Stop running back abuse! There's an abuse problem that plagues pro football. It's not steroids, gun crime, blow, cocktail waitresses and syphyllis or a Brett Favre-style speedball of Seagrams VO and Vicodin. No, it's the abuse of running backs. Teams have chewed up and spit out premier backs for two decades, using and abusing their best players and shortening countless careers in the process. Of course, players are enablers, party to the problem: they all want the ball, the touchdowns, the prestige and the hot groupie sex that comes with lugging the leather on every other play. If we had any emotions, we might even care. But the question remains: how how much abuse can one running back take? We started to wonder in the wake of the announcement earlier this week that the Chargers had cut LaDainian Tomlinson, the future Hall of Famer and franchise icon, at the ripe old age of 30. As we reported on Tuesday, he’s the most recent poster-mule of an overworked to the point of uselessness by an NFL team, as if he were nothing more than a Dust Bowl era plowhorse. LT was abused, in other words. Here’s what we found on the topic of abuse: the punishment a back can take depends largely on a player’s age. But there is a benchmark that seems to apply to everybody, and that benchmark is 400 touches (25 per game in the 16-game era). It’s not just the touches, of course, but the corresponding punishment that goes with attempting to negotiate a minefield of 11 large angry men and Ed Hochuli himself 400 times in a single autumn. We don't like getting hit 400 times in a pillow fight with pink panty-clad college girls, let alone getting hit 400 times by a guy with cannon balls for biceps. Here's what happens: A very, very young player (21 to 24) can exceed 400 touches once or twice early in his career, but the statistical chinks in the career soon appear. A player in his mid 20s – fourth or fifth year in the league – will certainly see his career or productivity cut short soon, if not immediately, by a single 400-touch season. And a player who exceeds 400 touches in his late 20s is all done. As noted earlier this week, the players remembererd most for going out on top, Jim Brown and Barry Sanders, got out at exactly the right time based upon the historic life cycle of a running back. And they got out after careers in which they actually were not abused like some of the other notable backs listed below. It's the biggest reason they they were productive to the very end. The effective end of a player’s career – no matter their age – is around 2,800 touches. It's a number that makes sense with the eye test: a premier back who averages 300 touches a season will obviously cross the 2,800 mark in his 10th season. After that, the old gray mules are just plodding along uselessly. Twenty-five players have touched the ball 400 or more times a single season. Nine players had multiple 400-touch seasons, led by Emmitt Smith and Eric Dickerson, with four each. In total, there have been 42 400-touch seasons. Almost all of them led to disaster. But we then compiled the list of most touches in a single season. Then we looked at the top 10 players on the list, the players who toted the ball more in a season than others in history. It turns out all suffered the obvious symptoms of running back abuse. Here's the list and the brutal tales of punishment, woe and careers cut short. 1. James Wilder (492 touches in 1984) The former Buccaneers star is easily the most abused player in history. In 1984, Tampa fed him the ball a record 492 times. Nobody’s come close to that number of touches in a single season. He ran the ball 407 times and caught 85 passes. Quite a season. But talk about a beating. Hell, he averaged just 3.8 YPA on the ground, too, so you wonder why the team felt the need to beat him so badly for that kind of below-average rushing production. The Bucs weren’t done with him yet, either: he ran the ball 365 times in 1985, and caught 53 passes – that’s 418 touches. That’s an abusive 910 touches from scrimmage in two seasons – easily the most by any player in a two-year span. His production had declined noticeably from one year to the next, too: Wilder averaged 3.8 yards per rush and 8.1 yards per reception in his brutal 1984 seasoon; he averaged just 3.6 YPA and 6.4 yards per reception in the nearly as brutal 1985 season. Wilder’s effective career was over after that two-year pounding. He lingered on with the Bucs through 1989, and spent his final season in 1990 with the Redskins and Lions, but his production declined each and every year along the way. Essentially, Wilder gave the Bucs and the game of football everything he had for two years, but it chewed him up and spit him out and left him a shadow of what we might have been had he been treated more judiciously, like a Jim Brown or Barry Sanders. The worst part? Wilder has abused by 1984 and 1985 Tampa teams that went just 8-24. The rest of the Top 10 2. Larry Johnson (457 touches in 2006) 3. Eddie George (453 touches in 2000) 4. LaDainian Tomlinson (451 touches in 2002) 5. Edgerrin James (450 touches in 2000) 6. Marcus Allen (447 touches in 1985) 7. Ricky Williams (442 touches in 2003) 8. Eric Dickerson (441 touches in 1983) 9. Emmitt Smith (439 touches in 1995) 10. Jamal Anderson (437 touches in 1998) We could go on and on. And we talked about other all-time greats like Barry Sanders and Jim Brown earlier this week. But the numbers speak for themselves: give your top running back the ball too often, and his career and productivity are soon over.