Last week on my weekly guest appearance on Sports Radio 1350′s M & M Show (shameless plug alert: you early risers can catch me at 7:40 on Friday mornings), an interesting question was posed to me. One of the show’s hosts, Jim Marlin, pointed out that there seems to be several 1,000-yard rushers throughout District 3 football. He asked if any backs from the York-Adams area had eclipsed that mark.
The answer now is yes … barely. After eight weeks, only one YAIAA back has eclipsed the 1,000-yard mark — Dover’s Tanner Link has 1,004. And that’s only because Link exploded for 301 rushing yards last week against Northeastern.
But at the time of the question, the YAIAA was still waiting for a rusher to reach that magic milestone. I decided to do some research and see if that was a bit abnormal.
Turns out, it’s really not.
Last year, there were seven YAIAA running backs who finished with more than 1,000 rushing yards: Charles Anderson (Central York), Jeisson Lloret (Bermudian Springs), Dusty Reed (Delone Catholic), Ethan Hornbarger (Kennard-Dale), Corey Harris (West York), Cody Waltimyer (York Suburban) and Jeremy Knaub (Red Lion).
Of those seven, only two — Anderson and Lloret — had more than 1,000 yards after eight weeks.
In 2008, when there were eight 1,000-yard rushers, only three had reached that plateau before Week 9.
If anything, there’s the potential for the YAIAA to have more 1,000-yard running backs this year. Four need less than 100 yards to get there this week: Bermudian’s Austin Keller, Delone’s Kodi Reed, Northeastern’s Aaron Greene and York County Tech’s Marcus Holley. In fact, Holley would have rolled well past 1,000 already if he hadn’t missed two games due to injury. There’s at least five or six others with a legitimate shot to reach the milestone.
In other words, seems like there is plenty of backfield talent in the YAIAA.
Its really hard to run for a thousand yards in the spread offense when are pretty much an all passing team now