You Don’t Know Bo

Year: 2012

Grade: B

Country: USA

Director: Bonfiglio

Review

i was getting ready to talk about how overrated bo jackson is, but then i looked at his stats again and realized that they actually kinda support the supposition that he could have been one of the best ever. he has the second best career yards per carry average (among RBs) – behind jamaal charles and .2 yards/carry ahead of jim brown. this is aided in large part to his speed – he had three seasons with a long TD run of 88+ yards. no one else does that. his TDs per carry isn’t actually great – .0310 compared to .0323 for barry sanders, .0352 for marshall faulk, .0433 for adrian peterson, .0449 for jim brown (just the first
four i bothered to calculate). he also benefited from a shorter season than everyone else; and in the nfl that matters. even in the games he played he didn’t carry the ball much. fewer than 16 times per game every season. so, he was always fresh and didn’t need to worry about getting beaten up as much as most of the workhorse running backs in history. he also didn’t catch the ball out of the backfield much at all. though he probably could have. all that said, he did have a scary combination of speed and size. had adrian peterson never come back from his knee injury last year, though, we could reasonably have the same conversation about him. this is what happens every time a bo jackson or marcus dupree gets injured or a steve prefontaine dies.