Adrian Peterson is 36 years old and doesn’t currently have a team. If his career is over, it will have been a heck of a ride.
I was putting together some thoughts on Derrick Henry yesterday when I noticed that he’d scored multiple touchdowns from 50-plus yards four years in a row. That got me wondering about where that might stack up all-time, and I started pushing around some of the numbers.
They’ve got nice searching tools in the “Stathead” portion of Pro-Football-Reference.com that are really good for this kind of thing.
When I pulled up the numbers for the Super Bowl era, the results were surprising. There’s Adrian Peterson at the top, with 16 such runs. One more than Barry Sanders, and a lot more than all those running backs from the ‘70s and ‘80s that we tend to think of as great – Walter Payton, O.J. Simpson, Earl Campbell, Eric Dickerson.
The two Tennesssee backs (Chris Johnson, Henry) are sitting at 3rd and 4th, with 11 and 9 such runs. Peterson has at least twice as many 50-yard touchdown runs as every other back in the Super Bowl era.
Note on this one that it’s only runs. If a guy catches a swing pass and runs 70 yards for a touchdown, that’s not counted on this list. According to this Stathead search engine, 31 players since 1966 have had at least 5 TD runs from 50-plus yards. Four of the 31 played last year, and I’ve got them in bold in the chart below.
With this being limited to the Super Bowl era, Jim Brown doesn’t show up. He played most of his career before the first Super Bowl. But I glanced at his numbers (12 TD runs of 50-plus yards).
Peterson has had a great career. Even better than I realized.
| 50-YARD TOUCHDOWN RUNS | |
|---|---|
| Player | TD |
| Adrian Peterson | 16 |
| Barry Sanders | 15 |
| Chris Johnson | 11 |
| Derrick Henry | 9 |
| Fred Taylor | 8 |
| Robert Smith | 8 |
| O.J. Simpson | 8 |
| DeAngelo Williams | 7 |
| Jamaal Charles | 7 |
| Maurice Jones-Drew | 7 |
| Ahman Green | 7 |
| Saquon Barkley | 6 |
| Frank Gore | 6 |
| Tiki Barber | 6 |
| LaDainian Tomlinson | 6 |
| Warrick Dunn | 6 |
| Napoleon Kaufman | 6 |
| Terrell Davis | 6 |
| Emmitt Smith | 6 |
| Tony Dorsett | 6 |
| Michael Turner | 5 |
| Ricky Williams | 5 |
| Willis McGahee | 4 |
| Jamal Lewis | 5 |
| Clinton Portis | 5 |
| Corey Dillon | 5 |
| Bo Jackson | 5 |
| Herschel Walker | 5 |
| James Brooks | 5 |
| Neal Anderson | 5 |
| Greg Pruitt | 5 |
—Ian Allan