Minnesota Vikings won’t play Adrian Peterson against Arizona Saturday

For the second straight week, Minnesota Vikings running back Adrian Peterson will be held out of a preseason game.

Peterson didn’t play last week against the Oakland Raiders and won’t play Saturday against the Arizona Cardinals, coach Mike Zimmer told reporters on Thursday.

According to Master Tesfatsion of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune:

This isn’t a shock regarding the 29-year-old Peterson. He played in just one preseason game in 2013, starting against the San Francisco 49ers in the third week of the preseason but departing without touching the ball.

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In 2012, coming off a torn ACL, he didn’t play in the preseason at all.

It’s been three years since Peterson carried the ball in a preseason game, when he had 81 yards on 14 carries against the Dallas Cowboys on Aug. 27, 2011.

It hasn’t seemed to hurt his productivity. Peterson had 1,266 yards and 10 touchdowns in 14 games for Minnesota last season, coming off his near-record setting 2,097-yard season in 2012.

A two-time NFL rushing champion, Peterson has run for 10,115 yards and 86 touchdowns with a 5.0-yard-per-carry average in seven seasons since he was taken with the seventh overall pick by the Vikings out of Oklahoma in 2007.

Peterson is tied for seventh with Hall of Famers Joe Perry, Gale Sayers and Barry Sanders on the all-time list for yards per attempt among players with at least 750 carries.

He is the second-leading career rusher among active players, trailing only Stephen Jackson of the Atlanta Falcons, who has 10,678 yards, and his 86 rushing touchdowns is tied with Priest Holmes for 14th in NFL history.

In 2013, Peterson fell just eight yards shy of matching Eric Dickerson’s single-season record of 2,105 yards, set in 1984 with the Los Angeles Rams. It was just the seventh 2,000-yard season in league history.

O.J. Simpson was the first, rushing for 2,003 yards with the Buffalo Bills in 1973. Dickerson was next, followed by Sanders with the Detroit Lions in 1997, Terrell Davis of the Denver Broncos in 1998, Jamal Lewis of the Baltimore Ravens in 2003 and Chris Johnson of the Tennessee Titans in 2009.