Eddie George and the Tennessee Titans: The Running Back Who Never Sat Down
Eight seasons. 128 consecutive starts. Not one missed game. For a running back absorbing 300-plus carries a year in one of football’s most brutal divisions – Pittsburgh twice a season, Baltimore twice, Jacksonville twice – that number is harder to explain than the rushing yards.
Houston First, Then Tennessee – the Draft That Started It All
The Houston Oilers picked George 14th overall in the 1996 NFL Draft, though the selection almost went differently. Jerome Bettis had been linked to Houston before choosing a trade to Pittsburgh instead, which reshuffled the board and put George in play at that slot. He was the 1995 Heisman Trophy winner out of Ohio State, where he’d rushed for 1,927 yards and 24 touchdowns in his senior year – including 207 yards against Notre Dame in a 45-26 win. The Heisman vote that year was the closest in the award’s history at the time, with George edging Nebraska’s Tommie Frazier by 264 votes.
He won NFL Offensive Rookie of the Year in 1996, rushing for 1,368 yards. That was the beginning of seven 1,000-yard seasons in his eight years with the franchise.
What the Franchise Rushing Record Actually Means
George finished his time in Houston and Tennessee with 10,009 rushing yards, surpassing Earl Campbell’s franchise record of 8,574. Campbell is in Canton. When George broke that record, he was doing it against defenses that had specifically built their game plans around stopping him – because for most of his career, the offense wasn’t hiding what was coming.
His four Pro Bowl selections came in consecutive years: 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000. His best statistical season was 2000, when he rushed for 1,509 yards, scored 16 total touchdowns, and helped the Titans finish 13-3. The team went 30-6 in games where he hit 100 rushing yards. Thirty and six. That’s not a stat about one player – it’s a stat about what one player did to a team’s chances.
Among NFL running backs during his eight years in the league, only Curtis Martin accumulated more rushing yards (10,182 to George’s 10,009). Marshall Faulk had more yards from scrimmage. Everyone else was behind him. George, Eric Dickerson, and LaDainian Tomlinson are the only three backs in NFL history to rush for 1,200 or more yards in each of their first five seasons. Dickerson is in the Hall of Fame. Tomlinson is in the Hall of Fame.
128 Starts in a Row at Running Back
Only two running backs in NFL history have rushed for 10,000 yards without missing a start. Jim Brown is one. Eddie George is the other.
This tends to get underweighted in the Hall of Fame conversation, probably because durability doesn’t produce highlight clips. But consider what it actually required: 300 or more carries in each of eight consecutive seasons, a streak no other back in NFL history has matched. Running backs at that workload almost always miss time – hamstrings, knees, ankles, ribs. George played through whatever came up. He also played in a division where the Pittsburgh Steelers had a top-10 defense four separate times during his career, Baltimore three times, Jacksonville twice.
When the Titans had the ball and needed yards, they handed it to George. Everyone in the stadium knew it. A lot of those defenses were specifically designed to stop it. The yards came anyway.
The 1999 Season and Super Bowl XXXIV
The Titans went 13-3 that year and George was central to all of it. In three playoff games, he ran for 391 combined rushing and receiving yards. Against Indianapolis in the divisional round, he broke off a 68-yard run – still the longest in Titans postseason history – and finished with 162 rushing yards. In Super Bowl XXXIV against the St. Louis Rams, he scored two touchdowns, rushed for 95 yards, and caught two passes for 35 more.
The Titans lost 23-16, famously ending on Kevin Dyson being tackled at the one-yard line as time expired. George had done everything asked of him. The Rams that year had Kurt Warner throwing to Isaac Bruce and Torry Holt behind one of the most explosive offenses the league had seen. Tennessee still needed one more yard.
Steve McNair and George together – that pairing defined the franchise’s best stretch. McNair took the hits as a runner and a scrambler; George absorbed the carries as the primary back. The Titans made the playoffs four times in George’s eight seasons, including two AFC Championship Game appearances and the one Super Bowl run.
Where He Ranks – and Why the Hall of Fame Case Gets Complicated
George retired after a final season with the Dallas Cowboys in 2004 with 10,441 career rushing yards, ranking 16th all-time at the time. His yards-per-season average of 1,160 ranked eighth in NFL history at retirement – ahead of five running backs currently in the Hall of Fame.
He’s been a Pro Football Hall of Fame semifinalist twice, in 2022 and again in 2024. He has not been selected. The argument against him usually centers on yards per carry – his career average was modest, around 3.6, because he was asked to run between the tackles on almost every down regardless of situation. The argument that makes more sense to me: the volume was the assignment. He wasn’t asked to be Barry Sanders. He was asked to show up every week and move the chains in a division full of elite defenses, and he did it for eight straight years without flinching.
Among Heisman Trophy winners who went on to NFL careers, George ranks fifth all-time in rushing yards, behind Barry Sanders, Tony Dorsett, Marcus Allen, and O.J. Simpson. The fact that that sentence doesn’t automatically get him into Canton says more about the backlog of deserving candidates than it does about his career.
No. 27 Gets Retired – September 15, 2019
The Titans retired George’s number at halftime of the home opener against Indianapolis, the same game where they also retired Steve McNair’s No. 9. McNair died in Nashville in 2009. The ceremony honored both men together, which meant the crowd at Nissan Stadium was processing two things at once: celebrating what George built and mourning the absence of the man who built it alongside him.
George had announced the team’s second-round draft pick – wide receiver A.J. Brown – at the 2019 NFL Draft in Nashville a few months earlier, so his connection to the franchise hadn’t dimmed. His No. 27 is also retired at Ohio State, making him one of the few players in the country whose college and NFL numbers are both off the table.
After Football: MBA, Broadway, Coaching
George went back to Ohio State after retiring to finish his undergraduate degree in landscape architecture. Then he enrolled at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management and earned an MBA. He founded EDGE Group, a landscape architecture and design firm, and runs The Edward George Wealth Management Group. In 2016, he appeared on Broadway in Chicago as Billy Flynn – the role created by Jerry Orbach – for six weeks.
None of that is what most former NFL running backs do. Most don’t finish one degree, let alone two. Most don’t do Broadway. George seems to approach everything the way he approached the carry count: if the assignment is in front of you, you do it until it’s done.
In April 2021, Tennessee State hired him as head coach with no prior coaching experience at any level. He went 27-24 in four seasons, earned Big South-OVC Coach of the Year honors in 2024, and left for Bowling Green State in the Mid-American Conference in 2025. His son Eriq, who played defensive end at TSU under his father, followed him to Bowling Green. In October 2025, George’s Falcons came back from 21 points down in the second quarter to beat Toledo 28-23.
He’s one of five Heisman Trophy winners ever to become an FBS head coach, joining a list that includes Steve Spurrier. In October 2025 he also criticized the Titans organization publicly, telling The Tennessean he believed the franchise had been set back “at least a decade and maybe more” by recent decisions – a pointed comment from someone who still clearly cares about what happens in Nashville even 20 years after leaving.
The Titan Who Defined a Decade
The Titans haven’t been back to the Super Bowl since the 1999 season. They’ve had good teams, a few playoff runs, but nothing like that stretch between 1997 and 2003 when George was carrying the ball and McNair was getting the ball out of pressure and somehow making it work. That era produced the franchise’s only Super Bowl appearance, its only AFC Championship Game wins, and the only extended period where Tennessee football felt like it belonged among the league’s best.
George rushed for 10,009 yards in a Titans uniform. He never missed a start. His number is hanging from the rafters at Nissan Stadium. At 52, he’s coaching in Ohio, building something new, still drawing on whatever it was that let him take 2,733 carries without sitting down. The Hall of Fame voters will eventually have to decide whether those 10,009 yards and 128 consecutive starts are enough. Plenty of running backs already in Canton put up fewer yards with less durability.
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