Jamal Charles

A good piece on Charles. Since I can't stand how the Niners play, I've taken to watching the Chiefs and Alex Smith play the last couple years. So I've watched Charles play a lot. If you hear Charles speak, he does not come across as smart. In fact, he sounds outright dumb and borderline unintelligible at times. Which is strange because if you watch him play, he is one of the most intelligent running backs I've ever seen run.

This seems small, but he almost always knows when to go out of bounds and when to stay inbounds. So many players and coaches mismanage the clock in football games. How many times have you seen a player try to get four extra yards when there is under a minute to play and the team needs the valuable time and timeouts to get a final score? Or the opposite, when a guy goes out of bounds to avoid a hit when his team is running out the clock? Both happens all the time. I've noticed Charles always make the right decision.

Also, Charles does an incredible job with spacial awareness -- spotting holes that split second before everyone else and uses his speed to get through them. In contrast, watch a back like Trent Richardson run -- or even Knile Davis on the same team -- they almost never see the same holes Charles sees. For a smaller back, he goes between the tackles quite a bit, and effectively.

There was a run last week where Charles broke through into the secondary and then decided to move almost completely laterally. The move ended up doing nothing, because he got tackled, however it was an incredibly intelligent thing to do that you almost never see a running back do because he knew the space had run out and he tried to create more for himself by moving sideways. He is going to do something like that again and it'll end up being a touchdown.

Also, he doesn't not take punishing hits for a running back. Smart players know when they are going to take a hit and try and avoid it. This is probably the number one reason Charles, over other RBs his size and speed, is so successful.

Last week, Charles had a fumble, blamed himself on the play and immediately said, next time, I'm just going down. In contrast to a player like Kaepernick who lies and bumbles about the mistakes he makes during games (dumb penalties - he lies, misreading coverages - he says he'd do the same thing over again). To me, this is a sign of deep intelligence and understanding of the game, when you make a mistake, you b) immediately know it is a mistake and b) own up to it. Note: owning up to it is also a sign of character, but intelligence and character are not mutually exclusive and may even reinforce one another.

At any rate, the article talks a little bit about his learning disability, which explains somewhat how he comes across in interviews - slow. But if anything, I would say that reveals a bias in my estimation of a person's intellect, because it is obvious to me Charles is among the smarter offensive minds in the league. There is a reason he is the all time leader in yards per run at 5.5. At the end of his career, we might be making an argument for his as one of the best runners of all time.