Stephen Dubner

I don't think so.

The causes and consequences of the running back decline starting now.

This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything with your host, Stephen Dubner.

Roland Fryer is a Harvard economist.

He has also co-founded a few companies, and he's won some major awards for his research on education and policing.

You may remember him from an episode we made a few years ago called Roland Fryer Refuses to Lie to Black America.

But when he was a kid, he did not dream of being an economist.

In the early 1980s, when the running backs Eric Dickerson and Walter Payton were tearing up the NFL, Rowland was doing the same in Pop Warner football.

So what was your view of the running back position then?

Did you just feel like you were king of the hill?

Of course, because it was Texas Pop Warner football.

It wasn't just back then in the early 80s that running backs were revered.

They had been at the center of the game since it began in the mid-1800s.

It wasn't until 1906 that the forward pass was allowed in professional football.

The NFL was founded in 1920, and for its first few decades, passing was rare.

On the vast majority of plays, the ball was snapped to the quarterback, who would then hand it off to a running back.

who would follow the blocks of his offensive linemen to try to get through the defensive linemen.

It was not necessarily exciting.

Football was a slow and grinding affair.

Three yards and a cloud of dust was how people described it.