NFL Top 100: Two rushers in top 10, neither is Ezekiel Elliott?

Two rushers made the NFL’s top 10 and Ezekiel Elliott isn’t one of them.

The Dallas Cowboys are on the precipice of an unprecedented season. On top of taking a quarterback into the season that will be playing on the franchise tag, something rare for any player and nonetheless a starting quarterback, the Cowboys will have to endure the coronavirus pandemic like every other team in the league.

While his team, teammates, and organization as a whole have their own issues to worry about, there’s something that is probably bothering Cowboys running back Ezekiel Elliott more than anything else. That would be all the recent criticism and amnesia surrounding his greatness.

Since he first set foot into the NFL, Zeke has not only been one of the best players on the Cowboys roster but one of the absolute best players in the entire NFL. People seem to forget that though when you think about the recent criticism and under appraisal of the star runner.

You remember what we are talking about right? That would be the NFL survey conducted by ESPN that eventually ranked Zeke as the third-best back, but included a comment from an unnamed NFL coach that said he wasn’t even a top 10 back. That would be blasphemy, by most definitions anyway.

Ezekiel Elliott seems to have been forgotten about. That’s the picture that preseason chatter seems to paint, at least.

Well, that all must be good and soaked into Elliott’s psyche by now, but there’s fresh salt for the wound, so to speak. With the new season on the cusp, the NFL has recently begun to drop their top 100 players heading into the new season.

They recently revealed the top 10 of that list and although following the list up until this point would have revealed the punchline here, there were two running backs in that group of the top 10. In case it isn’t abundantly clear by now, Zeke was not on that list.

While it is a tragedy that a coach allowed to work in the NFL doesn’t think that Elliott is a top 10 back, it is only a further disappointment that any rankings you would call official lists him anywhere below two, such as ESPN’s third-ranking. This one takes the cake here though.

If there is room for two running backs in the top 10 player ranking heading into the new year and there isn’t room for Ezekiel Elliott, the list isn’t credible. You can even meet halfway, where he may not be a top 10 guy, but that would inevitably mean that there shouldn’t be two backs in the top 10.

For a player as versatile as Zeke is, as productive as he has been, as durable as he has been, and with the offense for which he plays in, he should be a top 10 player if there is room for two running backs. So, again, how are there two rushers in the top 10  of the NFL rankings heading into this season and neither is Ezekiel Elliott?