The game of football could continue in its current form for the next 500 years and there will never be another Marcus Allen. Standing 6-foot-2, Allen carried the ball 893 times in his four seasons at USC -- and that's after racking up just 136 carries in his freshman and sophomore seasons -- then lasted 16 seasons in the NFL, where he toted the rock a total of 3,022 times. As a point of reference, football's resident workhorse back, Steven Jackson, has a total of 3,507 college and professional carries to his credit, more than 400 behind Allen. Allen drew an NFL paycheck at age 37; Jackson is 32 and a fossil by modern standards.
But beyond the sheer number of carries is Allen's importance to which the teams he played. Simply put, running backs just mattered more back then, and Allen has the hardware -- a Heisman, a Maxwell, a Rookie of the Year, an NFL MVP and a Super Bowl MVP -- to prove it. Marcus Allen, Bo Jackson, Herschel Walker, Earl Campbell, O.J. Simpson (gulp), Emmitt Smith, the sport simply has no use
However, just because Allen's career path no longer has a modern parallel doesn't mean the skills that got him there don't.
In an interview with Culotta and the Prince on ESPN Radio's Baton Rouge affiliate, Allen shared the traits that got him to the NFL and kept him there longer the shelf life of two modern NFL running backs.
"Even though I was a starter, I never came in with the attitude that I was the starter. I never rested on my laurels; I never took things for granted," he said. "In order to get the best out of myself I had to put myself in an underdog role every single year.... That is what worked for me. I came in every single year with a goal in mind, I had something to prove. I didn't come in with the attitude that I was the No. 1 guy; I came in like I was fourth-string and I had to work at it every single day. That was my attitude and that's why I lasted so long.
"And I knew the game so well. Part of that was playing quarterback and part of that was asking a lot of questions. Why this, why that, what happens when the safety is displaced, what can I expect? Those kinds of things. I looked at my role as a running back almost like the quarterback; I observed things like he did. Not just where do I run, who do I block? I looked at the overall game."
Allen then launched into a tangent critiquing the blink-and-you'll-miss-a-snap college practice habits. Safe to say he and Jake Spavital wouldn't see eye to eye.
"We've gotten wrapped up in quantity of plays instead of the quality of plays," Allen said. "You go to a practice and guys want to run 100 plays but they don't even stop and correct what they did wrong, they go to the next one. That's what football is becoming. Guys are not fundamentally sound, the technique is not there. Yes, it's great to be athletic, to be fast and strong, but you've got to be fundamentally sound, you've got to be smart, you've got to have great technique."
Allen then shared a story about why, from age 18 to 37, he would finish runs by sprinting down the field, no matter how far the actual carry went.
"We had a habit at USC when John Robinson was the coach that we practiced so hard, games were actually a lot easier. I prepared myself. At any time a long run wasn't foreign to me because I worked on it every single day," he said. "I played 16 years and one of the things I noticed was there were a lot of young running backs that were supposed to come in and replace me. They'd get the ball, they'd run 5, 10 yards past the line of scrimmage and they'd go back to the huddle. To me, preparation was everything, always wanting to be the best conditioned, always wanting to be the toughest, always wanting to be the smartest. You had to work at those things. They're not easy. Believe me, they're not easy because some days you just don't want to do it. That's when you have to motivate yourself, play tricks on yourself, get yourself to do things when sometimes you can't but they pay off in the long run. I always said that my pain today was going to be my strength tomorrow."