The 2020 NFL Draft has yielded a talented running back class, including a star Pro-Bowler in Jonathan Taylor as well as reliable, productive starters such as Antonio Gibson and James Robinson. None of these talented players were drafted in the first round though, and Robinson was undrafted. Only one running back was selected in the first round in 2020: Clyde Edwards-Helaire, who was made the 32nd pick of the draft by the Kansas City Chiefs. While Edwards-Helaire has shown glimpses of the talent that earned him that draft selection, he has largely disappointed and has rushed for more than 500 fewer rushing yards in his first two seasons than the afore-mentioned trio of runners.
However, I believe that 2022 is Edwards-Helaire’s season to shine. Edwards-Helaire is a highly talented player, and there is good reason to judge that health may finally be on his side heading into 2022, contrary to the last two seasons. He was having a promising rookie season in 2020 before hip and ankle injuries suffered in a Week 15 game against the Saints cost him the rest of the regular season and affected his play in the playoffs. Furthermore, Edwards-Helaire recently revealed on the Arrowhead Addict podcast that in March of 2021, shortly after the Chiefs’ loss in the Super Bowl to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, he had gall bladder surgery, which caused the rest of the offseason to be quite turbulent for the young player. The procedure resulted in Edwards-Helaire losing about 45 pounds, dropping to 160 pounds from his listed playing weight of 205. He says he did not touch a football between the surgery and the start of OTAs, and spent the rest of the offseason dealing with stitches and recovery, working to get back into playing shape. With this knowledge, Edwards-Helaire’s disappointing 2021 season in which he struggled to shine on the field and dealt with more injuries which limited him to just ten games and 517 rushing yards on the season (down from 803 in 2020) makes a lot more sense considering the context of his difficult preceding off-season. Flash forward a year later, and Edwards-Helaire is finally fully healthy and benefiting from his first full training regimen in an NFL off-season. Unless the injury bug once again unluckily strikes him, he will benefit from good health on the playing field in 2022.
As a prospect, I loved Edwards-Helaire and made him my top-ranked running back in the 2020 NFL Draft. He is a savvy runner with good burst and contact balance to excel between the tackles. He’s also a capable receiver with some real route-running abilities. The bottom line is that these past two seasons have not deterred me from my initial opinion on Edwards-Helaire’s abilities to achieve success in the NFL, and I doubt they have for Head Coach Andy Reid and the Chiefs’ offensive coaching staff either. When the Chiefs selected Edwards-Helaire with their first pick in 2020, Reid declared that Edwards-Helaire was better on film than Brian Westbrook, who earned two Pro-Bowl selections in Reid’s time as the head coach for the Philadelphia Eagles. By endorsing his selection as the first running back off the board as high as the 32nd pick, I truly believe that Reid meant that statement, and that kind of impression from college tape does not wear off after two injury-affected seasons in the NFL. Reid knows that patience is a virtue since Westbrook did not hit the 1,000-yard rushing mark in a season until his fifth year in the NFL.
Edwards-Helaire faces some competition in the Chiefs’ backfield, including the addition of Ronald Jones and the recent emergence of Jerick McKinnon, but Edwards-Helaire is the most talented of the bunch and additionally faces an uptick in opportunity after the departure of star wide receiver Tyreek Hill, which may require the Chiefs to rely more on the ground game than in recent years and may pave the way for Edwards-Helaire to showcase his receiving skillset to a greater extent in his third year. From finally reaching full health to benefiting from a full off-season of training to an increased workload in 2022, the talented running back Edwards-Helaire is primed for a massive season that I believe could see him eclipse 1500 all-purpose yards and prove his worth as a first-round draft pick.
