I’ll be the first to tell you that Jerome Bettis’s role in this Super Bowl, and in fact, on this Steelers team, is a little bit blown out of proportion. He’s a leader and a mentor, and he seems to inspire the other guys, and all that stuff is invaluable. But his actual role on the field… basically, he’s a friendlier TJ Duckett. He’s a short yardage guy, and endzone guy, and a change of pace to Willie Parker.

But on Page 2 today, David Schoenfield makes the point that Jerome Bettis is absolutely not one of the best running backs of all time… and I disagree wholeheartedly. He’s 5th on the NFL’s all-time rushing list. Now, I’m not saying that the all-time rushing list is the end-all be-all for ranking RBs all time, but it’s something. It’s not meaningless. 5th all-time makes a running back pretty great.

The guy argues that Bettis ran for over 1,500 yards just once, and that he has a 3.9 career yards per carry, while other Steelers like Erric Pegram, Richard Huntley, Amos Zereoue, Chris Fu’amatu-Ma’afala and Willie Parker have combined to gain 4.38 yards per carry for the Steelers. He also compares Bettis to a guy like Harold Baines or Don Sutton, someone who was around long enough to compile a lot of stats, but was never truly great.

All of those points ignore important things about Bettis. If I could choose 3.9 yards per carry from any back in the NFL, I’ll take it from Jerome. Because at the 3nd of those 3.9 yards, there’s going to be at least one very sore tackler. He punishes a defense. He wears them down. At the end of the game, the last person a linebacker or DB wants to see coming at them is Jerome Bettis.

I think Bill Cowher prefers that kind of offense. Give him the choice between, say, Zereoue, breaking one for 20 yards, or Bettis rushing 5 times, getting 4 yards per carry, and Cowher wants the 2nd option. It controls the clock, it lengthens drives, and it wears down the defense. I really believe that through the years, Bill Cowher and the Steelers have designed things that way.

And a lot of Bettis’s carries, especially in recent years, come in short-yardage situations. Are you going to hold it against the guy that on a 4th-and-1, he gets a yard and a half? He’s outstanding in those situations… he’s got the patience, vision, and quick feet to find the hole, and then the power to force himself through it. The Steelers beat the Chargers this year because of what Jerome Bettis was able to do late in the game in short-yardage situations.

Longevity means something. This guy seems to hold it against Bettis, or at least discount it as a factor. I don’t see it that way. Why shouldn’t it be a positive for Bettis that he’s been able to keep himself healthy and stay around for a while? Not everyone can do that.

I once said that you could make a case for Jerome Bettis as one of the greatest athletes in the world. Now, it was said half-facetiously, and probably drunk, and I’m not really suggesting that Bettis is one of the greatest athletes in the world, but… consider that he became the NFL’s 5th-all-time leading rusher, and he did it as a fat guy. A man of that size having that kind of quickness is just not natural… in fact, it’s fucking superhuman. Take any other great athlete… Kobe Bryant, Lance Armstrong, LaDainian Tomlinson, Wayne Rooney, Ichiro… and strap 150 pounds to their back, and then let’s see what a great athlete they are. Kobe as a fat guy is Robert Traylor. Lance Armstrong as a fat guy is an accountant.

I mean, you line up all the other great RBs ever, and look at them… in their prime, they were chiseled. Bettis accomplished the same things, more than most of them, as a fat guy. I mean, we’re not talking about 1st basemen here, or sumo wrestlers, or golfers. We’re talking about running backs in the National Football League… a position that contains, truly some of the greatest athletes in the world. And a fat guy had made himself one of the best. That’s remarkable.