NO PLAYER TOOK more of a pounding last season than 23-year-old Jonathan Taylor. The five-foot-ten, 226-pound Indianapolis Colts running back carried the ball 332 times (the second-highest total in football since 2015) and rushed for 1,811 yards (552 more than any other player). And Taylor didn’t miss a game. This season, he’ll be expected to do the same thing.
Taylor knows this won’t be easy. He—and the rest of the NFL—is well aware of the workhorse-running-back abyss, the way players like him inevitably break down after just a few seasons of big hit after big hit. From Giants star Saquon Barkley, who started his career with back-to-back 1,000-yard seasons but hasn’t played a full season since, to Carolina’s Christian McCaffrey (remember him?), big-time running backs in today’s NFL don’t last long.
Then again, Taylor’s never been broken, not in three years at the University of Wisconsin (where he twice
