Steven Jackson Slated for More Carries When He Should Be Benched

Jackson has looked bad. He has looked every bit of his age while struggling his way to 151 yards on 47 carries (long of 50 in game 1). I was a little surprised he was managing 3.2 YPC on the season until figuring out his longest run ads almost 1.1 YPC to his season total.

Koetter believes Jackson should get better the more carries he gets and attributes his struggles to falling behind and abandoning the run game. His game stats from last year fail to clearly support this idea and Jackson is getting too old to be able to be relied upon as a workhorse back.

Jackson has struggled doing what he used to do so well. He has zero rushing touchdowns and struggles in short-yardage situations. Third and one is still a mountain too high to climb for our offense. The offensive line has fallen apart but Jackson has not shown the ability to do much with what he is given. Instead he produced his statistically worst year in football by a pretty sizable amount.

There is a good chance that Jackson is simply done. Running backs have a tendency to quickly lose their effectiveness in their late 20s and Jackson also has had to deal with a monstrous workload in his career. For comparison, Snelling has 2300+ less touches while being one year younger than Jackson.

Jackson has displayed no burst and struggles to move laterally with any level of speed. He frequently gets taken down behind the line of scrimmage but struggles to produce when he gets a hole. Jackson still has some utility on passing downs but has dropped some frustratingly easy catches.

At this point Jackson is the starter but provides nothing over our other running backs. Jason Snelling and Jacquizz Rodgers have been doing much better, albeit unspectacular, behind this terrible offensive line. How these two have been ignored while our free agency prize is hurting the offense is perplexing.

Koetter needs to give the more reliable Rodgers and Snelling the bulk of the offensive snaps and let Jackson try to make something happen coming off the bench. Not the other way around.