Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Running Backs

Las Vegas Raiders RB Josh Jacobs looked at the reality of being a running back in today’s NFL and caught the 6 AM flight out of Vegas. 

New York Giants RB Saquon Barkley looked at the reality of being a running back in today’s NFL and signed a one-year deal for $10.1 million. The incentives in the deal will be very challenging for Barkley. He said he had an “epiphany”. Or maybe a chat with his banker. 

Same situation. Different response. As players coming off their rookie-capped contracts both Jacobs and Barkley found a market that valued running backs just above place kickers on the economic totem pole. Prone to injury and undercut by a steady stream of star running backs emerging from the Draft, veteran running backs across the league now found themselves squeezed on short-term deals for what constitutes pocket change for quarterbacks. 

Or find themselves out of the league. As this transpired in RB World, Chargers QB Justin Herbert— coming out of his rookie deal— inked a $262.5 million/ five-year contract extension. While Aaron Rodgers kicked back $30 million to his new team (the New York Jets) so they could gain flexibility under the rigid NFL salary cap. Barkley took a fraction of that to spend his fall/ winter getting pounded and punished carrying the ball.

Indianapolis Colts star RB Jonathan Taylor is another who’s fallen from star to vapour trail. Taylor said at minicamp in June that contract negotiations on an extension are up to the Colts but that not having an extension before the season “wouldn’t be a distraction to me”. While the Stanford product wants a generous contract as he comes off his restricted rookie deal, Colts owner Jim Irsay says the team had yet to exchange contract numbers with their star. 

Taylor has now changed his agent and demanded a trade. He and the Colts are currently at war. This has caused much debate within the football community about the former glamour position of Walter Payton, Barry Sanders and Emmitt Smith losing status. One sure sign of the decline is the franchise tag for runners going from $14.5 M down to the $10.1 M accepted by Barkley. 

As the NFL becomes more pass-happy, are running backs about to become worker drones, table setters for fabulously rich QBs? It is, of course, a matter of sports caponomics . (For more on the evolution of salary caps read our book Cap In Hand: How Salary Caps are Killing Pro Sports and Why the Free Market Could Save Them.) 

Scarcity drives value, and the most scarce commodity is not excellent running backs. It’s excellent quarterbacks. Scarcity is why left offensive tackles make more than guards and centres. It’s why cornerbacks make more than middle linebackers. It’s why these positions are drafted in the first round while running backs and others slide to the later rounds. 

As we remarked in Cap In Hand, the NFL knew it was a two-tier league back in 1987 when it busted a strike by the NFL Players Association for free agency. “There had been no new CBA since the 1982 agreement expired in 1987. To drain the NFLPA’s bank account, the NFL had previously created a “Quarterback Club” marketing arm separate from other players. While the league’s top QBs and select others were handsomely compensated with bonuses and percentages of sales, the move denied significant marketing revenues to the rest of the players and the union.”

End of strike. You’d think that with agents advising RBs and the market establishing value running backs would put pride aside. Nah. Running back Le’Veon Bell describes the process when he turned down guaranteed wealth in Pittsburgh. “My franchise tag was $14.5M, and I walked away from it,” Bell said on the AP Pro Football Podcast. “It’s a respect thing. You told me you were going to do this for me but you didn’t... I could’ve just ignored it, went inside the locker room and had been playing. 

“But that wouldn’t have made me happy, and I’m sure inside the locker room, everybody would’ve felt it, and, as a team, we wouldn’t have been good. I feel that’s the same with Saquon. He’s trying to be the best he can, but obviously deep down, he’s not happy, because he wanted to be compensated. He still wants his teammates to be good, so he showed up.”

Bell’s own gamble didn’t work out as he’s drifted from the Jets to the Ravens to the Buccaneers. From leading man to bit player.

Former Bears standout Matt Forte, third-leading rusher in team history, says Barkley and Jacobs should take the franchise tag, “… you go into the building, you can lift weights and you practice with the team and stuff,” he told The Athletic . “And on game day, I just wouldn’t play. And, you know, they can say what they want, the media, they (might) want to bash the player, but you have to use that as a business tactic. Because the team treats it as a business. You have got to treat your body and your career as a business as well. And so that’s the only leverage you have.”

Were we not talking about multi-millions this might be a true tragedy. After all, it is “F***-You Money” with millionaires trying to wrestle fortunes from billionaires. Still, get set for when the NFL negotiates its next collective agreement. We could go without football for a while.

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Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster  A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, he’s a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his new book with his son Evan, was voted the fifth-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His prize-listed 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx