If running back pay is going to rebound, this is the year.
The team that carries the NFL’s biggest contract at the position played in the Super Bowl. The draft is lacking, with perhaps the best tailback in this year’s class rehabbing a torn ACL and without a real first-rounder to be found in the bunch. And the free-agent group, now untethered from franchise tags, is loaded with well-pedigreed bellcows.
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Put the 1990s equivalents of Saquon Barkley, Derrick Henry and Josh Jacobs on the market 30 years ago, and you’d have a feeding frenzy for their services. As it stands now, those guys probably won’t get half of what a top receiver does.
And if they do, it’d qualify as a market correction.
“The game has evolved and changed,” ex-Vikings GM Rick Spielman told me over the weekend as he reminisced about the old days. “Back then, all of a sudden, these quarterbacks coming out are more athletic than they were through the ’90s. Everybody was questioning, It’s the same thing—the game has evolved.”
Spielman’s history can draw a roadmap for that evolution.
He got his start in the NFL as a BLESTO scout with the Lions, and in his second year the team rode its legend of a tailback, Barry Sanders, all the way to the NFC title game, the only in franchise history until this year. Then, he went to Miami, where he traded for Ricky Williams, a rugged, old-school back who became the best player on a playoff team. And we all know what Adrian Peterson and Dalvin Cook meant to his more recent Vikings teams.
Those Lions teams were, more or less, like everyone else in the NFL in the 1990s, either in possession of a back who was the focal point of the offense, or in search of one. Decades later, the Minnesota teams that Peterson led were outliers in being built around a tailback, and the ones Cook played for used him as far more than just a ballcarrier.
Fair or not, general perception in the NFL holds that you can get by in pro football without having a great player at the position—and that perception isn’t new. It’s been building for more than two decades, to the point now where only a kicker has a lower franchise tag number than a running back. And so it’s that environment that Barkley, Jacobs and Henry, as well as Austin Ekeler, Tony Pollard and D’Andre Swift, are going out into this week.
Will they turn the tide and score top-of-the-market contracts?
It’d be hard to count on that.
