For the most part, records are meant to be broken. Eric Dickerson has held the single-season rushing record in the NFL for 29 years, and part that has to do with the growing passing attacks in the league. There isn't the same emphasis on the ground game that there was 29 years ago when Dickerson was doing his thing.
That hasn't stopped Vikings running back Adrian Peterson from gunning for it, though. Peterson was just 18 yards shy of the record in 2012, and now he's going for his second 2,000-plus yard rushing season in a row. All of this coming off that ACL surgery that changed the expectation for torn ACL recovery. The guy's an animal.
Peterson's goal this season is 2,500 yards on the ground, which would shatter Dickerson's record. And with the way teams throw the ball these days, it'd take a similarly unique athlete to touch that mark if Peterson were to actually hit it.
Here's what Dickerson told Sam Farmer of the Los Angeles Times:
“I just want to wish him good luck, tell him I hope he has a great season. At the end I’m going to say, ‘But don’t break my record. I hope he has 2,104 yards.”
Dickerson even offered up a recipe for defenses to go at Peterson, since we all know Christian Ponder is Minnesota's quarterback and that doesn't exactly amount to the greatest show on turf.
“He’s going to see a lot of eight- and nine-man fronts,” Dickerson said. “Because they’re going to dare [quarterback Christian] Ponder to throw the football. They’re going to stack the line of scrimmage. If I’m a defensive coordinator, my thing would be, ‘OK, I want you to hit him all the way to the ground. Punish him.’ That’s what they do.
“The kind of runner Adrian is, he won’t back down from that. But that’s how you try to get to a back, frustrate him with the fronts, and just constantly hit him, hit him, hit him.”
Dude wants to keep his record.
