Peterson carries Vikings into playoffs to cap greatest rushing season ever
Joe Bianca
Adrian Peterson said all the right things in his postgame press conference on Sunday. He talked about the team accomplishing its ultimate goal in clinching a playoff berth and relegated personal considerations to the back burner. Yet the disappointment in his voice was audible. The man who had just willed his team to the positive side of a 37-34 epic over their biggest rival on national television was dejected.
In the end, Peterson fell nine measly yards short of breaking Eric Dickerson’s 28-year-old single-season rushing record of 2,105 yards. His frustration is understandable. Great athletes don’t have much use for being second on lists of awesome feats and Peterson is as great as they come. But it needs to be said and said often: the season the sixth-year back from Oklahoma put together in 2012 was the greatest of any runner in history.
The numbers are staggering: 2,097 yards rushing on 6.0 per carry. 1,598 rushing yards in his final 10 games, more than any other runner had in a full 16. 4.1 yards per carry after contact, the same number 2011 rushing champ Arian Foster averaged overall this season. In his Week 17 masterpiece, 189 of his 199 rushing yards came after contact. 40 runs of 15+ yards (next closest was star rookie Alfred Morris with 24).
Peterson was, by far, the largest contributor to a Minnesota Vikings team that improbably went 10-6 and made the playoffs a year after going 3-13. He plays alongside a second-year quarterback who’s ranked 21st in the league by Football Outsiders. His offense has been without Percy Harvin, its only receiving weapon, since Week 9. He runs behind an offensive line that is good in space but is hardly ever able to blow people off of the ball and create big holes. He faced stacked boxes, eight and nine-man fronts, on nearly every down because defenses are unconcerned by the Vikings’ passing game. They know exactly what’s coming, they hit him a lot and in the backfield and he still won’t be stopped. He’s a battering ram, pounding away until the door comes down.
And then, there’s the knee. Last Christmas Eve, in a meaningless Week 16 game against the Washington Redskins, Peterson took a low hit from DeJon Gomes and tore both the ACL and MCL in his left knee. The catastrophic injury was particularly devastating to Peterson for several reasons. For one, the plants and cuts necessary to be a successful running back put more strain on the knee ligaments than the skills utilized for other positions. More importantly, the timing of the injury and expected recovery timetable not only ended his 2011 season but put his 2012 campaign in jeopardy as well. Even optimistic forecasts had him making his return around Week 7. There was no guarantee he would ever be the same electrifying running back again.
Yet there he was on September 9, resembling every bit of the usual Purple Jesus, running for a pair of touchdowns on his reconstructed knee as the feature back in a Vikings win over Jacksonville. As the year went on, he just kept getting better and better, running more and more violently and plowing through more and more tacklers.
Dickerson had the misfortune of setting his rushing mark in 1984, the same year Dan Marino threw for 5,084 passing yards and 48 touchdowns, arguably the greatest season a quarterback has ever produced. So a Most Valuable Player award was never in the cards for the exquisite runner from SMU.
But there has been no such season this year from the position annually most prized by NFL writers. Peyton Manning, Tom Brady and Aaron Rodgers have all compiled characteristically great numbers, but in the context of this illegal contact, spread offense, quarterback-friendly era where 5,000-yard passing seasons are no longer incomprehensible, their campaigns don’t approach the transcendence of Marino’s. There should be no debate as to who the MVP was in 2012, and if the voters decide otherwise, the award should just be renamed “Best Quarterback of the Year” for transparency’s sake.
Judging by his visible discouragement with not breaking the rushing record, Peterson will probably be similarly crestfallen if he doesn’t take home the MVP. Awards in sports, however, are ultimately just debate fodder for down the road, invoked at the ends of careers and subsequent beginnings of Hall of Fame discussions. What matters most to the consumer are the ephemeral moments, the feelings engendered and the memories forged by witnessing true, once-in-a-lifetime greatness on the field.
This past Sunday, following an afternoon of forgettable games between teams who had already clinched playoff spots or been eliminated, Peterson and the Vikings took center stage. People who hadn’t seen firsthand the demolition of his running this season tuned in and marveled.
Against the backdrop of a phenomenally exciting game, everyone’s eyes focused on the guy so determinedly chopping away at the deficit between him and immortality. Twitter timelines, a haven for anonymous negativity and unrelenting snark (the latter to which I often contribute), were overwhelmed with those pulling for Peterson to break the record.
With 40 seconds left in a 34-34 tie, 2nd & 10 from the Green Bay 37-yard line and Peterson needing 35 yards, he got loose. As he’d done so many times this season, he busted through the line, got to the second level, stopped on a dime and cut it back upfield. For a brief moment, it looked as though he would break the record in the most dramatic way possible – with a game-winning, playoff-clinching touchdown.
It didn’t happen. The Packers had safeties deep and were able to stay in front of Peterson enough to gang tackle him at the 11. The Vikings bled the clock down and kicked a field goal to win the game.
He had fallen tantalizingly short of a record he clearly was burning to own, but in the process, he shook the sports world with his performance. In the final week of a grueling season, less than a year removed from major surgery on the joint most integral to his job, he carried the ball a season-high 34 times for 199 yards, dragging an otherwise mediocre Vikings team into the playoffs with his teeth.
Dickerson’s 1984 was legendary. Jim Brown’s 1963 cemented him as the standard-bearer to which all future runners would be measured. O.J. Simpson’s 1973 produced the only 2,000-yard season of the 14-game season era. Walter Payton’s 1977 crowned him the new greatest ever. Barry Sanders’s 1997 was a work of art.
Peterson though, surpassed them all with his 2012. The numbers say it, the circumstances augment it and our eyes confirm it. After what we all witnessed, whether he has a record or wins an award to show for it is beside the point.
Running the Point 
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