On February 20th , Football Perspective hosted a “Wisdom of Crowds” election with respect to the question: Who is the Greatest Running Back of All Time?™ Well, Football Perspective guest commenter Adam Steele offered to count the ballots, and I’ll chime in with some commentary.

There were 41 ballots entered, with each person ranking his or her top 20 running backs. The scoring system was simple: 20 points for a 1st place vote, 19 for a 2nd place vote, and so on. As it turns out, the race for the top spot was heated, with three players running away from the pack.

This chart is sortable by total points, points per ballot (using 41 as the denominator), GOAT votes, top 5 votes, and top 10 votes. In the interest of statistical significance, a player needed to appear on at least five ballots in order to be ranked in the table below.

I’m not sure if the results here are surprising, but it is interesting how close the race at the top truly was. Jim Brown, Barry Sanders, and Walter Payton made basically every top 5 list, while no other back made that cut-off on even half of the ballots.

The next tier is probably 7 deep, giving us something of a consensus for the top ten running backs in history. I’m not surprised that Emmitt Smith, Eric Dickerson, LaDainian Tomlinson, and Marshall Faulk were four of the next five players, but I was a bit surprised that O.J. Simpson was in there, too. Given his post-playing career, you never quite know how he’ll do in these rankings, but he settled nicely into the tier following the Big Three.

A bit behind those five but ahead of the rest are Earl Campbell and Adrian Peterson. Both are in unique positions: Campbell has a pair of obvious black marks (short prime, receiving), while Peterson is both an active player and one coming off an ugly season off-the-field.

Let’s close with a table displaying the full distribution of votes, including the running backs who weren’t ranked on the previous list. Note that by default, only the top 20 running backs are shown, but you can change that number using the dropdown arrow on the left.

Some other notes:

Bo Jackson was your high variance back. He was named on just 9 ballots, but on those nine, he averaged an incredible 13.3 points.

Gale Sayers was the 20th choice on five ballots, almost like a “I don’t want to leave him off but don’t quite know where to rank him.” The Bears great did averaged 8.2 points/ballot on the 27 ballots on which he was named.

Curtis Martin, Terrell Davis, and Edgerrin James made 74 ballots, but totaled just 9 top-ten votes among them. Jerome Bettis and John Riggins each made just 13 ballots, and ranked no higher than 11th on any of them.

Thurman Thomas and Tony Dorsett came in at #11 and #12, but they feel like they belong in a different tier than the backs in the top ten. Neither Thomas nor Dorsett ranked in the top six in any ballot.

I’ll leave the rest of the discussion to you guys. And thanks again to Adam for doing the hard work.