After losing their first two games of this season, the Baltimore Ravens have won five in a row, and they’re starting to look like the team people felt they could become when the season started.
While quarterback Lamar Jackson, the NFL’s reigning regular season MVP, is playing outstanding football, the talk of the team is star running back Derrick Henry, who was signed as a free agent from the Tennessee Titans during the offseason.
Henry has run for 873 yards in seven games, and Jackson said he feels Henry has a “great chance” of setting a new single-season rushing record.
“It’s there. I feel like he has a great chance of doing that. I believe he can do it,” Jackson said, via Sarah Ellison of Ravens Vault.
Lamar Jackson was asked what he thinks Derrick Henry’s chances are of setting a new all-time rushing record this season: “It’s there. I feel like he has a great chance of doing that. I believe he can do it.”
— Sarah Ellison (@sgellison) October 23, 2024
The record for the most rushing yards in one NFL season is held by Eric Dickerson, who posted 2,105 yards for the Los Angeles Rams in 1984, in his second pro season.
That season, he averaged 131.6 rushing yards per game, and Henry isn’t far off right now at 124.7 rushing yards per game.
The advantage Henry has is the fact that NFL teams now play 17 games, compared to the 16 games or 14 games teams had each season for decades.
Henry previously reached the 2,000-yard mark in the 2020 season, but last season, he had 1,167 yards on the ground in 17 games, and it therefore looked like wear and tear was catching up with him.
But this season, the 30-year-old is putting together what could be a record-breaking season at an age when running backs have historically fallen off a cliff when it comes to their production.
