Aaron Jones has historic place in his sights in 2022

GREEN BAY – Aaron Jones doesn’t have all the numbers nailed down, but he’s aware he’s putting himself in a special place in team history.

“Am I in the top five?” he asked when questioned if he knows where he ranks on the franchise’s all-time rushing list. The follow-up was how high he could rise this year. “I have a chance to be, what is it? (Number) three? Two?”

So here’s the lowdown. Jones, the Packers’ star running back entering his sixth NFL season, already ranks fifth in rushing yards with 4,163, and third is reasonably within reach in 2022, less than 900 yards away.

To be fifth in just five years is noteworthy enough. He’s ahead of Dorsey Levens (7th/3,937), who played eight seasons and carried the ball almost 200 times more than Jones has. He’s also ahead of Hall of Famers Clarke Hinkle (8th/3,860) and Paul Hornung (10th/3,711), who played 10 and nine seasons with the Packers, respectively. He leapfrogged those three Green Bay greats among the seven he buzzed by on the list last year.

But now Jones, whose career average of 5.1 yards per carry is tops among all the team leaders by a healthy margin, is also just 35 yards away from surpassing another Hall of Famer, Tony Canadeo (4th, 4,197), and 862 yards from jumping in front of John Brockington (5,024), all the way into third place.

Asked if he’s surprised at all to reach such historic heights so soon, the humble yet ever-confident Jones said “yes and no,” because he’s always expected success from himself while understanding just how much of a past this franchise possesses.

“That means a lot,” he said of both his current and potential ranking. “There’s been a lot of great running backs to come through here in Green Bay. We’ve been around for over 100 years and to leave my mark in history and hopefully to keep climbing that is huge.”

First or second place is for further down the road, with Ahman Green and Jim Taylor more than 4,000 yards away at this point. But the 862 to get to third would be in line with the 799 Jones racked up last year in sharing the rushing duties with backfield mate AJ Dillon.

Any statistics will be difficult to predict, though. While Jones and Dillon are both coming off seasons in which they each surpassed 1,100 combined rushing and receiving yards – just the second backfield duo in team history to accomplish that, joining Brockington and MacArthur Lane in 1972 – how the production gets divvied up this year is anyone’s guess.

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