With Bucs 2.3 yards per carry rushing average from its Backs; It’s time for someone else to get their shot

You wont find a bigger Cadillac Williams supporter than yours truly. The sheer determination of Carnell Williams to overcome the adversity of not one but two knee injuries, one of which was entirely career threatening to say the least. But today I went back and watched footage of Caddy’s return from his first injury. He got a bunch of carries in garbage time of the win over Detroit Lions and to be honest it doesn’t look any different than how he is running right now. Take this run for example…against the Browns,

Cadillac was taking off, he hit the hole. A good back should be able to break away from the persuit and take it to the house. Cadillac runs hard, he really does, because he runs with heart. But Cadillac’s speed to take it home has always been in question, even as a rookie. His first game against the Vikings he took it all the way, but in that game, the Vikings were in a run prevent defense, so that if you do make it through the line, there is no one there behind you to tackle the runner. He really has never done that since. Cadillac is a hard runner, and so is Earnest Graham, but EG is our fullback! Rather than mess with that success, its time to take a look at other options. You still need to feed the ball to Cadillac because he is a hard runner as we’ve pointed out. Other than Kareem Huggins, film on the other backs is limited because theyre time on the Bucs squad has also been limited. Kregg Lumpkin- One career carry here for 19 yards, thats all the info on Lumpkin, who impressed Packers organization enough to keep him on their roster going into the regular season. Lumpkin ended up on injured reserve in October of that year. He was released on September 4th of this year, and the Bucs swooped in and picked him up, apparently with others interested as well. Legarrette Blount- Maybe the most known of the back up backs, but not for on field accolades, is Blount. Unfortunately, he is known for his fighting incident where he punched an opponent. Blount ran for over 1000 yards and an Oregon record 17 Touchdowns. Kareem Huggins is the backup on the depth chart however, and we do have film on his running style, which is very fast. He is the type of runner that would compliment Cadillac Williams, not replace him. He can hit a hole and be gone with it in seconds as he did several times this preseason.

Back in the day of Buc Ball you had cool names like Thunder & Lightning or WD 40 (Warrick Dunn and Mike Alstott) because you had clashing styles of running backs. Alstott would get you 4 yards and a cloud of dust. Dunn would spin bobb and weave and next thing you knew he was gone for 50 yards. Thats what the Bucs need these days, because running 27 times for 1.7 yards per carry average is not going to get it done for much longer, not if the Bucs want to continue with their race to ten wins which so far isnt doing so bad 1/5th of the way there.