So who do you prefer? The guy who ranks 5th in career rushing yards or 4th in career rushing yards per game?  Or, if you like, there’s LeSean McCoy. Gore and Peterson already have crossed the 12,000-yard mark, and McCoy is likely to do so as well; either way, they are the three active players with the most rushing yards, making them a natural source of comparison. And assuming McCoy gets there, they will also be the only three players from this era (not including Tomlinson or younger players) to hit the 12,000-yard mark.

McCoy’s highs weren’t as high as Peterson, but they were a little higher (two first-team All-Pro seasons, a third season as a top-three fantasy running back, six Pro Bowls in the last seven years) than Gore.  And his career volume probably won’t match Gore, but it will probably be higher than Peterson.  McCoy is currently 29th in career rushing yards and 22nd in career rushing yards per game.

Let’s compare the three players year-by-year, starting at age 21.

All three had big, All-Pro type years at age 23 and strong years at age 24, with McCoy probably being the worst of the three. At ages 25 and 26, McCoy was even better while the other two declines; at ages 28, 29, and 30, McCoy and Gore had nearly identical rushing numbers, while Peterson was all over the map, but all three averaged between 1075 and 1150 rushing yards during those years.

We can also look at them on a career basis by age, and how many rushing yards each players had through age X.

Through age 28, Peterson had an enormous lead on the group, particularly in terms of rushing yards per game. And McCoy had a lead of over 1,000 yards on Gore, mostly due to playing more games.

But Gore hasn’t really slowed down, which is why he’s probably going to end up with the most rushing yards in this group. McCoy is probably more similar to Gore than Peterson, especially when it comes to consistency: in their active seasons in the NFL, Gore’s standard deviation in rushing yards is 236 rushing yards, McCoy is at 236 yards, and Peterson is at 620 yards.

What do you think of these three? How will history remember them? Is McCoy a better or worse Hall of Fame candidate than Gore, although the honest answer to that is likely “it depends how the rest of McCoy’s career unfolds.”

Peterson with a rare cameo by a good quarterback.

In ’09, the Vikings had a Relative ANY/A of +2.05, easily the best passing game the franchise has produced in the last decade.  In fact, the only other time in the last ten years that Minnesota had an above-average ANY/A was last year, when Peterson rushed for just 72 yards in three games.

Most of his time in Minnesota, though, the team’s passing attack has been below-average — or outright bad.  For example, in 2012, Peterson rushed for 2,097 yards.  That represented 17.9% of his career total, and it came when the Vikings had a Relative ANY/A of -0.94.  Overall Peterson has a weighted average RANY/A — i.e., the Vikings RANY/A in each season of Peterson’s career, weighted by the number of rushing yards Peterson had — for his career of -0.52.  Take a look.

Two years ago, I looked at which running backs played with the best passing games. I used the same formula described above, where I calculated, for each running back, his team’s average weighted RANY/A. I have re-run the numbers through the 2016 season for the top 150 leaders in rushing yards.

With an average RANY/A of -0.52, Peterson has the third-worst RANY/A of any running back in the top 20 in career rushing yards, behind only Walter Payton and Steven Jackson.

What do you think?