It’s not often that a star athlete says he’s so frustrated with his sport that maybe his entire job shouldn’t exist. But that’s where the NFL found itself when Tennessee Titans running back Derrick Henry, seemingly so dismayed by the news that the league’s three franchise-tagged running backs—Saquon Barkley, Josh Jacobs, and Tony Pollard—all failed to get long-term contracts before Monday’s deadline, tweeted his frustrations about running back value.
“At this point, just take the RB position out the game then,” Henry wrote, responding to a tweet from Matt Miller, an ESPN draft analyst who detailed a draft-and-replace process that seems to be underway across the NFL. “The ones that want to be great & work as hard as they can to give their all to an organization, just seems like it don’t even matter. I’m with every RB that’s fighting to get what they deserve.”
Colts running back Jonathan Taylor, who led the NFL in rushing in 2021 and is now entering the last year of his rookie contract, also chimed in.
And so did the Chargers’ Austin Ekeler, who was so unhappy with his contract that he reportedly requested a trade earlier this year. “They act,” Ekeler tweeted, “like we are discardable widgets.”
And then there’s, the 49ers’ Christian McCaffrey, one of only a handful of star running backs to sign a big contract in the last three years, who called it “criminal” that Barkley, Jacobs, and Pollard didn’t get new deals on Monday.
The running back market has been crashing for years. When it bottomed out on Monday, you could sense players finally beginning to grieve. While it’s noble for Henry to say he will fight for what running backs “deserve,” it’s also sad to think about how unwinnable that fight will be. Whether these individual players are deserving has nothing to do with it.
This has been a brutal year for the position. This offseason, Dallas cut star running back Ezekiel Elliott (age: 27). The Vikings did the same with Dalvin Cook (27), Tampa Bay released Leonard Fournette (28), and the Browns declined to re-sign Kareem Hunt (27). Cincinnati’s Joe Mixon (26) took a significant pay cut to avoid joining them in the free agent pool. Green Bay’s Aaron Jones (28) also took a $5 million pay reduction. The Titans reportedly made Henry (an elderly 29) available for trade in the spring, but had no takers for a player who had more than 1,900 yards from scrimmage last year. And there was no trade market for Ekeler (28) despite having a dozen more touchdowns than any skill position player in the NFL over the last two seasons. Ekeler stayed in L.A. and settled for some extra contract incentives.
But Monday was another dismal day for running backs everywhere who had been holding out hope that Barkley, who is 26 and the Giants’ best offensive player, or Jacobs, who is 25 and led the NFL in rushing last season, would be able to land lucrative new deals that could move the running back market forward. (Pollard, 26, doesn’t have a résumé to match Barkley or Jacobs, but he’s in line to be the Cowboys’ starting RB now that Elliott is gone.)
Now, nobody from that trio is allowed to sign a new long-term contract with their clubs until after the season ends. That means playing on the tag, as Pollard plans to do since he has already signed his franchise tag, or not play at all. Running backs have been taking hits for years. But the position has never been squeezed quite like it is now.
Assuming they sign the franchise tag and show up to training camp next week, Barkley, and Jacobs will be paid the same fixed, non-negotiable salary of $10.1 million each for the season. That’s a lot of money to most people. But consider that a wide receiver making $10 million wouldn’t even rank among the top 25 players at the position in 2023. In the NBA, a player making $10 million per year wouldn’t even be among the top 150 in the entire league.
NFL players generally hate the franchise tag because the team holds all the power and the player assumes all the risk. If a running back gets hurt while playing on the tag, the team can walk away after this season. But if he excels, the team can just franchise tag him again for about $12 million in 2024. If the Giants did that with Barkley or the Raiders did that with Jacobs next offseason, those players would essentially be getting a two-year contract for $22 million for the prime of their career.
That is essentially what the Jets gave to wide receiver (and Aaron Rodgers’s buddy) Allen Lazard. Lazard is a solid player, but he has barely as many yards from scrimmage in his five-year career (2,306) as Jacobs did last season (2,053). On a per-year basis, Barkley is slated to make less than tight end Evan Engram (Barkley’s former teammate in New York) who on Sunday agreed to a three-year deal with $24 million guaranteed from the Jaguars. Ekeler, who was set to make just $6 million this year and then got $2 million in earnable incentives added to his contract this spring, makes less money than Miami second-string slot receiver Cedrick Wilson, who has 18 fewer catches in his four-year career than Ekeler did just last season.
“I’m looking at some of the backup receivers out here that are still making more than me, that’s going to piss me off, right?” Ekeler said on the Rich Eisen Show earlier this year. “I’m a little bit like, OK, wait a minute, so you’re telling me these people are the no. 3 receivers and they’re going to make more than me? And I’m the starter? I get more carries, I touch the ball more, I have more of an impact.”
You know who would have agreed with that argument? Former Giants general manager Dave Gettleman—you know, the one everyone made fun of for being bad at his job.
The job for people running NFL teams isn’t to hand out money based on past performance (Gettleman aside). It’s to build a team for the future. And looking around the league, it’s clear that drafting running backs high and paying running backs top dollar has been a bad way to build a team. Since 2013, no Super Bowl–winning team has paid its leading rusher more than $2.5 million, and the average salary of the leading rusher on the past 14 Super Bowl teams is just $1.4 million.
Meanwhile, nearly every team that’s handed out a big running back contract in the last five years has come to regret it. Dallas gave Elliott a massive deal in 2019, and that hefty salary became part of the reason the Cowboys could no longer afford to keep receiver Amari Cooper. Todd Gurley signed a big extension with the Rams in 2018 and was cut halfway into the deal after getting paid less than half the money. Mixon took a pay cut to avoid the same fate this year. Cook’s 2020 extension with the Vikings ended three years into a five-year deal. McCaffrey signed his big-money deal with the Panthers in April 2020 and missed 23 games over the next two seasons; Carolina traded him to San Francisco last year amid a roster rebuild and midseason coaching change.
This positional devaluation has been brewing since 2011, when the NFL and the NFL Players Association agreed to essentially delay massive contracts for first-round picks until their fourth, fifth or even sixth year in the league. But by the time running backs have been in the league that long, they are often already declining. When wide receivers, quarterbacks, and defensive ends are turning 26, they’re hitting life-altering paydays as they approach their primes. NFL running backs turning 26 get treated like Leonardo DiCaprio’s girlfriends.
As running backs fell through the cracks of a new financial model, a running back’s job, in and of itself, also became less important than ever. Passing supplanted running as the dominant football strategy because coaches have realized the average pass goes 7 yards and the average run goes a little over 4. Not only had the job of the running back been devalued, but it’s also been split among players. Most teams figure they can put together a functional running game by committee, giving 20 percent of the money to a few guys who can replace 90 percent of the production.
The Giants being unable to reach a deal with Barkley is particularly devastating to younger running backs like Taylor, who is a candidate to receive the franchise tag from the Colts in 2024. Players like Barkley were supposed to be the (potential) exceptions to the rule. It turns out they are beholden to it.
Thus far, only Le’Veon Bell in 2018 had the chutzpah to sit out an entire season in protest of this system that chews running backs up and spits them out (and Bell’s effort was misunderstood). Perhaps Barkley or Jacobs will follow suit and forfeit a half million dollars per week for 18 weeks in a row. But it’s far more likely that by Week 1, Barkley and Jacobs are playing football. So hopefully they enjoy their vacations. Because when September rolls around, they’ll do what the system is designed for them to do: go back to work.
