Fathead Blog

The bizarre thing is that even after a fairly long NFL career, it’s difficult to gauge just how good he was. His 10,009 career yards rank 26^th all-time, yet he had only five career 1,000-yard seasons.  10,000 yards is an amazing accomplishment and made Williams a great rusher, but he will be remembered by most as someone who could have done even more.

In 2000, his second NFL season, Williams missed six games due to injury, but still finished with 1,000 yards. Then after racking up nearly 4,500 rushing yards over the next three years, Williams abruptly retired in 2004. He returned in 2005, but shared time with a young Ronnie Brown, and in 2006, he was suspended for the entire season for violating the NFL’s drug policy. Williams returned again in 2007, but playing in his first game, he was injured and missed the remainder of the season. Williams played in 2008 – 2010 without missing a game, but he again spilt time with the younger Brown. Last season, he served as a backup with the Baltimore Ravens behind star Ray Rice.

The Dolphins drafted Ronnie Brown to add stability and the "wildcat" to their running game.

When you add it all up, Williams missed about 3 ½ years of playing time. He averaged nearly 1,200 yards per season from 1999 – 2005, so factoring in that rate of production, Williams lost approximately 4,000 yards in all. When you add those yards to his career, a good picture is painted as to just how good he could have been.

With 14,000 career yards, he vaults all the way into fifth place on the all-time rushing list behind only Hall of Famers Emmitt Smith, Walter Payton, Barry Sanders, and Curtis Martin. Just as important, if Williams had been a steady force in the backfield, the Dolphins probably don’t draft Ronnie Brown. Instead of sharing the rushing duties in much of his career in Miami, Williams could have had the bulk of the carries to himself and accumulated even more yards as a feature back.

Now, while all this projecting is fun, the important thing to remember is that it certainly is no guarantee of what Williams would have accomplished. Even if he had been able to stay on the field, there’s still no telling how things would have played out.

The bottom line is that we’ll never know if Williams might have challenged Emmitt Smith’s NFL record of 18,355 yards. But if things had turned out a little better, he may have given it a shot – and Mike Ditka would have had the last laugh.