Only a historic effort could keep Lynn Bowden from winning SEC’s rushing title
Barring a truly remarkable performance by LSU’s Clyde Edwards-Helaire in the College Football Playoff national championship next week, Kentucky star Lynn Bowden will finish this season as the Southeastern Conference’s rushing champion.
Bowden rushed for 1,468 yards for the Wildcats, who capped their season with a 37-30 win over Virginia Tech in the Belk Bowl on New Year’s Eve. Mississippi State’s Kylin Hill — whose season is also over — right now is second in total rushing with 1,350 yards. Edwards-Helaire, the only SEC running back whose campaign is still on-going, ranks No. 3 with 1,304 yards.
It’s possible for the SEC’s first-team running back to pass Bowden in total yardage, though he’d need to rush for 165 yards against a Clemson defense that has only three times given up more than 100 yards to a single back and only once — against Ohio State in the CFP semifinals — allowed an opponent to rush for 160 or more yards as a team. Edwards-Helaire has eclipsed that amount twice in his career — he rushed for 172 yards at Mississippi before hanging a career-high 188 yards on just six carries against Arkansas the next — so if the junior is at full strength, it’s within the realm of possibility (he’d probably be much closer but only rushed twice against Oklahoma last week due to a hamstring ailment).
But he would need an all-time rushing day on college football’s biggest stage in order to end this season as the league’s rushing champ. Since 1970, the SEC has crowned its top rusher based on average yards per game, a category in which Bowden is the runaway leader: the UK junior averaged 112.92 yards in 13 games, about 10 yards more than Hill (103.8) and about 20 yards better than Edwards-Helaire (93.1).
The Tigers’ star would need to rush for 390 yards — putting him at 1,694 for the year — to finish with a per-game average better than Bowden’s. That would put him at 112.93 yards per game, just past UK’s standout. Anything’s possible, but the odds are not in Edwards-Helaire’s favor, as only four FBS football players have rushed for 390 or more yards in a single game, ever.
They are: Tony Sands (396 for Kansas against Missouri in 1991), LaDainian Tomlinson (406 for TCU against UTEP in 1999), Melvin Gordon (408 for Wisconsin against Nebraska in 2014) and Samaje Perine (427 for Oklahoma against Kansas, also in 2014). All of those games occurred during the regular season, and of those defending teams, only Nebraska allowed fewer than 200 rushing yards per game (177.8) as a team on the year.
It would take an all-time effort against one of the country’s best rush defenses for Edwards-Helaire to unseat Bowden, so Kentucky for the fifth time in its history should finish with the SEC’s top guy in that category. Bowden would be the first since Artose Pinner earned that distinction in 2002 (117.8 yards per game). Sonny Collins did it in back-to-back years — 1973 and 1974 — and Moe Williams, whose single-game rushing record Bowden came close to breaking this year, led the league in 1995.
More stats
▪ Unless LSU somehow rushes for about 1,900 yards as a team against Clemson, Kentucky also has locked up the team rushing title — both in total yardage and yards per game (by which the record is kept). The Wildcats rushed for 3,624 yards this season, setting a new school record, and averaged 278.7 yards per game, the highest league average since 2013 (Auburn, 328.3 per game). It is the first time UK will finish as the SEC’s rushing leader, based on the conference’s records dating back to 1948.
▪ Bowden’s individual rushing effort over the course of the season was the second-best by by a quarterback in SEC history; he came up 6 yards short of passing Auburn’s Cam Newtown, who set the record of 1,473 in 2010. His average of 7.9 yards per carry lags behind only Clemson’s Travis Etienne (8.0) nationally.
