Stephen Dubner

You don't have to go back to the 1920s or the 1950s, but pick whatever seems like a sensible starting point in modern NFL history and tell me how the running game evolved and was eventually superseded by the passing game.

So the story you're telling me is simply that football people, including coaches and analytics people like you,

have been discovering over the years that passing is more valuable than running.

Additionally, the league itself decided over many years to make passing more prominent by rule changes.

And so now we've just arrived at this new circumstance where passing is just more valuable than running.

Where does that leave the running back in the modern football economy?

Now, you may be thinking, I understand that running backs have become somewhat less valuable, but are they really that much less valuable?

The answer to that question has to do with something that happened in 2011.

That's coming up after the break.

I'm Stephen Dubner, and you were listening to Freakonomics Radio.

Last year, the economist Roland Fryer and I teamed up to try to learn why running back salaries have fallen so much since their heyday.

Salaries are driven in part by where a player is selected in the NFL draft.

In 1990, 12 running backs were taken in the first two rounds of the draft.

Last year, there were two.

So what's driving this decline?

We've already heard about the analytics revolution that showed the value of passing versus running.

We've heard about rule changes the NFL adopted to privilege the passing game.

But there was another big change in 2011 that shook things up for NFL rookies generally and running backs in particular.

team has control of you for five years.

That is Robert Turbin.