The biggest question in Saturday’s NFL draft is this: Will USC’s Reggie Bush be the first player picked or won’t he? All the rest is column fodder designed to keep fans hooked to the internet for the latest rumors.

Bush is, as Paul Zimmerman describes him in this week’s Sports Illustrated, “the most explosive offensive performer in years.” If anything gave NFL teams cause for concern, it was Bush’s curiously muted performance in the biggest game of his career at the Rose Bowl against Texas. But then, much of that had to do with the failure of nerve on the part of USC coach Pete Carroll, who left Bush on the sidelines during key moments in the fourth quarter, thus depriving his team, Bush, and us from seeing how he might come through with all the marbles at stake.

No matter. Bush’s reputation shouldn’t be tainted for a play he wasn’t in on, and the 2004 and 2005 seasons, in which he amassed 4,665 total yards and 32 touchdowns in 26 games, proved beyond a doubt that he is the most talented and versatile running back in the nation – probably, as Notre Dame coach Charlie Weis suggested last year, since Marshall Faulk.

And If I were an NFL general manager, I wouldn’t use a no. 1 pick on him even if you threw in his backfield mate, LenDale White, with a healthy hamstring.

Reggie Bush is the latest manifestation of NFL coaches’ recurring dream that Super Bowls can be won by running backs. They can’t, or at least they haven’t, since the game got modern some 40-odd years ago. NFL-style football is a passer’s game and has been at least from the time Johnny Unitas emerged in the late 1950s as pro football’s first household name.

Some brief history: The hands-down greatest running back in the league at the time of Unitas’s ascendancy was Jim Brown, drafted sixth in the first round in 1957. Brown won a single championship ring with Cleveland in 1964, his next to last season. The greatest running back after Brown, by consensus, was the Chicago’s Gale Sayers, drafted no. 4 in the first round in 1965. Sayers played for seven years, but his team never won a championship. For several years in the early- and mid-1970s Howard Cosell and everyone else considered O.J. Simpson, a top overall pick, to be Sayers’s successor. O.J., great as he was, never took home a ring.

As the 70s stretched toward the 80s, the best was either Walter Payton (no. 4 pick in 1975) or Earl Campbell (no. 1 in 1978), depending on whom you ask. Payton and Campbell played 22 seasons between them with one championship ring to show, and that was for Payton’s 1985 season with the Bears, when Chicago had maybe the greatest team in modern NFL history and could have won with Don Knotts at tailback.

At Eric Dickerson’s peak (he played from 1983, when he was the second overall pick, to 1993), most would concede that he was the game’s best runner, though by Barry Sanders’s (no. 3 overall) rookie season in 1989, some called him the best since Jim Brown. Sanders may indeed may have been the best running back in NFL history, but by 1998, his last season, his Detroit Lions were 5-11, exactly one game better than they were the year before Sanders joined the team. Dickerson and Sanders played a combined 21 seasons in the NFL and neither ever won a Super Bowl.

Around this time, the collective wisdom of the years began to sink in, and NFL teams with the top overall pick became increasingly reluctant to use it on running backs. In 1995 Cincinnati took Penn State’s Ki-jana Carter with the first pick in the draft (Carter rushed for 1127 in parts of six seasons), but for the next seven seasons no running back went higher than fourth. From 2002 through 2004, no running back went higher than 16th in the first round. It seemed that sanity had overtaken the league. That is, until the Miami Dolphins used the second overall pick to take Ronnie Brown last year. The Dolphins won’t win with Brown – or at least they won’t win because of him – and neither will the Houston Texans if they make Bush the first choice on Saturday.

That’s what history says. Picking a running back high up in the draft isn’t quite as foolish as picking a wide receiver with your no. 1 ticket – from 1996 through last season, 45 wideouts have been first-round selections and only 11 have made the Pro Bowl – but it’s close. It’s not that college football is turning out running backs less talented than those of decades past. Quite the opposite. As late Giants GM George Young phrased it, “The reason running backs don’t have more of an impact on the game today is because they’re all so good. It’s hard for one to stand out.”

Actually, that’s been true for more than 30 years. From 1970 (when the AFL and NFL merged) through last season, the average run from scrimmage in the NFL netted a fraction over four yards. Last year, the league average per rush was 4.0 – which is exactly what the Super Bowl champion Steelers, a mediocre running team, averaged per try.

Running backs are highly susceptible to injury and have a notoriously short shelf life. Because it’s a relatively uncomplicated position to play, there are always a dozen younger men ready to step in and take over a veteran’s position when he loses a step or is forced out of a game, however briefly, with a minor hurt. Bush may indeed be the finest prospect at the position since Sanders, and with his ability as a receiver he may have more weapons to offer than Sanders.

But that doesn’t mean the laws of heaven, earth, and pro football are going to be suspended for Bush. His new pro team, whether it’s the Texans or whoever, will win if he averages the same phenomenal 8.7 yards per carry he did with the USC Trojans last season. But, of course, he won’t, largely because NFL defenses – all NFL defenses, even those on the worst teams – are much better matched to all NFL offenses than the defenses USC’s opponents were to the Trojans’ offensive talent. Bush will probably rush for considerably more than the league average of four yards, if only because his exceptional speed and acceleration will enable him to break a handful of long runs (probably in games in which his team is so far behind that most of the defense is downfield in a prevent formation).

But without a defense that keeps the score close enough to make a running back worthwhile (the Texans were dead last in points allowed last year) and without a passing attack that prevents the opposing defense from stacking the line against him (Houston had the third fewest passing yards in the league), Bush looks to be headed, at best, for the title of “the Barry Sanders of the New Century.”

Mr. Barra is the author, most recently, of “The Last Coach: A Life of Paul ‘Bear’ Bryant.”