Chapter 1: Why are running backs no longer the stars of the NFL?
Hey there, it's Stephen Dubner. In a matchup that absolutely no one would have predicted, the Seattle Seahawks will play the New England Patriots in this year's Super Bowl. The most prominent players on those teams are New England quarterback Drake May and Seattle wide receiver Jackson Smith Njigba. You'll notice I did not name a running back. Why not? That's what this episode is about.
We first ran it last season, and now we've updated facts and figures as necessary. As always, thanks for listening. The National Football League, a phenomenally successful piece of the sports and entertainment industry, is largely built around the forward pass.
That's when the quarterback, the star of the show, throws the ball downfield to one of his sprinting receivers who tries to catch the ball and sprint even further down the field. This can be a very exciting thing to watch. In recent years, the passing game has gotten even more exciting and more sophisticated, and it has helped drive the league's massive growth.
But if you ask football fans of a certain age who they idolized when they were kids, it probably wasn't a wide receiver or even a quarterback. It was probably a running back.
Big opening for Tony Dorsett. Look out, he's got great speed. Tony Dorsett was my favorite player. I had the uniform, the helmet. The running backs were bigger stars during my childhood than the quarterbacks.
My favorite player of all time was Barry Sanders. The day that he retired, I remember crying.
I had a Ricky Waters jersey when he was with the Eagles, actually. I wore it on the first day of school, I think of first or second grade.
The three men we just heard from, we will meet them later. Two of them are former NFL running backs themselves, and the other has represented many running backs as an agent. The running back I loved as a kid was Franco Harris of the Pittsburgh Steelers. To be honest, I was a little obsessed with Franco.
We don't need to get into the details here, but I did once write a book about him called Confessions of a Hero Worshipper. Like I said, a little bit obsessed. I liked everything about Franco, the way he carried himself off the field, but especially how he ran. Some running backs, like Jim Brown, were known for their power, for running people over.
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Chapter 2: What factors contributed to the decline in running back salaries?
You've got some data, you've talked to a bunch of people, but plainly your appetite is deeper than that. Why? What do you want to know?
I think it's such an intriguing question. It's one of these things where your intuition and your eyeballs can oftentimes be inconsistent with what the actual data tell us. Where does our intuition fail us? I think it does it a lot in life.
I'm just fascinated by human behavior generally, but how we think about the use of my favorite subject, economics, when it comes to issues like valuing positions in a game that's as complex as football.
So today on Freakonomics Radio, Roland Fryer and I explore the decline of the running back. We speak with one of the analytics gurus who sparked the revolution.
Once I built that model, it was very, very clear that passing was far superior to running.
We will hear an agent explain why the position is so difficult. The running back is the most violent position in the most violent sport on the planet.
And, of course, we will get the running back perspective. The quarterback got all the credit for taking to the Super Bowl, and he did the bare minimum. Last year's Super Bowl was won by the Philadelphia Eagles, whose running back Saquon Barkley had a historically great season. Was that the sign of a running back renaissance? 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.
So, look, I'm of two minds about this because I have this job at Harvard. I'd give it away in a second if I could have been an NFL player, right? Right.
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Chapter 3: How have rule changes affected the value of running backs?
The big American sports back then were baseball and boxing. It wasn't until the 1960s and 70s, with the rise of the passing game, that football started to become the juggernaut it is today. But for at least a couple more decades, running backs remained the star attraction. The position has always required a certain amount of physical sacrifice.
Every part of football is physical, right? But when you're running the ball, it's not just the person in front of you that you're going into. People are coming from the side and taking hits at knees. You can get rolled up on. There's a lot of bodies there.
So how long ago did you start thinking about this decline in the value of the running back?
Years, because it's been a slow decline of running backs, and it's my favorite position. I thought, why are my boys being paid less when these quarterbacks who aren't nearly as tough as running backs are being paid more? I grew up in the era of Barry Sanders, Walter Payton, Emmett Smith. I've always liked these really, really explosive running backs just because they look like pure athletes.
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.
Everybody, right? And so the running backs... They've had the biggest drop relative to any other position. This season, the average salary of a starting quarterback in the NFL was just over $30 million. The average for starting running backs, $7 million. There are still plenty of running backs who are considered superstars. Saquon Barkley, Derrick Henry, Josh Jacobs, Christian McCaffrey.
But they're not paid like superstars. None of those four are among the five highest paid players on their team. Why not? Roland Fryer wondered whether this was a supply story or a demand story. In other words, were running backs just not as good as they used to be? Or did teams no longer value what running backs had to offer?
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.
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Chapter 4: What role does analytics play in the perception of running backs?
I lied to him until I was six when I was really five. Were y'all hitting at five? I mean, we had pads on. I don't want to call it hitting. We had pads on. Back in the day, man, it was different. When we were hanging out in the neighborhoods, we would call this thing free-for-all. It would be like seven, eight kids, and we would throw the ball, and one dude had to make all eight guys miss.
I want people to hear from you, like, what it's like playing running back. I mean, what part of it is mental, physical? How much of it can be taught versus instincts?
It's one of the most unique positions on the field because you're the farthest one back. So you see everything going on. And as a running back, you have a job to do every single play. Wide receivers, they can take a play off. But running backs don't have that because we're either running the ball or we're blocking. Or we're in the passing routes.
One part of it is really the skill, natural gifts from God. And the other part is studying and learning. And I tell other young backs now is let your natural instincts happen, right? But being a student of the game, learning like, okay, every defense has a weak point. Your job is really like to find that.
Tell me in your view, why is the running back market like it is today? I mean, do you feel like the current situation is unfair? Do you feel like it's fine? I hate it.
It's unfair. It's unfair because you're telling me that you'd be a great difference maker as a running back. And because I don't play quarterback, I can't get paid the right value for my position. You're telling me that because I don't play quarterback, I got to play elite level every year to get elite money. But the quarterback can play above average for years and one year be pretty good.
And now you're about to get elite money. Think about that. Guys like Josh Jacobs, really good running back, played on bad teams and still played well. And his last year with the Raiders, he said, yo, you know, I led the league in rushing and they didn't offer me a contract. Can you imagine the world where a quarterback leads the league in passing yards and he don't get offered a contract?
But on the other hand, I don't see any Super Bowl winners in the last 20 years with a mediocre quarterback, maybe Brad Johnson of the Tampa Bay Bucs. I see several with average running backs and really good quarterbacks. Is that a reason that the quarterback position is valued more?
Well, it's tricky because the few quarterbacks in the last five, six years, these guys have been like all pro quarterbacks. Brady, he's still one in there. Stafford's still one in there. Mahomes got three in there. These ain't just regular guys just winning Super Bowls. In 2019, I was blessed to be with the Kansas City Chiefs, and I won a championship with them guys.
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Chapter 5: How do former running backs view their position's current value?
But it's even more interesting than that. The Giants took Barkley in the 2018 draft with the second overall pick. His five seasons in New York ranged from good to very good. He was hurt a few times and the Giants offensive line was weak, but he was still considered a top running back. The Giants chose to not offer him a new contract. Instead, they use what's called a franchise tag.
That's an NFL rule that allows a team to keep a good player for one year at a relatively high salary rather than letting him become a free agent and pursue a longer term deal. While the Giants had Barkley on this one-year hold, they gave their quarterback, Daniel Jones, a four-year contract averaging $40 million a year.
When Barkley became a free agent, he left the Giants and signed a three-year contract with the Philadelphia Eagles for about $12 million a year, so less than a third of what Daniel Jones was being paid. And how did Jones and Barkley do the following year? Barkley had one of the best seasons an NFL running back has ever had, and his Eagles won the Super Bowl.
Daniel Jones played so badly that the Giants benched him and then released him. Like LaShawn McCoy asked, how is that fair? Well, fair may not be the right word. The real issue is value. The value of a running play versus the value of a passing play.
The run-pass balance. It was this perennial question, do teams run too often or do they not run often enough? That is Brian Burke, a sports data scientist with ESPN. And so there was this question, and so people came along and they started to analyze the question, and they didn't really have the right tools.
So, Brian, the reason I was really eager to speak with you is that Roland wrote this piece in the Wall Street Journal about the decline of running back salaries. And I've been told that if we had to point to one person in the universe who who is perhaps most responsible for that decline, it might be you. Do you want to claim that credit or blame?
I won't argue against it. I was part of a larger movement that I may have been at the forefront of it, but I certainly wasn't alone. Describe your role in that larger movement then. My role in this was my hobby, which was football stats and what eventually became known as analytics.
Now, football stats were only a hobby at the time because you were a U.S. Navy pilot, correct?
Yeah. Went to flight school, made it into F-18s, flew single-seat fighters for my career in the Navy. They sent me to Monterey to grad school, and that's where I learned my stats. I thought, this is completely useless. Like, how am I ever going to use this in the Navy? But once I got out of the Navy, I thought, gosh, the level of analysis in football is so bad.
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Chapter 6: What insights do agents provide about the running back market?
Yeah. And, you know, they put all the stats online now. So this is like 2006. I said, hey, you know what? We can just download the data. And by the end of lunch, we can answer this question forever. And that was the genesis of, you know, football analytics for me. When I began doing this, I hadn't read Moneyball. I didn't know that existed. It was an advantage because...
The baseball people tried to put it onto football for a long time. The kind of tools and the kind of analysis just doesn't work on football. I came from this military background, and I'm like, this is war. This is zero-sum, two-player game theory. And that paradigm took hold.
In what ways would you say that your military background contributed to the way that you frame the questions you're trying to answer in football?
there's this optimization element to it in the same way in the military you have a mix of strategies it's not like always do this or always do that you have to be unpredictable in a way that keeps your enemy or your opponent on his heels there's a famous thinker in military aviation named john boyd who invented this thing called the ooda loop if you've ever heard of that and
Keeping the enemy confused and disoriented and in a state of ambiguity is one of the goals in American fighting theory. Football works the same way.
So in a war-like setting, when you're trying to advance into enemy territory, which weapon is more valuable, the ground game or the passing game? Brian Burke's analytic approach allowed him to answer that question.
I was able to build something called expected points and expected points added. It's a point expectancy model based on down distance and yard line. Once I built that model, the very first thing I did was just aggregate by play type and And it was very, very clear at that moment that passing was far superior to running. Teams are running far too often.
And the way you know that is because if they're doing each in the optimum mix, the payoffs would equalize. There would be what people commonly refer to in game theory as That's the Nash equilibrium. As long as you have an intelligent opponent, you can assume that that equilibrium is going to be the optimum mix. And they were far out of whack.
From that moment on, we knew that you need to pass more. What year was this? 2008 is when I first did this, but it took years to permeate the football world. It was a slow process.
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Chapter 7: What are the physical demands and risks associated with being a running back?
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.
He was an NFL running back for four teams over eight seasons, including a Super Bowl win with the Seattle Seahawks. Today, he does football commentary for CBS Sports. Roland Fryer spoke with him.
Why do you think the running back market is so challenging today?
Number one, the CBA. That's the meat and potatoes of the conversation. when it comes to the running backs.
The CBA is the collective bargaining agreement, the contract between NFL teams and the NFL Players Association, the union that represents the athletes. The negotiations over a CBA are long and often contentious as they establish pay standards and other terms for years to come. The current CBA was agreed to in 2020 and runs through the 2030 season. The one before that went into effect in 2011.
Overall, the 2011 CBA was a lucrative affair for the players. Their share of league revenues rose from 42% to 47%. But that agreement also came with some restrictions for rookies. Before 2011, a drafted player could freely negotiate a contract with the team that chose him. This led to some bad deals for teams when the player didn't play well or got hurt.
The 2011 agreement created a rookie wage scale that set contract terms based on draft order. It also mandated a four-year contract with a cost-controlled fifth-year option that their team could exercise. This structure is still in place today, and that's what Robert Turbin is talking about when he tells Roland Fryer that the team has control of you for five years.
What happens is you come into the league as a 22-year-old rookie, and basically you are handcuffed for five years. So realistically, you don't have an opportunity to re-up or get a second contract unless Until you're 27 years old.
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Chapter 8: Is there hope for a resurgence of the running back in the NFL?
Like, what are you talking about? But that's the thought process for a lot of executives until proven wrong. It's almost like you're guilty until proven innocent as a running back.
If you go back 20 years, the average career length for an NFL running back was around five and a half years. That number started dropping right around the 2011 collective bargaining agreement. And today, the average length is around two and a half years. Let's hear now from another former running back, Robert Smith. Like Robert Turbin, Smith played for eight years.
All of his were with the Minnesota Vikings. Smith retired after the 2000 season.
It was always kind of a badge of honor to play the position because it is a very physical position. And there are times when you have to block players that outweigh you by a large amount. It's not for the faint of heart.
Today, Smith calls NFL and college games for Fox Sports. His reverence for the running back position goes deep.
Only the quarterback has the ball in their hands more. And so you have, I think, one of the greatest opportunities to impact the outcome of a game. On every running play, 11 guys are trying to hit the same person, and that's the guy who has the ball. It's the challenging part, but it's also the rewarding part. that you were able to get by them.
I hold the NFL record for the longest average per touchdown run at more than 26 yards. And I got to tell you, it's a feeling that I wish everybody could experience when you break into the open and you know, you're going to score a touchdown. It's like when you're leaning back in a chair and, and you almost tip and fall, and you get this rush of adrenaline.
It's like this sudden burst of excitement that I'm about to score a touchdown.
Those occasional bursts of excitement are, of course, offset by thousands of hours of training and by the physical punishment.
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