The Big 10 knows Jonathan Taylor is good at football

Hanging 100 On Conference Foes

Generally, putting in 100 yards of rushing is a good day at the office. You either ripped off enough long runs to keep moving the chains, or the coach relied on you to keep the defense honest by feeding you the rock. Also, the three digits is eye-catching, and that’s attractive to a busy broadcaster scanning stats for something to talk about.

The question is, can you do it against the teams in your conference? Everyone in your conference? Against how many teams can you nail the gloves you played in to your wall Willie Mays Hayes style?

Once again, I dived into the Sports-Reference archives, and found out it’s way harder than I expected. Here’s all the players that did so in games since 2000.

Even with conference realignment, that is not a lot. Shoutouts go to:

• LaDainian Tomlinson doing it in the one year I had stats for.
• Royce Freeman and Ka’Deem Carey, doing it in the current Pac-12.
• The old Big East, which somehow had the highest concentration of guys that were fun to watch on this incredibly arbitrary list.

So, that’s the hurdle to hit. Jonathan Taylor can join the club this season. He is missing Michigan State, who he’s never played, and Ohio State, that held him to 41 yards in the Big 10 Championship Game back in 2017. Let’s see what kind of damage other running backs have done against conference foes, with a minimum of 6 pelts.

Just 17 players as of this moment in time would need a second hand to count their successes. Oddly, most of the colleges in this list are Power-5 schools, while the first was mostly non-BCS teams.

Before we see the all-time leader board, let’s look at active players only.

1418 more yards than second place Rodney “Yeah, They’re Called Doctors” Smith. The man does work y’all. Let’s look at his ascent up the leader board since the week off.

In this batch, he’s passed Melvin Gordan and Anthony Davis, putting him 3rd all-time on the Wisconsin leaderboard. In continuing ‘man, they were fun to watch’ news, Pat White’s here again, as is Denard Robinson. Ameer Abdullah’s there too, but as he never got 100 yards against the Badgers that’s the only time he could be mentioned in this article.