No one said he should be crowned. He's a good NFL running back in 2016
I don't think that can be debated....yet
I'm not even sure I'm ready to concede he's a good NFL running back yet.
He's had 2 excellent games back-to-back. But prior to those games, he hadn't even broken 45 yards in a game. In his first 4 games, he had 31 carries for 117 yards (3.8 YPC).
He might be emerging and the last 2 games are evidence of that. Or he might have just hit some big runs (2 50+ runs, which are not sustainable) against some teams stacked up to prevent the pass. It's way too early to tell.
I think you're reading too much into him saying Gronk's game wasn't superb.
Was Blount's game superb? I would call it very good but not sure if I'd say superb. That would be 2,032 yards and 32 TDs over an entire season.
It goes beyond just the Gronk bit. It's about how many media members have no clue what the hell they're writing most of the time.
We're conditioned to believe that 100 yards is a good game for running backs and 100 yards for a WR and 300 yards for a QB. Why? Where do these arbitrary marks come from? 4,000 yard seasons are supposed to be big, but that means the QB has to average 250 yards to hit that milestone. Nobody thinks 250 yards is a big game from a QB though. Blount's yards today would give him over 2,000 in a season as you pointed out. And Gronk's numbers would be record setting.
Yet we use arbitrary milestones of 100 yards or 300 yards to decide if someone had a big day. But those don't correlate to big years. A RB or WR who hits 1,000 yards is considered a good player, but that's only 63 yards a game. If Blount averaged 63 yards per game, nobody would be happy about that performance until the end of the year, when we'd be thrilled we had a 1,000 yard rusher. And people in the media don't think about these things, they just use the same arbitrary stats they've been brainwashed into thinking as milestones.
Gronk didn't hit 100 yards today so the D must have done a good job. Brady didn't throw for as many yards, ignoring the fact he also had way fewer attempts because of the effectiveness of the run game. He still averaged over 8.5 YPA and completed over 70% of his passes but they zero in on one or two stats and miss the entire picture. And then he points out that they did a good job against Brady, who had a career 113.3 RAT against them. Only he did even better than that. It's just poorly-researched, lazy, and unprofessional.
I don't mean to rant at you, but it's a lot of things, and Fowler is not the only one guilty of this, just the latest of the million mediots banging on keyboards trying to spit out something clickable.
