Adrian Peterson is promising to obliterate the NFL rushing record by nearly 400 yards. Don’t laugh.
Adrian Peterson has no reason to break a sweat, but he will anyway. It’s a clear, sunny day at training camp on the Minnesota State University campus in Mankato and the Vikings running backs are off to one side of a practice field, being put through their paces by position coach James Saxon. The drill is simple: Accelerate a few steps, break left, catch a pass in stride, secure the football. All the backs on the roster have gone through these motions a thousand times before, at every level of football. They know the routine—jog, cut, catch, tuck, then lazily flip the ball back to the coach and head to the end of the line. It’d be peaceful if they weren’t in full pads under the afternoon sun. This is the eighth day of training camp and they won’t play an actual exhibition game for another seven days. These are dog days, dog drills and, generally, you can tell how secure a player’s roster spot is by his level of intensity. They are dog days because it’s all too easy to dog it, just a little.
So maybe someone should tell the NFL MVP that his job is safe and that he can, you know, relax. Peterson is exploding off a completely imaginary line of scrimmage, past non-existent opponents, protecting the football from nobody, with a grip that makes his forearm muscles bulge, then leaving whoever he is picturing himself beating—probably a Packer—in the dust for a few strides before turning and firing a nice, tight spiral back to the coach. Then he runs to join his fellow backs, and flashes a smile for the few thousand watching fans who would likely scream just as enthusiastically if they were allowed to watch Peterson brush his teeth. He doesn’t play much in August. He doesn’t need to. All he wants out of camp, he says, are “mental reps”—and this precision is how he gets them.
Peterson says it’ll be easy to turn it on physically when the games matter. Mentally, though, it’s impossible for him to turn it off. The man who plans to end his career as the greatest player in NFL history needs an end zone to race toward—ripping up a meaningless August drill, returning to score a touchdown less than nine months after shredding his left ACL, dragging the Vikings into the playoffs, whatever you’ve got. He puts those things in his way like imaginary linebackers so that he can run them over. “That’s just what he is,” says Saxon of his star pupil’s tendency to publicly challenge himself. “You can’t say no to what he is.”
A while back, Peterson blurted out a goal for the 2013 season: 2,500 rushing yards. It sounded insane and it became the only thing anyone discussing the Vikings focused on. Six weeks later, with training-camp stories to report, they’re still asking him about it. Did he expect this much attention for what was surely just a hopeful claim? Was this a play he drew up himself? “They needed something to talk about,” Peterson explains. “So why not pick something that I want to talk about? Why not set a goal?”
Goals are one thing. A stated attempt to achieve the impossible is another. And make no mistake: A 2,500-yard rushing season is impossible. For one thing, it’s 395 yards beyond the current NFL record—a 19 percent increase on Eric Dickerson’s 2,105-yard 1984 campaign. To accomplish it, some specimen straight out of a comic book would have to average more than 150 yards per game over a full 16-game season; would have to carry the football 400 times while averaging 6.25 yards per carry; would have to leap tall linemen in a single bound.
Last season, there were just 24 150-yard rushing games total by all backs in the NFL (seven of them authored by Peterson). Arian Foster led the NFL with 351 carries, and the co-leaders among backs in yards-per-carry averaged 6.0 yards apiece. One of those co-leaders was Peterson, who would have needed another 67 carries—roughly three more full games worth—at that clip to reach his 2013 goal. In other words, not until Roger Goodell gets his long-coveted 18-game season is 2,500 yards even a possibility.
None of the six other 2,000-yard rushers in NFL history has ever repeated the feat the following season. The Vikings offence last season was, to put it mildly, utterly dependent on Peterson, and so a slew of opposing defences will enter their 2013 games against Minnesota with one plan in mind: Stop Peterson and make Christian Ponder throw the ball. The Vikings have a stout offensive line and utilize an old-school blocking scheme. It’s powerful, especially in front of Peterson’s unholy combination of size, speed and what Saxon calls “suddenness,” but it’s not infallible, and eight- or even nine-man fronts can deter even the greatest of rushing attacks. For all these reasons, Peterson is statistically far more likely to lose 403 yards from his 2012 total of 2,097 than add them.
So yes, ask someone who knows football if an NFL running back can rush for 2,500 yards in a season and they’ll laugh in your face. Ask someone who knows Adrian Peterson if he can do it, though, and well…
“Guys in general is one thing,” says Vikings head coach Leslie Frazier. “Adrian Peterson is another. I don’t doubt Adrian Peterson. I’ve learned that.”
“I don’t think it’s an exaggerated statement,” says offensive tackle Matt Kalil, with a totally straight face.
“I wouldn’t bet against him,” says current Raiders and former Vikings punter Chris Kluwe. “He does things that I have never seen anyone else do. You just see him throw guys out of the way and you’re on the sidelines staring like, ‘How do you do that at the NFL level?’”
Even Peterson’s doctor, a man who has seen thousands of battered knees and knows just how fragile they can be after they’ve been repaired, is loath to doubt him. “Absolutely, he can [reach his goal]. Positively,” says Dr. James Andrews, who rebuilt Peterson’s knee in December 2011, then watched his patient’s week 17 assault on Dickerson’s mark from the Washington Redskins locker room where he serves as the team doctor. “When you take an athlete who’s come back healthy, they should be even better the next year than their first year back… because the ligament structure is still maturing.”
The rest of the Redskins were watching Peterson’s record attempt along with Andrews—all of them, the doctor says, pulling for him. It was Dec. 30, 2012, a year and a week since a tackle by Washington safety DeJon Gomes left Peterson writhing on the FedEx Field grass. A year to the day since Andrews opened his leg, leaving a long scar down his left knee. Eight months since new Vikings tight end John Carlson encountered Peterson at the team facility during OTAs, when the still-recovering AP jumped in during sprints and proceeded to blow away even the wide receivers. Six months since Kalil showed up for a team activity and found Peterson running up and down hills at what he told his rookie lineman was about 70 percent. “I was just like, ‘Man, I want to see this guy when he’s 100 percent,” says Kalil.
But there might well not be such a thing as a “100 percent” Adrian Peterson, because he refuses to define himself as a finished product. On the surface, he’s just another dedicated football player. A little further underneath, though, is a 28-year-old man who doesn’t know how to be satisfied with his achievements; someone who has to get better—at football, at everything. That’s why he had to run those wind sprints four months after his surgery. That’s why he promised he’d play in week one last year and score a touchdown (he scored two). It’s why he spends his free time during training camp in his room studying the playbook, playing online chess against current and former teammates (Antoine Winfield gives him his toughest competition) as well as his girlfriend, Ashley (“I dominate her,” he says, laughing). He’s also reading—a self-help book, of course, The 5 Love Languages: The Secret to Love that Lasts. Getting better.
When Peterson was leaving Oklahoma to enter the NFL, Sooners offensive coordinator Kevin Wilson called it “intrinsic drive.” Andrews calls it his “motivational factor.” He’s had it since childhood. “I just never wanted to lose in anything,” he says. “Whether it was running races, lifting, push-ups, doing Jump Rope For Heart in third or fourth grade, I wanted to be the one to jump rope the most.”
That drive is a product of where he comes from. Peterson has spoken of using football to escape the pain of his youth. At seven, Peterson witnessed his older brother struck and killed by a drunk driver. His father and football coach—the man who stuck his hyperactive child with the nickname “All Day”—went to prison for 10 years for money laundering when Peterson was 13. On the night before Peterson worked out at the NFL combine, his half-brother was shot and killed. He took all of that with him onto the field. “I run angry,” he famously said before the Vikings selected him in the 2007 NFL draft. Six teams passed on Peterson, some because they thought his upright running style and unwillingness to run out of bounds would make him injury prone. He’s missed just seven games in six years, and he’d still rather run somebody over than run for the sideline. It’s just better that way, more challenging. And, he says, it raises the bar for everyone else.
Adrian Peterson has two handshakes. The first one he uses in polite company—it’s a firm grip that says he’s pleased to meet you and let’s get down to business. If you offer no resistance, this is the handshake you get. But if you’ve heard stories about Peterson’s handshake—and it is legendary around the NFL, “his signature,” Saxon calls it—his first handshake makes you wonder: Were those stories overblown? Was he being nice to me? Does he think I’m not worth a real shake? So, stupidly, when you part ways and shake again, you give him a real squeeze, to let him know that you have a handshake, too. And then you get the second handshake—enough pressure to make you wince; enough that you realize you’re not getting your hand back unless he would be so kind as to return it. And he does, then he grins at you and jogs away. Peterson is a very nice man; he’s just also going to beat you at whatever you’ve got. And he’s not shy about wanting to do it.
He was happy to get the Vikings to the playoffs last season—that was the most important thing—but he won’t pretend that he wasn’t disappointed to miss out on Dickerson’s record. “When I came off the field and Jeff [Anderson, the Vikings VP of communications] was like, ‘Man, eight yards!’ I was like, ‘Whaaaat?’ Aww, it hurt.”
That pain is an example of why he puts these things out there—the idea of failing publicly is his most powerful tool. What good are goals if nobody’s judging your progress; doubting whether or not you can accomplish them? Peterson’s 2012 season might have set a record after all—for most pre-season pundits embarrassed to have doubted an athlete. It’s a record he wants to break this year, hence the 2,500-yards statement. You have to be more than driven to tape targets like this to your back—you have to be the sort of person who can refer to yourself as “The Poster Boy for ACL Injuries, for Beating the Odds” in a tone that implies capital letters, as well as say that your mind is set “on being the best player to ever play.”
You know how they say that it’s lonely at the top? Maybe it is. But you know where it’s really lonely? At 6:30 a.m. in the weight room. On a deserted indoor track in March. On the steps of an empty stadium, with no teammates or stopwatches or spotlights. “Those are the toughest times, when you’re out there working all by yourself,” says Peterson, who has become the work-ethic measuring stick by which all Vikings are judged. “I do it because I feel like that’s the best way to condition your body, your mind and your soul—because there’s no one out there holding you accountable. It’s you. So in my mind, when I’m there, I’m thinking, ‘No one will outwork me today.’ That’s all.”
He knows that he’s an inspiration—for his success and his work ethic, but most of all for his return from the injury that haunts the nightmares of every NFL player. He’s been told this again and again. And it’s flattering, but it’s also another target on him. Another football ideal Adrian Peterson must embody. Another invisible linebacker to stiff-arm. He can’t regress, because at any moment there are players in recovery rooms, in the dark early days of rehab, on a cart on the way off the field after hearing that dreaded pop, who are thinking of him. They are telling themselves, “If Adrian Peterson can do it….”
“It’s pretty humbling to me, because these are guys who are already in the NFL, in the pros, and I’m inspiring them,” he says. “It means a lot, man, knowing how I did that. Not only just hard work, but believing and having faith. That was the biggest part—believing, not doubting. Speaking those things, over and over, ‘I will come back. I will come back. I will be better. I will be better.’”
If that sounds hokey, fine. But you should know that it’s the most important part of rehabilitation. “You have to take all the positive gains and not go through a lot of negative gains,” says Andrews of the type of athlete who is able to return from a major surgery stronger than before. “They have to be confident in their own motivational skills. I spend a couple of hours operating on them, but my role after that is to guide them and motivate them—positive thoughts should be five-to-one to negative thoughts, probably 10-to-one, and if you get an athlete like that, you’re going to be holding him back, not pushing him forward.”
If Andrews’s job in the days following the surgery was guidance and motivation, it’s fitting that his patient has taken on that role in his own profession. The Vikings are a decent team that happens to employ football’s seminal talent. They have questions under centre and in the secondary. The receiving corps was dismal last year, and though they’ve addressed it by signing Packers standout Greg Jennings and drafting Cordarrelle Patterson, it remains to be seen how the unit will come together. The Vikings are competitive but flawed, and they play in one of the NFL’s toughest divisions. If the national football press hadn’t spent much of July and August dissecting Peterson’s bold proclamation, they’d have devoted more ink to the lightweight tilt at quarterback, where Ponder and Matt Cassel compete to be named the worst starting pivot in the NFC North.
Every word written about the impossibility of Peterson’s goal is a word not spent rooting around the psyches of his teammates. “Twenty-five hundred yards is just him wanting to put more of the load on his shoulder,” says Jared Allen, Minnesota’s standout defensive end.
The Vikings, NFL previews claim, will go as far as Peterson’s legs can carry them—so Peterson wants everybody to know just how far he’s planning to run. Why not set a goal?