“And I like that.”

A small giggle spills from his lips.

Never has the littlest man in Washington’s locker room felt so large. Thompson stands 5-foot-8, yet his place in the team’s offense is gigantic. “Third-down back,” Redskins Coach Jay Gruden calls him, but Thompson’s role is much broader than that. Runner. Blocker. Receiver. What doesn’t he do, except maybe throw? The best description of his charge might come from former Redskins safety Matt Bowen, now the co-host of ESPN’s NFL Matchup, who, after watching loops of game film filled with scenes of Thompson dancing from defenders’ outreached hands, has come to a single conclusion:

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“You just want to come up with at least 10 plays a game where you get him the ball with space so he can use his talent and his elusive speed.”

Ten plays. Ten Chris Thompson plays. All his own. No one else’s.

Until recently, the definition of an NFL running back was simple: robust and sturdy men who took handoffs from their quarterbacks, then rumbled into the roughly 20-foot-wide wall of linemen before them. Adrian Peterson, the NFL’s 10th-leading career rusher, who dresses two lockers from Thompson these days, is a perfect example of the traditional running back.

But a few years ago, something changed. Running backs became more than just runners. They turned into something more complex, impossible to categorize with a two-word depiction. Some say the revolution began in the early 1990s with San Diego Chargers running back Ronnie Harmon, who caught 79 passes in 1992 — more than most wide receivers. The trend carried into this century, when top backs such as Ricky Watters, LaDainian Tomlinson and Marshall Faulk were known for their pass-catching as well as their running.

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These days it seems the league is filled with players such as Thompson, who leads Washington with 20 receptions: running backs valued for their ability to do more than just run the ball straight into the line. The best example of the new NFL back might be the Saints’ Alvin Kamara, whom Thompson and the Redskins face Monday night in New Orleans. In just his second season, Kamara entered Week 5 tied for third in the league with 35 catches and ranked eighth in rushing yards with 275, making him the ultimate modern offensive weapon. Elias Sports says he is the only NFL player to have both 1,000 rushing and receiving yards through the first 20 games of his career.

In college at Florida State, Thompson assumed he would be a traditional running back. Though he admired players such as Tomlinson and Reggie Bush, who seemed to do everything for the 2010 Super Bowl champion Saints, he didn’t believe himself skilled enough to have their versatility. Then in 2010, a new running backs coach, Eddie Gran, showed up and saw a brilliant fit for something new.

“His vertical speed at hitting a hole was fantastic, and on swing passes, when he got into one-on-one matchups, he always won,” recalled Gran, who is now the associate head coach at Kentucky.

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Eventually, the coach approached Thompson with a proposal: If you can be not only a runner but a pass catcher and blocker, too, you can have a long NFL career.

The timing of this pronouncement couldn’t have been better. The Redskins took Thompson in the fifth round of the 2013 draft, just as teams were starting to use pass-catching running backs regularly. In 2016, he caught 49 passes. He had 39 through last season’s first 10 games before breaking a leg on the same Superdome turf on which he will play Monday night. This year, he is on pace to catch 107 passes, which would be the second-most in team history behind Pierre Garcon’s 113 in 2013 and ahead of Art Monk’s 106 in 1984. Both Garcon and Monk, of course, are wide receivers — players who are supposed to be leading their teams in receptions.

There are many reasons running backs are catching more passes these days. As the NFL has evolved into more of a throwing league, with 400-yard passing games from quarterbacks nearly a weekly occurrence, coaches are looking for ways to limit turnovers. The best way to eliminate interceptions is to throw screens to running backs. But the trend also comes from a physical necessity. Defensive linemen are bigger, stronger and faster. It’s harder now to run between the tackles than it was a few years ago.

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“Coaches are trying to get mismatches,” said former Cardinals coach Bruce Arians, now an analyst for the NFL on CBS.

Instead of trying to force running backs through a wall of gargantuan defensive linemen and inside linebackers, offensive coordinators are creating a different kind of running game by throwing passes to shifty running backs who often find themselves surrounded by yards of green grass with only a linebacker in front of them. Almost always, the running back is faster than the linebacker. If the quarterback has thrown him the pass with enough room to maneuver, he should be able to get eight or 10 yards. Often, this is enough for a first down.

The concept isn’t new. The West Coast offense, perfected by former 49ers coach Bill Walsh in the early 1980s and the base for many of the NFL’s offenses today, used short, quick throws to replicate the running game. But as colleges use more spread offenses and more quarterbacks come to the league skilled at executing the run-pass option (RPO), NFL offenses have become increasingly horizontal.

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“It puts stress on defenses,” Redskins running backs coach Randy Jordan said about pass-catching running backs. “When you get a guy like Chris Thompson that essentially runs routes like a receiver matched up on a linebacker, what do you do? Do you add in another defense back to cover a guy like Chris Thompson? But in doing so, you make your box lighter. So you’re gaining something, but you’re giving something to stop the run to try and protect against the pass.”

Thompson said he has noticed teams are starting to change their defenses in an attempt to control him. After Arizona and Indianapolis allowed him room to catch passes (with the Colts' soft Cover-2 zone permitting 13 receptions for 92 yards) in the season’s first two games, the Redskins' Week 3 opponent, Green Bay, used a defensive lineman to help the defensive back assigned to him, essentially double-teaming him.

Against the Packers, Thompson had only one catch and ran for just 17 yards. But the move to control Thompson softened the rest of Green Bay’s defense, helping Peterson run for 120 yards and making it easier for the tight ends and wide receivers to get open.

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“Every time I go out [on the field], they are saying: ’25, watch the screen, watch this, watch that,’ ” Thompson said in a reference to his jersey number. "You know, I think it’s really helped our offense out. If defenses think they can take me away, then it’s one less guy they have to worry about on the offense. I feel like we have a lot of weapons, though. You can figure out a way to knock one guy down, [but] then you got to worry about the other playmakers out there.”

When Jordan arrived in 2014, he saw a gem in Thompson. Through his first two seasons, Thompson had barely played, carrying the reputation of a small player who was too frail to handle the torture of a full NFL season. Jordan, the kind of coach who wears sweatpants and long sleeves on 95-degree days, challenged Thompson to get tougher, believing he could be an essential part of Washington’s offense.

Early in their time together, Thompson was slammed in the back by a defender as he jumped for a pass in a game. As Thompson grimaced on the sideline, Jordan stood nearby shouting: "Whoomp there it is! You aren’t going to be able to play 16 games!”

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Thompson went back on the field and played the rest of the game.

“I felt like a jerk, because I went to the training room the next day and he had a hematoma on his back,” Jordan said. “It looked like he was pregnant and there was a baby that was breathing in his back, I’ll never forget it.”

Jordan shook his head.

“I think that made him tough and to say that at the very least he wants to be good,” he continued. “When you have a player that has a really good skill set and he’s smart and you add in his toughness, you can’t help but continue to grow. And that’s what he has done.”

Several days after Jordan said this, Thompson stood in the locker room, still talking about his special plays. His face glowed, and he chuckled sheepishly and looked to the floor.

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“We all joke about it at practice,” Thompson said. “It’s like, ‘All right, if CT gets hurt or something happens, we know this play is out the door.’ ”

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Above him a television showed highlights of the Saints' victory over the Giants last week. Kamara’s face appeared on the screen.

“I know Kamara has his plays, too,” Thompson said. “I mean, Mark Ingram will be back this week, but Kamara has his plays that Mark Ingram is not doing to do and they are specifically for him. Lining up at receiver and stuff, that is just for him. It’s not for any other running back on the roster.”

He paused and looked around the locker room. A smile crept back across his face. Here he is at 27, more than an inch shorter than any of the players with stalls around his, a man who dresses with the running backs, who calls himself a running back and yet has caught more passes than any of the wide receivers or tight ends who sit nearby.

Third-down back?

Versatile?

He shrugged. Whatever they want to call him. Once he figured he would be a regular running back, carrying the ball into the scrum 25 times a game. Instead he has become the player whose number opponents are screaming as they try to guess how he gets the ball on his own special plays.

"This is definitely more fun,” he said. “I get to do a whole lot, and I love it.”