Looking Back at Last Season: Sony Michel Had One of the Great Postseasons Ever by a RB

With Patriots training camp less than a week away and the 2019 title defense about to drop, it’s worth spending a little time in next few days taking some backwards looks at 2018. In that way that new season of a Netflix show will start with a “Previously on …” feature that you can skip if you want, but I rarely do. Because all too often I have goldfish memory on the B and C plots of a lot of things I haven’t watched in a year and a half or so.

But not when it comes to the Patriots. With a lot of people, especially in the local media, important things get forgotten, glossed over, taken for granted and, at times, flat out given the revisionist history treatment. And last year no one’s performance was underappreciated the way Sony Michel’s was. Virtually all of the football glitterati who were against the Patriots drafting him 31st overall to begin with dug in, built trenches, piled up sandbags and rolled out razor wire to defend their position, even while he was putting together one of the most remarkable postseason performances by a running back in NFL history.

Felger and Mazz are still calling it a wasted draft pick. I talked to Greg Bedard at minicamps and he’s still insisting Phillip Lindsay would’ve done better, and he went undrafted. And I’m still saying what I said then: If anyone could have done it, then everyone would do it. If the Vinklevii had invented Facebook, they would’ve invented Facebook, and all that. This is especially worth noting now, as we find out that Michel had never really recovered from his knee injury that cost him games early in the season, was toughing it out anyway and needed surgery right after the Super Bowl. (Though the reports are that he’s finally been running full speed in the last couple of weeks. So he’s got that going for him. Which is nice.)

So given that a maintenance crew had to spend another summer walking around Gillette Stadium with a tape measure, a level and some picture hooks to find out where they can fit yet another banner, it’s worth appreciating the only member of their rookie draft class who stayed healthy enough to make it a reality.

These were Sony Michel’s postseason numbers:

With a snap counts of 35, 34 and 27. So these average out on a per game basis to:

32 Snaps, 24 Attempts, 112 Yards, 4.73 YPA, 2 TDs

To put those numbers into perspective, here are the backs with the highest postseason Yards Per Game in league history:

Now before you go all “Now just hold yer wad, there fella. We’re only talking about three games,” allow me to elaborate. Of those top five – and again, these are the top five YPG rushing averages in the 99 year history of playoff football, their total number of postseason games are:

Terrell Davis: 8 games
Arian Foster: 4 games
Timmy Smith: 3 games
Michel: 3 games
John Riggins: 9 games

So there are no guys near the top of this list that blow Michel out of the water in terms of total playoff games. And to be fair, your guys with a ton of them, like for instance Thurman Thomas (21 playoff games, 68.6 YPG) and Emmitt Smith (17 games, 93.3), tend to see their averages drop with repeated postseason appearances. But still, the fact that in a very important metric, Michel ranks No. 4 overall in league history is worth recognizing.

The real outlier in terms of postseason running backs is obviously Davis. He earned that 142.5 YPG with seven of his eight games breaking 100 yards, including totals of 157, 167, 184 and 199. So it’s not like when you take the incomes of you, Jeff Bezos and the guy who begs for coins at Andrew Square exit and average them out, you’re all multi-billionaires. Davis set a standard that will never be touched. Which is how a guy with 78 career regular season games winds up in the Hall of Fame. But there was nothing we saw of Sony Michel last January and February to make me think he can’t move into second and stay there.

Consider Michel’s 6 TDs. Which made him one of only eight backs ever to do that in a postseason:

Again, Davis is the outlier. Though unlike all the others, he played in four games in 1997. As a matter of fact, Ricky Watters got his 6 TDs in only two games. But when your back is on this list, running among a wolf pack of Hall of Famers when it comes to finishing postseason drives, and he’s only 23, that’s something to be celebrated.

Just as importantly, he was consistent. Everybody falls in love with the big splash play, the home run that you see out of guys like Ezekiel Elliot, Todd Gurly or Joe Mixon. That’s not necessarily Michel’s game. (Though he did have 25 carries of 10+ yards, putting him 14th in the league.) He’s more of a guy who’ll turn no gain into 4 yards. Or 4 into 8. And move the pile like he did against the Chargers:

But he still managed to rip off the most important long run of the season, his 2 & 9 attempt in the Super Bowl from the Patriots 5 that went for 26 yards, jumpstarting the drive that ended with that he himself finished, for the only touchdown of the game:

Again, it’s his consistency. We all remember LeGarrette Blount’s huge playoff games against Indy. It’s harder to recall how he followed up his 166 Yard, 4 TD number in 2013 with 5 Carries for 6 Yards the following week at Denver. Or how his 148 Yards with 3 scores turned to 14 Attempts for 40 Yards in the Super Bowl win over Seattle. In a small sample size, Michel’s “worst” game was just shy of 100 yards and the only touchdown of a Super Bowl victory.

And as the league continues to go small and the Patriots have the very real possibility of facing no playoff teams with a 240+ lb. run-stuffing linebacker like last year, Sony Michel has a very good chance of adding to his already impressive career totals. Assuming his knee is back to what it was at Georgia, you’d have to be brain dead to bet against it. Or to think anyone could’ve done what he did in last year’s playoffs and he was a “wasted” pick. Or fail to appreciate how good he was. Because not many guys have ever done what he already has.