and Craig “Ironhead: Heyward were amorphous lumps of clay. None were a joy to tackle.
Cleveland’s 6-foot-2, 232-pound fullback Jim Brown and Chicago’s 5-foot-10, 200-pound Walter Payton are far apart on the dimension spectrum of running backs, but is there any separation between them when it came to dying hard on every play? For that matter, is there anyone else even close?