Thomas Jones Will Be Next Unemployed Veteran Back, Sources Confirm

According to Adam Schefter of ESPN, who reports via his twitter page, sources inside the Jets have confirmed that RB Thomas Jones will not restructure his contract, and as a result will be cut by the New York Jets.  

Jones is the third in a string of veteran running backs suddenly finding themselves unemployed as the market for an older running back dwindles. With so many out there, how many will actually find work next season? 

An even better question might be: What is a running back who ran for over 1,400 yards and 14 TDs last season doing looking for a job when he had a contract that ran through this year?  Is there really absolutely no value in a 30-plus-year-old running back at all any longer?

It's funny, last week a SportsCenter special aired, detailing the damage done to an athlete's body (specifically LaDainian Tomlinson's that day) over the course of an NFL career.  They likened it to being in...I think it was several hundred car crashes.  At any rate, I follow around 50 NFL athletes on Twitter, and the day that special showed the twitter accounts lit up, with athletes posting about how ridiculous that story was. 

The funny part is, their employers seem to buy into it.  Fred Taylor last season, LT, Brian Westbrook, and now Jones this season: It seems that no matter where you go the older veteran running back is like Rodney Dangerfield—they get no respect.

The emergence of running back Shonn Greene in last year's playoffs no doubt made this decision a great deal easier for Jets management.  Greene really made the playoffs his coming out party, putting up two games with over 120 yards on the ground, and rushing for 41 yards in the Conference Championship before going down with a rib injury. 

Greene looks like he'll be a solid back for the Jets for years to come (or at least until he's around 30 years old), so the question is, what happens to Thomas Jones now?

My initial instinct is to say that Jones will be alright.  For the past five consecutive seasons he's run for over 1,000 yards and hasn't slowed down a bit.  He's only missed one game over that time span and has been reliable year in, year out regardless of whether he was a member of the Chicago Bears or the New York Jets.

It would seem that as a nine-year veteran, Jones would fall into the same boat as LT (nine years) or Brian Westbrook (eight years), however, I would argue that's not the case.  

Westbrook has been injury prone and slightly delicate his entire career.  He has never once played a full 16-game season, and is a very different kind of back than Thomas Jones is.  

LT, on the other hand, is a similar back in terms of punishment, but his nine seasons were full workload seasons, nine seasons of 300-plus carries while Jones carried the ball on average 125 times per year his first four years (years spent in Arizona and Tampa Bay).

He missed a total of eight games those four years, and then in his first season in Chicago split carries again for a total of 240 on the year.  At the end of the day, nine years as Thomas Jones seems to be a very different thing from nine years for LT—or Westbrook.

In the end Jones has carried the ball almost 600 times (or two full years as a feature back) less than LT, and logically would carry less damage to his body which would leave one to believe he at least had about two years left on him.

My guess is that Thomas Jones is able to find another team fairly quickly.  He's not really the same as the other two in that he's shown no signs of being on his way out. While LT's production has dropped off consistently every year, Jones' production has remained steady. While Westbrook continues to battle injury after injury, Jones may not have had so much as a hangnail in recent memory.  

Jones will land on his feet, and I'm sure the Jets will be just fine as well.  What will make this news will be if the Patriots (division rivals) make a move after Jones in similar fashion to the move they made for Taylor last season.  It's well known that no one's really satisfied with Laurence Maroney's progress thus far. He has moments of brilliance, and then drops the ball in a big moment, on a big play.

A reliable athlete like Jones is just the sort of back a team like the Patriots might need to push them over the top.  At the same time, San Diego has basically let all of their running backs go, so taking a long look at Thomas Jones only makes sense.  Don't be surprised to see him with a bolt on his shoulder next fall.