CMC Should Be the New Bettis

How fast RBs move on explosive runs since 2025

— @AcccountStat October 23, 2026

I laughed when I saw it. Then I sat with it, and I have to tell you the truth. The chart passes the eye test.

McCaffrey is still an excellent running back. He catches the ball at the level of a high-end NFL slot receiver, which means he is going to matter every single week no matter what the GPS says. But nobody who has watched this team all season can pretend the breakaway gear is still in the bag. His longest run of the year is 16 yards. Next Gen Stats had his top ball-carrier speed in 2025 at 17.3 miles per hour, the slowest of his career, and not one of his carries reached 20.² The speed that made him a home run threat is not coming through that door anymore.

What is still there, all of it, is the power and the will. And once you say that sentence out loud, a name walks into the room whether you invited him or not.

The pile

September 27, Arizona at Levi’s Stadium. The 49ers are up 29-27 with 2:03 left and the whole afternoon balanced on one first down. Second and 10 from their own 46, ball to McCaffrey up the middle, and the Cardinals stop him cold. Shanahan said afterward, “I thought he got stuffed for like four yards, so it’s a huge third-and-six, I’m thinking. But he kept his feet and we kept pushing the pile, which felt like almost the biggest play of the day.”³ The play should have died right there. Instead the entire mass of humanity slid down the field, 12 yards in all, to the Arizona 42. First down. The drive ended the way it had to, with George Kittle in the end zone a half minute later, and the 49ers held on, 36-30.

That is not a Christian McCaffrey highlight the way we used to mean it. No juke, no burst, no angle erased. A great player deciding a play will not end until he says so, and an offensive line voting with their shoulders.

I said it out loud watching it happen, before I had thought about it for even one second. CMC is the new Bettis.

The Bus in my head

I need to explain why that name was loaded and ready, because Jerome Bettis has been living in my football brain for two decades. I played fantasy football in the years when Bettis finished his career in Pittsburgh, and I rostered him two seasons in a row for one reason. All the man did was score touchdowns. Yards were somebody else’s department.

The line I carried around in my memory was three carries, three yards, three touchdowns. I checked. Memory undersold him. In the 2004 season opener against Oakland, Bettis carried the ball five times for a total of one yard and scored three touchdowns.⁴ One yard. Three scores. It might be the most honest stat line in the history of the position, a man announcing to the league exactly what his job was going to be from then on.

Bettis played good years for the Rams, the team that drafted him. He played his best football in Pittsburgh, for a franchise that understood everything he was and built a role out of it. He was the Bus. A gigantic, wide running back with immense power and just enough speed to make you pay for respecting the power. I loved watching him play.

Not apples to apples, and that is fine

Let me say the obvious part before the comments do. These are not the same body. Both men are listed at 5-11, and Bettis carried somewhere between 243 and 252 pounds on that frame depending on which bio you read. McCaffrey is listed at 210. Bettis ran over people as a first resort. McCaffrey has spent a decade winning with vision, burst, and hands.

The receiving gap alone should end the conversation if the conversation were about total skill. McCaffrey has 654 catches for 5,580 yards and 36 receiving touchdowns. Bettis caught 200 passes in his entire career. More than a quarter of McCaffrey’s touches are catches. Bettis was close to a pure carry back.⁵

So why does the comparison refuse to die for me? Because the argument was never that McCaffrey is the same player. The argument is that the job is converging. Watch where his touchdowns live now. All 17 of them in 2025 came in the red zone. This season, through six games, he has 11 carries inside the 5 and six touchdowns on them, and those 11 carries are 84.6 percent of the team’s inside-the-5 work. His touchdowns are coming from Bettis distances.⁵

And here is the mirror image I cannot get over. In 2005, Bettis took 28 carries inside the opponent’s 10-yard line and scored nine touchdowns. In 2025, McCaffrey took 37 carries inside the opponent’s 10 and scored nine rushing touchdowns.⁴⁵

Count the work in touches, because carries alone cheat a receiving back, and the picture everyone assumes falls apart in an interesting way. Entering this season, through nine years each, Bettis had 2,856 touches and 56 total touchdowns. McCaffrey had 2,284 touches and 98 total touchdowns. McCaffrey carried less of the load and scored nearly double. His career total of 105 touchdowns has already passed Bettis’s career total of 94, and Bettis is in the Hall of Fame.⁴⁵

The workload gap is real and the touches math only narrows it. It does not close it. Bettis still did more of the grinding. What the math does prove is that McCaffrey arrives at this exact career moment having been used hard enough to need a new shape. And he has earned the right to a role Kyle Shanahan designs just for him.

What Bettis figured out

The part of the story that matters is not the decline. It is the deal Bettis made with it.

After the 2004 season he was ready to retire. Bill Cowher and Ben Roethlisberger talked him out of it with a specific picture. Come back for one more year. Willie Parker, the undrafted kid with the real speed, takes the bulk of the carries. You become the finisher. Bettis said later that at the 12th hour he was convinced to give it one more shot, and that he was glad he did.⁶

The 2005 split, in full. Parker carried 255 times for 1,202 yards and scored four rushing touchdowns. Bettis carried 110 times for 368 yards and scored nine. Parker took 70 percent of the pair’s carries. Bettis took 80 percent of the pair’s carries inside the 10. The yards went to the young man. The touchdowns went to the old war horse.⁴

Cowher’s words for it, from Steelers.com, are the cleanest job description a closer ever got. “He was our finisher, our closer. It was a role not only he embraced, but our team embraced.”⁷ Hrmmm, does that sound familiar?

It ended in Detroit, Bettis’s hometown, on the Super Bowl podium. Parker set a Super Bowl record that afternoon that still stands, a 75-yard touchdown run, the longest run from scrimmage in Super Bowl history.⁸⁹ Bettis’s line was 14 carries for 43 yards and no touchdowns, and it did not matter at all, because the reduced role had bought him the only thing the workhorse years never did. He announced his retirement holding the trophy. “I played this game to win a championship,” he said. “I’m a champion.”¹⁰

The ask

So here is what I am actually proposing, because this is a proposal, not an obituary.

Kaelon Black should be the primary-down halfback. First and second down, between the 20s, the carries that accumulate bruises without deciding anything, that is the rookie’s job. Let him absorb the primary-down abuse. McCaffrey keeps third down, where his receiving turns him into the most dangerous conversion back in football. McCaffrey keeps crunch time, the four-minute offense, the pile that has to move in Arizona with 2:03 left. And Kyle Shanahan’s wizardry will no doubt find ways for both Black and CMC to be on the field at the same time. But on the goal line, in goal-to-go from the 2-yard line or closer, the ball belongs to McCaffrey almost exclusively. Full stop.

Bettis got the leftovers of a game. This version of McCaffrey gets the leverage of it. That is why I believe he would be a better and more effective player in this role than Bettis was in his, because Bettis surrendered the moments and McCaffrey would be keeping every single one of them.

I know the objection, because McCaffrey has made it himself. In May he said, “You don’t tell the 3-point shooter you only get six 3s today,” and said game days are for doing whatever it takes to win.¹⁵ He is right about his own makeup, and so is the other thing he said, more recently, in September. “Our goal’s to win. Our goal’s to win the Super Bowl.”¹⁴ Those two quotes are the whole tension, and the second one has to win. The team is already walking this direction without announcing it. His touches are down from 24.3 a game last year to 17.5. His snap share is down from 83 percent to 72.⁵ The management plan exists. What does not exist yet is the identity that goes with it, the public understanding that the trimmed role is not a fading star being protected. It is the best finisher in football being aimed.

There are times this offense needs more speed to stay balanced, and McCaffrey has to accept those snaps going somewhere else. But in gotta-have-it time, it is CMC all the way. That has to be the deal, stated plainly, the way Cowher stated it.

The Parker problem

A proposal is only as good as its other half, and here is where I have to be honest with you, because the “Fast” Willie Parker half of this has not happened yet.

It started like it was supposed to. In the opener in Melbin, Black carried 14 times to McCaffrey’s 10, the biggest share any back not named McCaffrey has taken since McCaffrey arrived in 2022. The staff clearly meant it.¹¹ Since then the share has slid, 45 carries for the season at 3.8 a carry, and his longest run of the year is 14 yards. One run of 12 yards or more in six games. Parker took his job with a 161-yard afternoon the first time he started. Black has not had his afternoon yet.

My read on Black is that he is close, genuinely close, and that what he is missing is the one thing only snaps can teach. His issue is vision, the half-second of patience while a run develops, and a rookie does not learn that holding a clipboard. His preseason pointed the same direction. Twelve carries, 61 yards, nothing longer than 14, but the traits flashed, and offensive coordinator Klay Kubiak said after his debut, “I loved how he ran. He really brought kind of a spark to our offense.”¹²

The film guys saw the shape of it before most of us did. A shout-out here to Jonny Del’s Football Academy, where the preseason film work on this roster has been as good as it gets, and to the Gold Standard network, where Del’s Thursday film breakdowns with Rob “Stats” Guerrera are appointment viewing for anyone who wants to understand what they are watching.¹⁷ Spend August with that film and you can watch Black learning the hardest lesson a young back learns, letting the run develop instead of forcing it, the lesson Bobby Turner builds his room on. JP Mason ran as hard as any back in football, and he was still traded last spring. The learning curve here is not steep. The kid is a third-round pick who followed Curt Cignetti from James Madison to a national championship at Indiana, and his composite athletic score coming out of school sat around the 91st percentile of every running back tested since 1987.¹³ The speed the chart says McCaffrey has lost is sitting right there in the same backfield. It just has not broken a run yet.

Hopes for January

I will tell you exactly what this looks like if it works, because I have been running the picture since that pile moved in Arizona.

It is a playoff game. Black’s line reads 20 carries for 80 yards, no touchdowns, and nobody cares, because those 80 yards are the reason the closer is fresh in the fourth quarter. McCaffrey’s line reads 15 carries for 50 yards and two rushing touchdowns, five catches for 60 yards and another score. Twenty touches. A hundred and ten yards. Three touchdowns, every one of them in a moment that decided the game.

Put that next to the real thing. Bettis, Super Bowl XL, 14 carries for 43 yards and no touchdowns.⁹ My McCaffrey beats the Bus’s own finale at his own job, because this McCaffrey never gave back third down or the passing game. He is not a smaller version of himself. He is a bigger version of Bettis.

The Bus’s last stop was Detroit, and it ended with a championship. There is a new Bus on this roster whenever the 49ers decide to build the route. Build it now, while it is still a choice, while the man volunteering for the goal line is still the best player on the field.

The chart says he got slow. Fine. Let him be slow at the only speeds that matter in February. Three yards at a time, straight ahead, into the end zone.

Sources (17)

1. The speed chart (@AcccountStat on X): running back top speed on explosive runs of 12 or more yards since 2025, data credited to SumerSports. The chart is described by its own label; its methodology is not independently verified. ↩
2. Has Christian McCaffrey lost a step? (Niners Nation): Next Gen Stats figures for McCaffrey’s 2025 season. A 17.3 mph top ball-carrier speed, the slowest of his career, and no carry reaching 20 mph. ↩
3. 49ers 36, Cardinals 30: 4 observations (Cards Wire): Shanahan’s postgame account of the 12-yard pile run, quoted verbatim. The official line is in the Pro Football Reference box score, Arizona at San Francisco, September 27, 2026. ↩
4. Jerome Bettis (Pro Football Reference): season and career tables and splits, including the 2004 opener against Oakland, the 2005 red-zone and inside-the-10 splits, and the career touchdown totals. Pro Football Reference lists Bettis at 252 pounds; his Hall of Fame bio lists 243, so the column prints the range. ↩
5. Christian McCaffrey (Pro Football Reference): season and career tables and splits, including the 2025 red-zone and inside-the-10 splits, the 2026 red-zone rushing table and snap shares through Week 6, and the career touchdown totals. ↩
6. Bus’ last stop (Associated Press, via the Vindy archives): Bettis talked out of retiring after 2004 by Cowher and Roethlisberger, with the finisher role behind Willie Parker as the pitch. ↩
7. Cowher on Bettis, “He was special” (Steelers.com): “He was our finisher, our closer. It was a role not only he embraced, but our team embraced.” ↩
8. The longest plays in Super Bowl history (The Analyst): Parker’s 75-yard run in Super Bowl XL remains the longest run from scrimmage in Super Bowl history. ↩
9. Super Bowl XL box score (Pro Football Reference): Pittsburgh 21, Seattle 10, February 5, 2006. Parker 10 carries for 93 yards and the record touchdown; Bettis 14 carries for 43 yards. ↩
10. A storybook ending (Steelers.com): Bettis’s retirement on the podium in Detroit. “I played this game to win a championship. I am a champion.” ↩
11. 5 Things to Know: Running Back Kaelon Black (49ers.com): Black’s background, the third-round pick out of Indiana by way of James Madison, and Shanahan’s “second-rated back on the board” from The Rich Eisen Show. Game-by-game usage is from the official 49ers and ESPN game logs. ↩
12. 49ers coach can’t stop raving about rookie Kaelon Black (SI): Klay Kubiak on Black’s preseason debut against the Chargers. ↩
13. Kaelon Black picked 90th in the 2026 NFL Draft (Indianapolis Star): Black’s Relative Athletic Score of 9.14, ranked 199th of 2,305 running backs tested since 1987, about the 91st percentile composite. ↩
14. Christian McCaffrey opens up about 49ers’ new backfield plan (49ers Webzone): September 23, 2026. “Keeping defenses on their toes,” and “Our goal’s to win the Super Bowl.” ↩
15. Christian McCaffrey: Workload is an issue for practice, not games (NBC Sports): May 28, 2026. The 3-point shooter line, verbatim. ↩
16. 49ers trade for RB Brian Robinson Jr. (49ers.com): the August 2025 trade with Washington. Robinson was San Francisco’s No. 2 back in 2025 (92 carries) and is Atlanta’s goal-line closer in 2026, per Pro Football Reference. ↩
17. Jonny Del’s Football Academy and the Gold Standard 49ers Podcast Network (YouTube): Del is credited for his preseason film work and the Thursday film breakdowns with Rob “Stats” Guerrera. No segment is quoted in this column. Links to shows, outlets and creators mentioned here go to their own pages, the house pattern for this column. ↩