As potentially unbreakable NFL records go, the all-time rushing mark seems to be one of the most untouchable.
If any current player has a chance to get close enough to make things interesting, it’s Ravens running back Derrick Henry.
He’s the active leading rusher, with 11,423 yards. That puts him at 19th on the list, already ahead of Hall of Famers like John Riggins, O.J. Simpson, Earl Campbell, Jim Taylor, Larry Csonka, and Terrell Davis.
In the early weeks of the 2025 season, Henry will leapfrog Steven Jackson and Fred Taylor. Barring serious injury, Henry likely will finish 2025 in the top 10.
Here’s the real question. How high will he go? He’s 2,628 yards away from the top six, and 3,495 away from the top five.
And the Emmitt Smith record of 18,355 yards is a mere 6,932 yards away.
Yes, Henry (now 31) will need several more years of high-end performance to get there. That said, he has shown no sign of slowing down. While the end can come quickly (and Father Time remains undefeated), maybe Henry is the outlier — like Emmitt was.
Smith played through the year in which he turned 35, generating 937 rushing yards in his final season. Henry is 5.5 seasons away from catching Smith, based on Henry’s average of 1,269 yards per season.
He had 1,921 yards last year, at 30. He’s playing with a generational quarterback, whose mere presence makes it easier for Henry to find daylight.
It won’t be easy. But here’s the point. It’s never really been a serious consideration that Henry could catch Emmitt.
Maybe it should be. And Emmitt would be fine with that; he told us several years ago at the Super Bowl that he wishes Walter Payton would have been alive to congratulate Emmitt when he broke Payton’s record. Put simply, Emmitt wants to be able to shake the hand of the person who breaks his record.
While it’s hardly anything close to a lock, there’s a non-zero chance that Emmitt will eventually be shaking Derrick Henry’s hand. Much of it will depend on the rest of Henry’s body will defy the hourglass long enough to keep running through, over, and around defenders.
At a time when some of the most powerful people in the country have made “DEI” into a four-letter word, the NFL claims it’s standing firm in its commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Recent developments make it fair to ask whether the NFL is truly committed, or whether the NFL is simply trying to thread a needle that is getting smaller all the time.
The latest news came from the league’s cancellation of the 2025 version of the accelerator program, which puts minority candidates in front of owners during the May meetings. The NFL issued a statement last week that attempted to create a “nothing to see here” vibe, explaining that the program was stopped for a year in an effort to make it better next year.
Another view would be that doing it is still better than not doing it, and that it could have been held in its current form in 2025 as usual and changes could still be made for 2026.
Jarrett Bell of USA Today has taken a closer look at the league’s mixed signals. On a subject where the league tries to say all the right things, the actions aren’t completely meshing with the words.
“I realize that people are going to look at [the cancellation of the 2025 accelerator program] and say, ‘These people are backing off,’” Steelers owner Art Rooney II told Bell. “That’s not going to happen. There’s nothing I can really do about that perception, except to say that we’re still not satisfied with where we are, and we recognize that we still have work to do.”
Both the perception and the reality when it comes to the league’s hiring practices for key positions like coach and General Manager have been equally bad over the years. Not long before former Dolphins coach Brian Flores put his career on the line by filing a landmark racial discrimination case against the NFL and multiple teams, NFL executive V.P. of football operations Troy Vincent provided a damning admission that was highlighted in Flores’s civil complaint.
“There is a double standard, and we’ve seen that,” Vincent said. “And you talk about the appetite for what’s acceptable. Let’s just go back to . . . Coach [Tony] Dungy was let go in Tampa Bay after a winning season. . . Coach [Steve] Wilks, just a few years prior, was let go after one year . . . Coach [Jim] Caldwell was fired after a winning season in Detroit . . . It is part of the larger challenges that we have. But when you just look over time, it’s over-indexing for men of color. These men have been fired after a winning season. How do you explain that? There is a double standard. I don’t think that that is something that we should shy away from. But that is all part of some of the things that we need to fix in the system. We want to hold everyone to why does one, let’s say, get the benefit of the doubt to be able to build or take bumps and bruises in this process of getting a franchise turned around when others are not afforded that latitude? . . . [W]e’ve seen that in history at the [professional] level.”
Since Flores filed his lawsuit in 2022, the NFL has been trying to change its ways. The problem, as of 2025, is that a full-throated commitment to DEI can result in an executive order at worst — and a rambling, nonsensical, all-caps social media assault at best.
Speaking of rambling and nonsensical, Cowboys owner Jerry Jones provided some quotes to Bell regarding the impact of the political assault on diversity, equity, and inclusion.
“I don’t want to . . . I think it just makes us all aware,” Jones told Bell. “The emphasis the president puts on it just makes us all aware and thinking about it.”
What’s there to think about? Whether to remain committed to diversity? Or whether to find a way to tiptoe through a field full of mines planted by those who would like to 86 DEI?
“I know you’re saying, ‘Was this a reaction to that? And the timing of it?’” Jones told Bell regarding the cancellation of the accelerator program for 2025. “I don’t believe and have seen nothing from talking to anybody, that this is a reaction to that. I think you’d be naïve if you didn’t think the Supreme Court decisions have impacted decisions all over the country. The issue of technically, how and what you’re doing, I think that’s a lot more influenced than anything our president is talking about. . . . You see what I’m saying? The overall direction the Supreme Court took, that whole area would be a bigger impact.”
Jones is referring to the Supreme Court’s ruling from 2023 limiting race-conscious admissions practices for colleges and universities. Which is one of the unsurprising outcomes of a Supreme Court that has been stacked with the kind of conservative, business-friendly justices to whom someone like Jones would gift a Super Bowl ring and then act like it’s not part of a broader effort to ensure that the Supreme Court’s body of work will be favorable to the interests of America’s oligarchs.
The challenge for the NFL is to create a P.R. strategy that pushes the idea that they’re trying to increase and promote diversity, while also discreetly waging legal battles aimed at minimizing liability. It’s one of the reasons why the league always tries to pull any civil action against it from the true independence of the court system and into the secret, rigged, kangaroo court of arbitration, where the Commissioner is the one who hands out (and sometimes wears) the black robe.
Here’s the NFL’s apparent DEI playbook: Say one thing, do another. And then, when the thing you do gets noticed and criticized, say whatever you have to say to explain it all away.
That approach works, until it doesn’t. With the top of the executive branch currently going scorched earth on DEI, the tentpoles of the NFL’s P.R. effort are being quietly knocked down.
Beyond the decision to abandon the accelerator in 2025 under the guise of making it better for 2026, the NFL didn’t conduct during the 2025 annual meeting (as Bell notes) a media briefing from the diversity committee, which Rooney chairs.
The reason for that seems obvious. Anything the NFL would have said during the briefing to pat itself on the back when it comes to DEI efforts could (and quite possibly would) have been used against it, if/when the Commander-in-Tweet had happened to notice it while scrolling through his phone from the golden throne with a hole in the middle of the seat.
After trading for wide receiver George Pickens this month, Cowboys executive vice president Stephen Jones said that the team does not view the former Steeler as a No. 2 receiver.
The Cowboys’ incumbent No. 1 receiver doesn’t see Pickens that way either. CeeDee Lamb and Pickens were both in attendance at Cardinals quarterback Kyler Murray’s charity softball game over the weekend and Lamb addressed how their partnership will work during an interview with DLLS Sports.
“Now we both ones,” Lamb said. “It ain’t no A, B, none of that. It’s one. You look over there, you see one. You look over here, you see another one. So do what you gotta do with that.”
Amari Cooper led the Cowboys in catches and receiving yards during Lamb’s rookie season in 2020, but Lamb took over both spots the next season and has been the unquestioned top dog in the Dallas passing game the last three years. Pickens may not match his numbers, but it’s clear that the Cowboys see their offense taking on a new look in 2025.
A social-media dustup (not the Del Rio kind) broke out on Thursday regarding the question of whether the Cowboys and linebacker Micah Parsons have a “handshake deal” on a new contract.
Clarence E. Hill, Jr. of All City DLLS reports that a handshake deal exists. However, Parsons disputes it.
It doesn’t matter.
Handshake deals are meaningless. They’re unenforceable. They’re not worth the paper they’re not printed on.
The NFL has a specific procedure for executing player contracts. The document must be reduced to writing. The player’s NFLPA-certified agent must be involved. The deal must be approved by the NFL.
No informal agreement matters until the final deal is done. And if, as it appears, owner/G.M. Jerry Jones threw an arm around Parsons’s shoulder and spouted off a few numbers and Parsons nodded along, it doesn’t mean jack diddly squat.
Even if they capped it with a handshake.
The law of every state requires certain types of contracts (e.g., real estate transfers) to be reduced to writing. The law of the NFL, as set forth in the Collective Bargaining Agreement and by the mandates of the NFL’s Management Council, requires every player contract to be in writing. And signed. And approved.
Even if Parsons verbally agreed to every single term of the deal, it does not matter until the contract is signed, sealed, and delivered to 345 Park Avenue for final approval. Until then, the player can change his mind. The team can change its mind.
The entire issue of whether they shook hands on it obscures the deeper problem with the Cowboys’ way of doing business. Why dick around with a handshake deal when it’s fairly simple to sit down and hammer out a formal agreement?
The Cowboys love to wait for a ticking clock. Maybe they think it makes things more interesting. It definitely doesn’t make things cheaper. And it doesn’t create cap space that can be used on other players.
Again, we’re not saying there was or wasn’t or is or isn’t a handshake deal. We’re saying that it doesn’t matter, one way or the other. All that matters is whether the Cowboys and Parsons’s agent agree on the key terms, print out the paperwork, sign it, and send it in.
In the time it took me to hunt and peck this blurb, they could have gotten half of the work done.
Once upon a time, every team played at least once in prime time. More recently, every team played one — and only one — Thursday game after playing on Sunday.
While it forced fans to hold their noses and watch (or not watch) games like Titans-Jaguars on a Thursday night in December, it created some degree of equity and balance when it came to the demands placed on the various teams.
In recent years, that’s gone out the window. And for good reason. Better prime-time games featuring more attractive teams lead to bigger audiences. Bigger audiences allow broadcast partners to justify the massive rights fees they pay — and it seeds the soil for even larger rights fees the next time packages are available for bidding.
The new approach, with certain teams being overloaded by prime-time and other standalone games and multiple teams (this year, the Browns, Titans, and Saints) being treated like Michael Scott’s neon beer sign, creates a competitive imbalance.
“Certainly the better teams probably end up finding themselves more widely represented in the television windows, and therefore get out of the routine,” NFL V.P, of broadcast planning and scheduling Mike North said during a Thursday conference all with reporters. “The Chiefs, for instance, have been playing five, six, seven prime-time games, playing seemingly every day of the week. It doesn’t seem to have hurt them. So, yeah, that’s what comes with success.
North attributed the dynamic to a “constant balancing act” of “trying to figure out [how to] feed the fans, feed our broadcast partners with the games and the teams they want to see.” He said there’s “always . . . an eye towards competitive inequities, but it doesn’t seem to have hurt to the Chiefs.”
But the selection of prime-time games isn’t only about imposing on the teams that have been good. The process entails making a guess as to whether a team will be good, or at least interesting, regardless of whether the team has a history of playing well enough to deserve the burden.
Last year, for example, the Jets had seven standalone games in the first 11 weeks, including two Sunday-Thursday short weeks. The Jets got the chronically short straw, even though they haven’t been to the playoffs since 2010. At the time, North justified giving the Jets the scheduling business by explaining that the Jets “kind of owe us one” after Aaron Rodgers’s Week 1 season-ending Achilles tear made their 2023 prime-time games far less attractive.
In 2024, Rodgers started every game during the gauntlet, and beyond. And the Jets went 5-12.
This year, the Cowboys have six prime-time games (and a record four Thursday games) despite not making the playoffs in 2024 and, given their schedule, unlikely to do so in 2025. Likewise, a pair of non-playoff teams who aren’t currently regarded as short-list contenders — the Dolphins and Falcons — have been tabbed for FIVE prime-time games each. (Both teams also have an early-morning standalone European game.)
The league apparently is making a bet that Miami and Atlanta will be good. Having six standalone games could help make that a self-defeating prophecy.
The league also expects that the Titans, Browns, and Saints will be not too good. And it will be not bad for them to have the routine and normalcy that comes from playing most of their games at 1:00 p.m. ET on Sundays. (The Browns will play a standalone game in London.)
Two years ago, the Texans played 16 games at 1:00 p.m. ET, before landing on Saturday night for the de facto AFC South championship game against the Colts. Houston parlayed their low profile into a very unexpected playoff berth.
This year, don’t be surprised if the Titans make a run at the same accomplishment. Overlooked and disregarded (just like No. 1 overall pick Cam Ward was during the draft), the Titans can quietly go about their business, stack wins, and get themselves into postseason contention.
And then pay they’ll pay the piper with plenty of prime-time games in 2026. It’ll be better to do it that way, than to play well enough to not make the playoffs, but to catch the league’s eye when it’s time to make out next year’s schedule.
