Totally in-depth study: Who has a longer prime — running backs in the NFL or actresses in Hollywood?

This may seem like a callous question, but it’s one that sadly demands to be asked.

On the one hand, you have NFL running backs, becoming more and more dispensable as the league moves further and further away from the running game and towards an all-aerial attack.

On the other hand, you have female actresses in Hollywood. It’s here that progress is being made, thanks in part to pioneers like Emma Watson in front of the screen, Shonda Rhimes behind the screen, and Alison Bechdel as the Queen of the Keyboard. However, we still have to deal with the fact that when you Google, “List of actresses’ roles” the top result is an IMDB list of “hottest actresses that have played lesbian roles.”

Both running backs and actresses have limited primes, as well.

For running backs, there are only 30 starting spots in the entire league, and teams are beginning to cycle through running backs quicker and quicker, preferring to save money at the position instead of hang on to a running back past his “prime.”

For actresses, their “primes” are a little harder to define. However, there is one thing every actress can be guaranteed of: being forced to play an attractive teenager at an age that makes it really creepy to be sexualizing said teenager, and being forced to play a mother very soon after that. The time between “sexualized teen” and “mother” can be considered an actresses’ prime, and will be for this not-so-highly-scientific study.

Now I realize that calling the role of a mother in a movie the end of an actresses’ prime is troublesome for a couple reasons. First of all, in a vacuum, there’s quite possibly no role that an actress would rather play than a mother. For actors, it’s an honor to play a great father in a movie, but it’s the way in which actresses are shoe-horned into those roles so much faster and so much more frequently that makes it an issue. There’s also the fact that actresses are hardly locked into “mother roles” after they make one such movie, and saying that they are would be taking a lot of autonomy from actresses who decide to take a role as a mother simply as part of their strong resumes of roles played.

But the fact remains, both running backs and actresses have their primes cut down by outside forces over which they don’t have much control. (While there are more and more women getting into movie production, the numbers are still incredibly skewed. Sadly, no running backs are owners of NFL teams just yet.)

So the question becomes who is able to stretch out their prime longer?

Methodology: At first blush, this would seem to be comparing apples to oranges. However, that’s not really the case.

For running backs, I defined their prime as the stretch of time from a player’s first 1600-yard season (an average of 100 yards a game for all 16 games) until their last. That’s a high number, but again, we’re talking a player’s prime. No active players were included since Adrian Peterson is a cyborg who will likely run for 1600 yards every season for the next 20 years, so who knows when his final 1600-yard season will be? The NFL-Reference Play Index was essential for this study, and only players from 1990 to the present time were used.

For actresses, I used good ole IMDB to kind of randomly choose four actresses and found their first teen role and their first mother role, and used that stretch to define their prime.

Like I said, it’s not perfect, but the comparison actually holds up rather well.

The Long-timers

LaDainian Tomlinson (5 years) and Scarlett Johansson (7 years)

Tomlinson is the lone (non-active) running back with three 1600-yard seasons from 1990–2016. Tomlinson had those three seasons over the five-season stretch from 2002–2006, giving him the longest prime of all NFL running backs of the past 26 years.

ScoJo made it a hair longer, though. Her first teen role was The Horse Whisperer in 2010, and it took her seven years to take the mom jump, first doing so in The Island, and even then, her child was more of a subplot than part of her main role in the movie.

These are the two that give us hope. It only goes down from here.

It happens to the best of em

Barry Sanders and Emmitt Smith (4 years) and Jennifer Lawrence (5 years)

Sanders and Smith are two of the most famous running backs of all-time, so maybe I made the parameters a bit high with 1600 yard seasons, but there were 20 different players from 1990–2016 to qualify, including the majestic Deuce McAllister. If McAllister can get there, I don’t think it’s too high of a number.

As for J-Law, it didn’t take Hollywood long to not only get Lawrence “movie pregnant,” but then make her character go through a miscarriage leaving her barren, robbing Lawrence’s character of even the chance to fully mother throughout an entire movie. They get you coming and going.

Late bloomers

Tiki Barber, Larry Johnson, Shaun Alexander and Terrell Davis (2 years) and Amy Poehler (3 years)

The above quartet of RBs all managed at least two seasons of 1600 yards, and all did so in back-to-back seasons. The case for many of these running backs was that they simply took to their roles at a later age than normal. Barber actually had his two 1600-yard seasons in his final two years in the league, choosing to retire on top. Alexander didn’t reach 1600 until his fifth and sixth seasons, while Johnson did so in his third season, but as an old 25 and 26. Davis had the sharpest decline, only playing in a combined 17 more games and running for less than 1200 yards in the three years after his back-to-back 1600-yard seasons.

As for Amy Poehler, her “teenage” role in Wet Hot American Summer was intentionally comedic, as was her “mother” role in Mean Girls, but the fact remains they were just three years apart, and in Mean Girls she supposedly had a child the age she was in a movie just three years prior. (The funniest inappropriately age mother I came across researching this was Angelina Jolie playing Colin Farrell’s mother in Alexander, despite being just a single year older than Farrell.)

Nothing gold can stay

Jermone Harrison (1 game) and Mary-Kate Olsen (1 twin sister)

Well, neither of these are really “primes” as we’ve defined them, but they go to show their extreme volatility of each of these professions. Jerome Harrison currently has the third-most rushing yards ever in a single game. Harrison ran for 286 yards for the Cleveland Browns on December 20, 2009. He finished the season with a mere 862 yards, and his entire career barely saw him get over the magical 1600-yard barrier we have been using so far (1681 career rushing yards).

Mary-Kate Olsen needs no introduction, and is sadly one of innumerable actresses (and actors, to be fair) who burn out after being a child star. Olsen hasn’t been in a movie since 2011, and has only been in one movie since 2008.

If your thought by now is that the odds are stacked against these two careers, well…