Eddie Lacy: Now You See Him, Now You Don’t

One more post on Lacy and then I’ll give it a rest… until next week when he tops the highlight reel against the Dolphins.

I’ve written before about some of the things I love about Eddie Lacy, but something new stood out to me when watching the Packers take on the Vikings.

I’ve always admired the way Eddie can make one cut and get back north and south very quickly. What amazes me most about that is the fact that he is a really big running back. It’s not easy for a big running back to be that elusive.

Against the Vikings, Eddie showed that he can not only be a change of direction back, but he can also be a change of speed back. Here’s what I mean. Take a look at the video below. It isn’t a running play but watch what Eddie does when he gets in the open field. As three defenders converge on him, he drops it a gear and bursts through their trap.

Here are a couple of screenshots of that play. Notice in the first screenshot the three defenders really have Lacy boxed in. The reality of the situation is Eddie should be stopped around the 39 yard-line.

Now take a look at a second screenshot after Eddie turns on the jets. After lulling the defenders to sleep with a methodical run Eddie kicks it into high gear and leaves all of them in the dust, almost breaking it to the end zone. The last two defenders are fortunate to trip him up at the 34 yard-line, as he was really close to breaking free for another touchdown.

There’s all kinds of talking the league about the fact that teams need to have a change of pace back, but nobody talks about the benefit teams get from having a running back that can throw defenders timing off by changing his own pace.

The bottom line is that this is just plain fun to watch. It helps that it’s against a divisional opponent, and it’s even better that it’s against the Vikings. Still, I look forward to a lot more of this from Lacy as the season wears on.