A Tennessee Vols running back competition between two players helped develop a famous move that took over the NFL
One of the most famous “moves” in NFL history was created during a Tennessee Volunteers running back competition between a couple of VFLs nearly two decades ago on Rocky Top.
For the first half of the 2010s, former Tennessee Vols running back Arian Foster carried my fantasy football team.
I’m not a huge fantasy football guy. I’ve been in just one league — the same local dynasty league — since 2006. When I landed Foster off the waiver wire in late 2009, I thought I was just picking up a former Vol who would be dropped in a few weeks (I’ve had nearly every former Vol rostered at some point, and I’ve only won the league once in 20 years, so maybe that’s not a great strategy). Foster, though, proved to be my MVP for nearly half a decade.
The former Tennessee running back may never have been in that position if not for a running back competition with teammate Montario Hardesty that helped develop Foster’s famous “dead leg” move.
Arian Foster explains how competition with Montario Hardesty made him a better player
This week on the Macrodosing pod, Foster explained how a running back competition with Hardesty at Tennessee helped him take his game to the next level.
“My redshirt freshman year (2005), I actually was behind Montario Hardesty,” said Foster. “The Ole Miss game came, and Trooper Taylor, our running backs coach — Gerald Riggs was the starter at the time — he calls for Montario [to go into the game]. And I’m right there by Troop, and [Hardesty] doesn’t hear him. To this day, I’ve actually never asked him where he was. [Trooper] puts me in and I do pretty well. And then I come back out, and Montario comes in. A little later on, I think he tears his ACL. And from there, I took my game to the next level, and we kind of traded carries here and there.
“But that kind of changed the trajectory of my career. What developed me the most as a player was that competition. I was a film junkie, so I used to sit in the film room and just over consume that stuff. I watched all of (Hardesty’s) practice reps, every single one of his practice reps. I was like, ‘What is it that he’s doing that I’m not doing that the coaches love about him so much?’ He was disgusting at getting upfield. I had a tendency when I first got to college — because I was so much faster than everybody in high school, I would just beat everybody to the edge. In college, guys are a lot faster, and so they cut off that angle. So they coach you to get upfield. And so we didn’t have anybody on the roster previously, or to that point, that got upfield the way that (Hardesty) did. He was explosive as s–t. One of the most explosive people I’ve ever seen get up the field.”
“So when that clicked, I implemented that into my game during the offseason,” continued Foster. “I got upfield, I exploded. That’s part of the reason why I developed the dead leg, which helped me so much in the NFL. I’ve told Montario that for years afterwards. I was like, ‘Dog, you spearheaded my career because you were so good at it that I had to study why the coaches loved you so much.’ But it was that competition. I saw something he was better than me at, and I took it upon myself as a challenge to get better at that s—t, so that I could develop more of my game — so that the coaches would put me on the field.”
Foster’s comments are a great reminder to young athletes that they should embrace competition. No one gets better by getting handed a job as a teenager — you get better by earning it.