Emmitt Smith remembers Super Bowl 30
Emmitt Smith spent the final two seasons of a 15-year NFL career with the Arizona Cardinals, long after he’d become the league’s all-time rushing yards leader (a record he still owns) and long after his three Super Bowl appearances as a Dallas Cowboys legend.
But the Phoenix area and his short time with the Cardinals still mean a lot to him. It’s where his youngest daughter was born, and it’s where he had younger teammates like Larry Fitzgerald and Anquan Boldin and Adrian Wilson, players who laid the foundation for the team’s first Super Bowl appearance at the end of the 2008 season.
Smith has been in town for Super Bowl week, doing interviews on behalf of the product he’s representing, Bounty brand paper towels.
From his first visit to the area in 1988, when as a college player he got to stay at the Arizona Biltmore resort and play golf for the first time, Smith took a liking to the city. The Florida native saw mountains for the very first time and was wowed by the green golf courses.
With the Cardinals in the NFC East back in his playing days, Smith got to play in Arizona every year.
“I’d been coming every year for 12, 13 years with the Dallas Cowboys. And so when the opportunity came, I was like yeah, why not? came over here and moved the family out. Brought him,” Smith said, motioning to his nearby son E.J., who plays college football at Stanford. “We spent two great years here, a great experience with the Arizona Cardinals organization, Michael Bidwill and the Bidwill family were great to deal with and all of them treated me well.”
Part of those early trips to the desert was a bonus one in January 1996, when Smith and the Cowboys won Super Bowl 30 27-17 over the Pittsburgh Steelers at Sun Devil Stadium. Smith had two rushing touchdowns as Dallas won its third title in four seasons.
Smith hopped on team owner Jerry Jones’ personal bus with members of his entourage one night during Super Bowl week, and enjoyed some local nightlife.
Smith’s rushing record looks unbreakable. The way running backs are used in today’s NFL game, 18,355 yards seems impossible to top over a career. Plenty of running backs decline in effectiveness at or near 30 years old, and Smith played until he was 35. Plus, teams often deploy a two-headed (or more) system with a bellcow back and a pass-catching third-down back on offense.
The days of one single running back carrying the load on down after down appear over.
“The game has changed so much. They do have an extra game so it’s possible, but to see guys last for a whole entire season and get over 300 carries consistently for three or four or five years, I don’t know,” Smith said.
Smith is picking the Philadelphia Eagles to defeat the Kansas City Chiefs in Super Bowl 57, because he feels they are a well-balanced team that can do everything well. As for the Cardinals, he said it isn’t a “good thing” that the team has yet to name a head coach.
“I don’t know how the players feel about Kyler (Murray), I don’t know how the organization feels about Kyler, but I think he’s done well by the Cardinals in terms of his performance on the field and so forth,” Smith said, “and unfortunately got hurt this year.”