Roland Fryer

So the non-economist in me wanted them to be paid more.

The economist in me understands that marginal value is what matters, and that's what's happening.

So Fryer put his research skills to work.

The first thing to do was to walk through and just verify those basic statistics, right?

Look at the salaries as a share of total spend of running backs relative to quarterbacks.

And of course, that's what you find out.

You can verify the intuition very quickly that the proportion of spend for running backs has gone down over time and quarterbacks much higher.

And not just quarterbacks much higher, everybody else on the offensive team.

So the first thing I did was test a bunch of supply side theories.

We went and collected all the data we could on passing yards, running yards over the years by team, et cetera.

But also we needed to understand the characteristics of the players.

So we looked at combine statistics and all the data we could collect from there in terms of 40 speed, three cone drill speeds, which is a measure of explosiveness, bench press, all those kinds of things.

And what we found was that running backs, in terms of their abilities in the Combine, have not changed.

So the supply going in has not changed.

And importantly, because it is a team sport, the supply of the other people around them hasn't changed much.

But what has changed is the expected value of a passing play relative to a running play.

The NFL and the teams want to maximize wins, maximize revenue.

And the way you do that is that you score a lot of points.

The way you score a lot of points is that you pass the ball more.

So just give me your name and what you do.