ProFootballFocus is in the midst of perpetuating one of the worst mistruths in the college football world — that former Wisconsin running back Ron Dayne is not the NCAA’s all-time leading rusher.
The service put out a graphic titled ‘college football all-time rushing leaders’ on Sunday. At No. 1: San Diego State’s Donnel Pumphrey with 6,405 yards. No. 2, as listed, is Dayne with 6,397 yards. Then comes Texas great Ricky Williams with 6,279 and Badger great Jonathan Taylor with 6,174.
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Wisconsin fans should be well aware of why PFF’s list — which is actually just an aggregation of the official NCAA rushing leaderboard — is contradictory. The NCAA includes Pumphrey’s bowl statistics in his 6,405 yards but omits Dayne’s. That is because the NCAA, for some reason, does not count bowl statistics before 2002.
So it ignores Dayne’s 728 rushing yards from bowl games, but includes Pumprey’s 328.
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— PFF College (@PFF_College) July 28, 2024
Simple logic would urge the NCAA to either include all bowl statistics, or include none. ProFootballFocus, instead, has shared one of the NCAA’s biggest ongoing mistakes.
If all rushing yards in every game played were considered, as they should be, here is what the NCAA’s all-time leaderboard would look like: