Many of us watch sports not caring if the men on the field are purple or magenta, as long as they produce. But watch sports long enough and you inevitably notice trends and rarities. One of them is that white tailbacks at the college and professional level have become virtually nonexistent.
In 2007, just 13 of the top 100 rushers in the Football Bowl Subdivision were white. The SEC and Pac-10 each have just one white starting tailback in their respective leagues, Vanderbilt's Jared Hawkins and Stanford's Toby Gerhart.
In the NFL, white tailbacks are even scarcer. Not one white player starts at tailback on any of the NFL's 32 teams. The last time a white tailback was taken in the first round of the NFL draft was 1974, when the Los Angeles Rams selected Penn State's John Cappelletti with the 11th overall pick.
With such a deeply entrenched trend, you wonder if ESPN college football analyst Craig James might be the last white player to rush for more than 1,000 yards in the NFL or if former Washington Redskins legend John Riggins will be the last white feature back to be inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
"Fans write me all the time calling me 'The Great White Hope,'" said James, who ran for 1,227 yards with the New England Patriots during the 1985 season. "One of these days, someone will come along."
It's difficult to tell whether the lack of white tailbacks is a result of nature or nurture. Are white athletes pursuing or being pushed into other positions because they're intimidated by the racial dynamics? Or is there something to the controversial theory that this is the merely the unraveling of genetic trends?
The answer is maybe … and maybe.
There's no doubt racial discrimination and exclusionist Jim Crow policies helped usher in "position profiling" in both the NFL and college football. For a long period of time, blacks were stereotyped as being intellectually incapable of playing certain positions, namely quarterback.
One position where African-Americans were welcomed was running back. After the NFL lifted its freeze on black players in 1946, one of the first players to reintegrate was Kenny Washington, a standout running back from UCLA. In his three NFL seasons, Washington averaged 6.1 yards per carry and was a top-five rusher in his second season.
Even then the NFL was a copycat league. After Washington and Marion Motley, the Hall of Famer who joined Cleveland in the All-America Football Conference in 1946 and averaged 5.7 yards per carry in his career, a wave of black runners entered the league in the 1950s and '60s.
Suddenly the black running back was en vogue. The dynamics of the position had changed dramatically, with speed in the backfield becoming a major emphasis. And as time passed, white feature backs became a rare sight.
Certainly some white tailbacks have had successful NFL careers after the explosion of black players, but not many. Mike Alstott, one of the few fullbacks given feature back responsibilities, retired as the Tampa Bay Bucs' all-time leader in touchdowns (71) and the No. 2 rusher in team history (5,088). In 1999, the six-time Pro Bowler was 51 yards away from the 1,000-yard mark, finishing with a career-best 949 rushing yards. Twice, Alstott led Tampa Bay in rushing.
But Alstott has proved to be little more than an aberration among feature backs. The last team to win the Super Bowl with a white back leading the team in rushing yards was the 1983 Redskins with Riggins. A white back hasn't led the NFL in rushing since Green Bay's Jim Taylor in 1962. The last white player to lead his NFL team in rushing was Nick Goings, with the Carolina Panthers in 2004.
"I don't ever want to put a spin on it and say it's profiling," said Floyd Keith, the executive director of the Black Coaches Association. "I think it has a lot to do with the quality of player."
But there is evidence -- some of it anecdotal -- to suggest there is a degree of profiling when it comes to white runners.
"It used to be for the athletes playing in high school, if you were African-American and playing quarterback, the assumption was they were going to put you at wide receiver," James said. "That trend has been reversed and there's not a perception [African-Americans] can't play quarterback, but there is a perception that if you're a white guy and a running back, you need to move your position."
Gerhart, a junior at Stanford, said opponents used to express surprise when they realized he was the feature back.
"There were definitely times after games, the DBs, safeties or linebackers would say, 'God man, you can move for a white guy,'" said Gerhart, who ranks 15th in the nation in rushing yards among FBS players. "Even at the college level, my freshman year I played some and after they tackled me, they'd say, 'Man, you run good for a white guy' or 'You're my favorite white running back.'"
Recently, according to Gerhart, one of his friends was playing an NCAA video game and created a player with Gerhart's speed and dimensions (6-foot-2, 230 pounds, 4.43 in the 40-yard dash). When his friend made the player white, the game automatically described the video version of Gerhart as "power back." When his friend changed the skin color to black, he became an "all-purpose back."
"Maybe it's just basic stereotypes," Gerhart said. "Even now you're described as a 'power back.' They still discredit speed."
Two completely different running styles and Gerhart's is far more conducive to the NFL.
Two completely different running styles and Gerhart's is far more conducive to the NFL.
