How is Ezekiel Elliot better than Jamaal Charles?

Gil Brandt’s running back rankings fail to include Jamaal Charles yet somehow has Ezekiel Elliot listed among the greatest of all-time.

Gil Brandt, a longtime NFL analyst, has been releasing his rankings of the all-time best players at every position. With his latest running back rankings, many of the 27 picks are quite obvious—Jim Brown, Gale Sayers, Walter Payton. However, near the end of the list, two things begin to stand out: 1.) not a single Kansas City Chiefs running back is on the list and, 2.) Ezekiel Elliot is listed.

A quick note: Ezekiel Elliot is a very talented running back. There’s a reason he was taken at No. 4 by the Dallas Cowboys in the 2016 NFL Draft in an era when backs are considered a dime a dozen. He has no real weakness in his game, as he’s not only an amazing runner with speed, strength and vision, but he’s also an exceptional blocker with very good hands. On a list of the game’s best active backs, he’s near the top of that list, without a doubt.

That said, Elliot has played a single season. While exceptions can be made for shorter careers like Sayers or Terrell Davis, at least they had a much larger body of work than one 1,600 yard season. The thing about all-time greatness is that a player is not just a flash in the pan but rather shows the rare ability to maintain their level of play over the long haul, or at least a span of time longer than a rookie year.

In fact, here’s a list of players who have had a single season with more rushing yards than Ezekiel Elliot last year:

Deuce McAllister
Corey Dillon
Tiki Barber
George Rogers
Barry Foster
Michael Turner
Gerald Riggs
Larry Johnson
Jamal Anderson
Ricky Williams
Ahman Green
Jamal Lewis
Chris Johnson
DeMarco Murray

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There’s not a single player on that list that would make any longtime NFL fan stop and consider as to whether they are one of the best 27 or even deserving of the Hall of Fame. All of them were certainly great. Many of them even seemed destined for the sort of greatness that Brandt wants to bestow today upon Elliot. However, the reason we wait for some perspective is because it’s possible to put together one great season—event two or three—only to watch injuries take their toll or talent to fade or defenses to catch on.

What makes the entire thing even worse is that Jamaal Charles has been left off of the list entirely, the same Jamaal Charles who owns the NFL’s all-time record for most yards/carry. While Charles definitely lacks the career yardage compared to others due to injury, his body of work remains greater than others who made the list, Elliot aside. He’s the Chiefs all-time leader in rushing with 7,260 and he has nearly 10,000 total yards from scrimmage in his career.

But back to the yards/carry stat, because that’s where Charles truly shines, where the Texas product shows that he is indeed one of the greatest running backs to ever play professional football. With a career average of 5.5 yards/carry, Charles is .3 yards ahead of Jim Brown, the number one running back on Brandt’s list.

Only five total running backs with 5,000 career yards rushing can say they averaged half of a first down every time they carried the ball. The other four are high on Brandt’s running back rankings. Charles, the overall leader, is somehow nowhere to be found.

Charles is, of course, not the only exception to this list. Fans from other teams could make the same claim to replace Elliot with a star of their own choosing, but for us who’ve watched Kansas City year after year, the fact that Charles is not even on the list is silly, let alone the presence of Elliot.

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