2009 Lions Season Review, Part 2: The Running Backs

It's been a long time since Barry Sanders ran into our hearts and then left us heartbroken and sad when he decided that he just couldn't live with us anymore. I suppose we can't blame him. I mean, he tried, he really did, but after a decade of fighting, and constant disappointment, he was forced to conclude that we were too dumb and broken down, and that we were never going to change. He tried to love us, despite our many, many flaws, but it just wasn't working out, and so he did what so many dudes do in the same situation, and he got the fuck out of town. COME BACK BARRY WE'LL HAVE DINNER ON THE TABLE EVERY NIGHT AND WE'LL DO THAT THING YOU LIKE IN THE BEDROOM THAT WE SAID WE WOULDN'T DO. WE PROMISE WE'LL DO BETTER BABY! COME BACK!

Ahem. Sorry. Anyway, when Barry left, he took with him our hearts, our hopes and our dreams. More than a great running back, he was our franchise, our savior, the one man who made the laughter of other fans worthwhile. Fuck them, we had Barry. But then Barry left, and we have spent the last decade wandering in the wilderness, searching for even a trace of that same ephemeral feeling. We gave up on finding it at running back as a parade of disappointments marched through town, and we recalibrated our hopes for the position. Would it be too much to ask just to find someone who was, I don't know, competent?

It seemed like we had finally found our man when, as a rookie playing for an 0-16 team, Kevin Smith finished with numbers comparable to those put up by Emmitt Smith as a rookie. They weren't great, but they were good, certainly very encouraging, and the way he finished the season seemed to presage greater things on the horizon. For my part, I went completely insane and said things like this:

2. Kevin Smith accounts for 1,800 total yards from scrimmage, about 1,200 rushing and 600 receiving with, say, 12 touchdowns.

That is from a post prior to the season in which I laid out several predictions. Okay, now that you have stopped laughing, you cruel son of a bitch, I suppose it's time for me to hang my head and admit that I am a dumb asshole. It's okay, I am secure enough to admit that from time to time, I make a complete and utter ass out of myself, and this was one of those times. To say that I missed the mark here would be to say that Napoleon missed the mark when he thought that his soldiers would have fun sledding and ice skating in Russia.(What up, history fans!)

Okay, obviously I was wrong, and it speaks to the strange duality of my nature that despite all of the bizarre ranting and raving, the fucked up imagery, and the occasional threats of suicide, I could still be so blindly optimistic. It shows just how much I want to believe in something, anything really, that I am quick to take the slightest glimmer of hope, trap it in a bottle and horde it like that degenerate Gollum in his cave. Kevin Smith, myyyyy preeeeeeecccccioooooooussssssss.

I will apologize for the startling and hilarious inaccuracy of my prediction, but I won't apologize for the spirit in which it was delivered. Reality may have judo thrown me into a world of stupidity, but that's okay, the hopeful are often bludgeoned and left for dead by the wicked. But, in the end, hope is what will allow me to get back up and beat the holy hell out of my tormenters. I will continue to hope and I can just about guarantee you that I will predict something equally as preposterous about Matthew Stafford before next season. It will happen, I know it will happen, you know it will happen, everyone will laugh and we will all move on. But maybe, just maybe, I'll be right, and I can actually be happy instead of cloaking myself in some bullshit cynicism.

Okay, okay, I apologize. This has gone completely off the rails. I will stop screaming like some street corner junky preacher about hope and just get on with this thing.

Anyway, yeah, Kevin Smith. We've already seen the hilariously stupid prediction that I made before the season, so let's just check out the actual statistics put up by the director of Jersey Girl. That is the same guy, right? For the season, Smith ran the ball 217 times for 747 yards and 4 touchdowns. That's only 3.4 yards per carry, which, uh, well, that ain't good, you know? He also caught 41 passes for 415 yards and a touchdown. Which means he rushed for over 400 yards less than I predicted, ended up falling over 600 yards short of the total yardage I predicted, and missed the touchdown mark that I predicted by 7.

We must, of course, keep in mind that Smith missed three games due to injury. Based on the final numbers, let's project what Smith would have put up had he played those three games. If we do that, Smith's numbers project like this: 267-919-5, 50-510-1. Uh, that's still a great big old pile of shit, right?

The simple and undeniable reality is that Smith just wasn't very good this year. There are some mitigating factors certainly. One of which is that the offensive line he was running behind was a wall of flaming poop. It's hard to really be an effective running back when your left guard is flailing about like a drunk quadriplegic in a breakdancing competition, just flopping around, aimlessly, jerking his poor worthless body an inch at a time, hoping against hope that this time he will miraculously be able to do the robot or pop and lock. Okay, so that may have been the weirdest and possibly most offensive analogy I have broken out. To be honest with you, I soar so far beyond the pale when it comes to offensive bullshit that I don't even know where the line is anymore. But if you are reading this, then I assume that you have come to take such things with a grain of salt. If you are a quadriplegic, well, I don't know what to tell you. Just chill out, maybe have a seat. Sorry. That was terrible.

Anyway, while the line was awful, it certainly was no worse than the abomination of a line the Lions trotted out during the Year of Unnumbered Tears. In that shittastic season, Smith still managed to rush for 4.1 yards per carry, which was a hell of a lot better than anything anyone else was doing back there, and which is what ignited my stupid prediction in the first place. That 4.1 ypc average was not exactly spectacular, but given the situation, it was extraordinarily good. Conversely, to see how bad Smith really was this season, we must put his per carry average into that same context. Smith averaged 3.4 yards per carry this season. Meanwhile, his backups, Maurice Morris and Aaron Brown, combined to average 4.29 yards per carry, or almost a yard better every time they touched that ball. That is an astounding difference, and shows just how bad Smith was this past season. It's a stark and brutal number, naked and terrible, and after seeing it you should have a really, really hard time apologizing for Smith's play.

Ah, but there's another factor at play here. Smith was injured against Washington early in the season, in a game, where, perhaps not coincidentally, he was putting up his best numbers of the season. After that game, Smith was never 100%, and his numbers never really approached those that he put up against the Redskins. He kept playing, but he wasn't all there, until finally, his knee exploded in a million different directions in the terrible loss to Baltimore. After the season, we found out that Smith was playing with two fucked up shoulders for much of the season, which certainly helps to explain his generally shitty play. But just how much can be laid at the feet of these injuries?

Well, let's look at how Smith performed before his body started to betray him. Against the Saints in week one, Smith rushed for only 20 yards on 15 carries. Not exactly a piece of evidence in his favor. The next week, against the Vikings, he ran for 83 yards on 24 carries. Not especially inspiring numbers, but given the historical beastliness of the Vikings run defense, that's actually a pretty good performance. The next game was the Redskins game, the one in which he was first injured. In that game he ran for 101 yards on only 16 carries and looked like he was on his way to breaking out. So . . . what does all of this mean?

Well, I think it shows that Smith would have had a bit more success had his body kept its end of the bargain. Of course, that's only based on one very good game against the Redskins and one okayish game against the Vikings following a miserable game against the Saints. I don't know. Really, I don't. There's just not enough info here to make the call. I will say that Smith didn't miss any games with the shoulder injury, playing the next week against the Bears, so apparently it wasn't too severe. Of course, in that game he only rushed for 30 yards on 19 carries, so maybe he should have taken a week or two off.

Frustratingly, whenever Smith was running well, like in the game against the Seahawks, the Lions were forced to abandon the run after falling behind, which further depressed Smith's statistics. It's hard to say how Smith's numbers would have looked had he played on a team that could run the ball throughout the game and if he had remained healthy throughout the season. All we are left with are two things: what the final numbers actually were, which weren't good, and our own impressions. Unfortunately, my impressions were that Smith was a running back who ran hard but simply didn't have that extra gear. I remember during the Thanksgiving game against the Packers, in particular, being frustrated by Smith repeatedly breaking loose only to be hauled down because he didn't have the speed to turn a decent gain into a big gain or a big gain into a touchdown.

My lasting impression of Smith from the 2009 season is of a running back who plays hard but isn't quite good enough to be a feature back in the NFL. That saddens me on a personal level, because Smith was one of the players who I found myself gravitating towards, a player who I began to place my hopes in, a player who I though represented one of the key building blocks in the future of the Lions success. It's also disappointing because it means that there is one more position that the Lions have to shore up. And that's even before taking into account the fact that Smith's knee malfunctioned like the poor Roto-Plooker in Joe's Garage. Of course, that poor bastard fell apart due to a freak golden shower mishap, so perhaps we shouldn't head down that road.

Anyway, weird Zappa references aside, we can't ignore the fact that Smith's knee was fucking destroyed in Baltimore, and while, yes, there have been many advances made by modern medicine in the repair and rehabilitation of ACL tears, Smith is by no means guaranteed to come back at the same level as before. There's a reason why, not long ago, these types of injuries were considered career enders, especially for running backs. An ACL injury tends to rob you of a lot of your lateral explosiveness and agility. It makes it hard to make those quick stops, and those turn on a dime moves necessary for all running backs. For a running back like Smith, who lacks the extra burst that would make some of those deficiencies a little less relevant, it's disastrous. Even if - and it's a big if - Smith is ready to go by the start of next season, there's a real chance that he won't be good enough anymore to carry the load full time. And as we saw this past season, and as I have beaten into the ground in this post, Smith might not have been good enough to begin with.

On that depressing note, we'll take our leave of poor Kevin Smith and focus on the other dudes tasked with running the ball this past season. Maurice Morris came over from Seattle before the season began, and promised to be a competent backup who could still give the Lions something when Smith needed a rest(or "a blow" as announcers often say, which may be the single most baffling phrasing fairly unique to sportscasts. I mean, how can they not understand how that sounds? That little phrase calls to mind, uh, something else, right? What is wrong with them? Or am I just a despicable degenerate? Wait . . . don't answer that.)

When Smith's knee went all Wounded Knee on him(get it, 'cause it was a massacre, and it was his knee, and see . . . see . . . okay fine, fuck you), Morris was forced into the starting lineup. This wasn't that much of a disaster because, well, Smith sucked for most of the year and when Morris had gotten a chance to play, he had generally outperformed Smith. In Morris' first start with the Lions, he ran for 126 yards on only 17 carries against Arizona and added a touchdown. The next week, he only ran for 37 yards on 18 carries against the Bears, but he rebounded in the season finale, rushing for 65 yards on only 16 carries. So, alright, we have one very good game, one shitty game and one mediocre game. Not bad, not great, perfectly acceptable football. Included in all that was one big run, a 64 yarder against the Cardinals which gave the Lions the big play they were missing from Smith.

For the season, Morris ran the ball 93 times for 384 yards and 2 touchdowns. That's a per carry average of 4.1 yards, which is far better than what Smith was able to put up. As a starter, Morris averaged 4.47 yards per carry, or a full yard better than Smith every time he touched the ball. That's probably not fair, due to such a small sample size, but fuck it, I am rolling with it. In addition, Morris proved a nifty little receiver out of the backfield. For the season, he only caught 26 passes for 210 yards, but for the three games he started, he caught 14 passes for 105 yards.

Morris played well when given the chance, and despite the fact that he was saddled with the Lords of Turdtown, Daunte Culpepper and Drew Stanton, during his starts, he still performed admirably and was a distinct asset. I felt confident with Morris in the game, and for a backup running back, you can't really ask for much more. Whether or not he has the ability to serve as a starter is another matter entirely, one that I'll touch on in a little bit.

Aaron Brown made the team as a rookie after I and everyone else had prematurely dismissed him as a bust after the draft. The scouting report said that he was fast but that he was terrible at dealing with contact. Not exactly what you want your weakness to be as an NFL running back. His one chance to make the team seemed to be as the new kick returner, but once the preseason got started, and Brown showed off his speed, we all quickly changed our tune. It was one thing to read that the guy was fast, it was another to see just how fast. He has the kind of electric speed and athleticism that makes a real difference, the special kind that doesn't come around too often, and after a huge touchdown and backflip in the endzone in one preseason game, we were all smitten and there was no way he wasn't going to make the team.

Still, Brown was a rookie and his weaknesses and limitations were still very real, which meant that he didn't see the field all that much. When he did, he was generally pretty effective, running the ball 27 times for 131 yards and adding 9 catches for 84 yards and a touchdown. His per carry average was a healthy 4.9 yards, and whenever he got out on the edge he was a real threat to do some damage. He probably will never be an effective between the tackles runner, but as a change of pace guy and as a weapon that can be moved all over the field, he has a bright future, hopefully with the Lions. I would love to see them stick Brown in the slot on occasion and get him the ball short and then let him make something happen.

At fullback, the Lions went with both Jerome Felton and Terrelle Smith. Smith, the veteran, was probably a slightly better blocker than Felton, but Felton was a better natural athlete and receiving threat out of the backfield. Occasionally, the Lions gave Felton a carry or two, but he didn't really do much with the opportunities. Still, it's nice to have a short yardage guy at fullback who can keep defenses guessing. He emerged as the starter and should remain there going forward.

Smith, meanwhile, was sent packing after an opponent bitched that he was playing dirty. Whatever. He was a dude, and little more than that, and now he is gone.

WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN FOR THE FUTURE?

Well, it's kind of murky, both in the short term and the long term. Smith's injury makes it tough to say what will happen. If he returns at full speed, he'll get a shot to prove that he's the main dude, and show that his poor performance was the result of injury more than anything else. However, I'm not so sure that will happen, which means that the Lions might be in the position to find a starting running back before the season starts.

The good news is that Morris is still here, which means that the Lions should have at least one reliable running back option. I'm not sold on him as the starter, if only because he's never really done it before. He's seen a lot of time over the years, first spelling Shaun Alexander in Seattle, and then Smith in Detroit this past season, but he's never been The Man, you know? I wouldn't be that upset if the Lions gave him the shot to be The Man, but again, that's all contingent upon whether or not Smith recovers.

Brown should see his role expand a little as a big play option out of the backfield, and the more ways they find to get him the ball in open space the better. I wouldn't be surprised to see his role evolve over the next couple of years into sort of a running back/receiver hybrid, similar to someone like, say, Eric Metcalf. I like his upside, and I think he's someone who can be a difference maker in the future.

The long term reality is that the Lions need a feature running back. It's looking less and less likely that Smith is that guy, whether he fully recovers from his knee injury or not. Ideally, they would uncover someone in the draft, but again, there are just so many holes to fill that it's probably a mistake to grab someone in this year's draft who is capable of making a difference at running back. Grabbing someone like C.J. Spiller would only mean leaving another dilapidated position untended and rotting for another year. There is simply too much to fix and too little time to do it in. If they can get by for another year with Morris and hopefully Smith, and maybe a cheap veteran free agent, then that's what they will probably do.

At fullback, I like Felton. I think he's a good athlete who brings a lot of things to the table. He can run the ball a little, he can catch it and he's an adequate blocker. I would love it if he became a kick ass lead blocker, but I'm not sure if that will ever happen. More likely, the Lions will try to grab another cheap veteran free agent and hope that he works out better than Terrelle Smith. Hopefully, the combination of Felton and Random Cheap Veteran will result in a solid fullback.

WHAT I SAID BEFORE THE SEASON:

The Lions have a good collection of talent here for the first time since St. Barry's spirit was broken by Lions Disease. I believe that Smith will make a leap this season, and hopefully he can outrun that terrible failure demon before it drags him down and makes him weep bitter tears. Morris is a proven and capable backup and Aaron Brown is the young cheetah that every team loves to have waiting in the wings. Meanwhile, Felton and Smith form a capable and versatile pair of fullbacks. It's a nice cocktail of talent, and, gulp, these dudes might actually be . . . actively . . . good?

GRADE: B+. This could be higher if Smith does indeed take the leap I expect him to. It could also sink drastically lower if Smith doesn't build on the end of his rookie season and if Brown flames out completely. But we are optimists and champions in our hearts and so we won't think that way.

FINAL GRADE: D. I was hilariously wrong about Smith making the leap. Morris was dependable and Brown was indeed a young cheetah, but like I said, this grade would sink drastically lower if Smith couldn't build on his rookie season. He couldn't, and the result is a big fat D, a billion tears, two fucked up shoulders and a knee that ended up looking like it just got off the boat on D-Day. This is what we get for being optimists and champions in our hearts, I guess. Oh well.