Why Don’t Running Backs Get Paid Anymore?

Hey there, it’s Stephen Dubner. Before today’s show, two quick things. Number one: on February 13^th, we’re putting on a live Freakonomics Radio show in Los Angeles. Come see us! As of this recording, there are some tickets left but not many, so don’t dawdle. Go to freakonomics.com/liveshows — one word — to get tickets. And, number two: we need your voice for an episode we’re in the middle of producing. It’s about sludge. Not the physical sludge that gunks up machinery and things like that; I’m talking about the administrative and bureaucratic sludge that can make it hard to do simple things. Like cancel a subscription. Or pick the best healthcare coverage. Or sign up for some government service. If you have a good sludge story, or example, we want to hear it. Use your phone to record a short voice memo and send it to radio@freakonomics.com. Please include your name, where you live, what you do. And tell us: what’s your sludge story? How did you respond to this sludge? And do you think it was accidental sludge or intentional? Make sure you record your voice memo in a quiet place and, again, send it to radio@freakonomics.com. Thanks muchly — and now, here is today’s episode.

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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.

COMMENTATOR 1: Big opening for Tony Dorsett. Look out. He’s got great speed. 

COMMENTATOR 2: 99 yards and a half. 

Jeffery WHITNEY: Tony Dorsett was my favorite player. I had the uniform, the helmet. The running backs were bigger stars during my childhood than the quarterbacks.

COMMENTATOR 3: Sanders! Unbelievable.

LeSean MCCOY: My favorite player of all time was Barry Sanders. The day that he retired, I remember crying.

COMMENTATOR 4: Watters, one man to beat, cuts it back in Seattle and they’ve turned the water on here in Seattle.

Robert TURBIN: I had a Ricky Watters jersey when he was with the Eagles. I wore it on the first day of school of first or second grade.

The three men we just heard from — we will meet them later. Two of them are former N.F.L. 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-Worshiper. 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. Others, like Gale Sayers, were so fast and graceful that it was hard to get a hand on them. Franco was somewhere in the middle: strong but elusive, a darter and a dodger. In football, every play is a miniature drama, packed into just a few seconds — twenty athletes moving at once, as complicated as a blueprint, as brutal as war, as delicate as ballet. A passing play is a bit of a magic trick; the quarterback and receiver try to trick the downfield defenders into being in the wrong place at the right time. A running play is more predictable, since the running back has to get through a wall of massive defenders. But if he does, and breaks free into open space — that is a special kind of thrill. Back when Franco Harris was in the league, and for a long time after, many of the game’s biggest stars were running backs. And they were paid accordingly. If you go back thirty years, and take the average salary of the top players by position, running backs ranked second, just behind quarterbacks. This year, running backs ranked 13th. So what happened? Everyone knows the N.F.L. has become much more pass-happy these last few decades but still, how did running backs fall so far? As it turns out, I wasn’t the only one with these questions.

Roland FRYER: I was really interested in why salaries of running backs have declined and why they seem to be less important parts of the offense than I remembered. 

Roland Fryer, an economist at Harvard and a friend of Freakonomics, recently wrote a Wall Street Journal column called “The Economics of Running Backs.”

FRYER: It’s been kind of a slow drip, a slow decline of running backs. And then you think, why? What is it? 

I asked Roland if he would sit for an interview to help answer those questions. He said yes — but he had another idea that he insisted would be even more fun.

Stephen DUBNER: So here’s the thing that really puzzles me. When I called you up and asked if we could talk about your Wall Street Journal column and make an episode based on this idea, you said, “Yes, and I would actually like to co-host that episode.” Can you explain that? I know very few Harvard economists — or anybody really — who’s interested in co-hosting a grubby little podcast.  

FRYER: I’ve always had a crush on you, Stephen, so I just wanted to get closer. 

DUBNER: Well, other than that, I guess the serious question I’m asking is what kind of questions do you hope to answer or explore as we move forward? 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?  

FRYER: I think it’s just 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:

Brian BURKE: 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.

WHITNEY: The running back is the most violent position in the most violent sport on the planet.

And, of course, we’ll get the running-back perspective:

McCOY: The quarterback got all the credit for taking them to the Super Bowl, and he did the bare minimum.

The upcoming Super Bowl, the Philadelphia Eagles against the Kansas City Chiefs, will feature a running back who had a historically great season. So, does this mean we’re looking at a running back renaissance?

Robert SMITH: I don’t think so.

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

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FRYER: 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 N.F.L. player.

Roland Fryer is a Harvard economist; he has also co-founded a few companies and has 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 N.F.L., Roland was doing the same in Pop Warner football.

FRYER: I started playing football at age five. The coach asked me to race their fastest player and I won. And he said, “You’re on the team.” In Texas, you play flag football five and six years old. And seven years old onwards, you strap on the pads and go to work. The coolest thing about playing was that they had a legitimate draft. You’d run a 40-yard dash, you’d kick the ball, you’d throw the ball, you’d catch some balls. They had a little shed there at the fields. They’d put all your measurements up, and then the coaches would select by lottery who went first. So, we cared about where we were drafted as early as, like, 8 or 9 years old.  

DUBNER: And how did you do in the draft?  

FRYER: Aw man, I was always the number one draft pick.

DUBNER: So what was your view of the running back position then? Did you just feel like you were king of the hill?

FRYER: Of course, because it was Texas Pop Warner football. My coaches early on told me my real talent was what they called running to the light, that you would just figure out where the gaps were and go, and it was all intuition. You’d score five, six touchdowns a game. I loved it. I absolutely loved playing football. And running backs were revered back then.

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 N.F.L. 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. Perhaps not coincidentally, football was not very popular either; 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.

FRYER: 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. 

DUBNER: So, how long ago did you start thinking about this decline in value of the running back? 

FRYER: 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, Emmitt 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.

FRYER: The first thing to do was to walk through and just verify those basic statistics. 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, that you can verify the intuition very quickly, that the proportion of spend for running backs has gone down over time, and quarterbacks, much higher.

DUBNER: And not just quarterbacks much higher. Everybody else on the offensive team. 

FRYER: 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 N.F.L. was just over $30 million. The average for starting running backs? Six million dollars. 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?

FRYER: 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, etc., 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. 

The N.F.L. Combine is a showcase where teams assess the abilities of the college players they’re looking to draft.

FRYER: 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 N.F.L. 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. Pretty simple.

Is it that simple? To find out, we wanted to hear from some running backs. Roland took the first interview.

FRYER: Are we ready? 

McCOY: Yeah. One, two, three, four. I had eggs, turkey bacon, never pork, a little pancakes, light syrup. O.J, you know. 

FRYER: So, just give me your name and what you do. 

McCOY: My name is LeSean McCoy. I’m an ex-N.F.L. all-decade running back for the Eagles, the Bills, the Chiefs, and the Bucs. Now, I’m on Fox with The Facility, five-day-a-week show. 

FRYER: Tell me about your early memories of playing running back. 

McCOY: So I was about five years old. You supposed to play at six, but I love the game so much, I lied to them. I told them I was six when I was really five.

FRYER: Were you all hitting at five?

McCOY: I mean, we had pads on. I won’t call it hitting. We had pads on. Back in the day, man, it was different. We’re 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.

FRYER: I want people to hear from you 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.

McCOY: 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, you 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. Another part is studying and learning. What I tell other young backs now is, let your natural instincts happen. But being a student of the game, learning like, okay, every defense has a weak point, your job as a running back is to find that.

FRYER: 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 or do you feel like it’s fine? 

McCOY: I hate it. It’s unfair. It’s unfair because you’re telling me that you’ll 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 about to get elite money? Think about that. Guys like Josh Jacobs — really, really good running back — played on bad teams and still played well. 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 a world where a quarterback leads the league in passing yards and he doesn’t get offered a contract?

FRYER: 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?

McCOY: Well, it’s tricky because the few quarterbacks in the last five, six years, these guys been All-Pro quarterbacks. Brady, he stole one in there, Stafford stole one in there, Mahomes got three in there. These aren’t 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. Patrick Mahomes had to come back in the fourth quarter to win that game. But then I look across the field, we’re playing the Niners. The whole week, the game preparation was, “All we got to do was get to third down.” Why is that? Because we want this quarterback that was paid all this money to throw the ball on third down. His name was Jimmy G. That’s who that was. The brother threw like forty-some passes the whole playoffs, and the undrafted running backs carried them. The quarterback got all the credit for taking them to the Super Bowl and he did the bare minimum. Or we go to New York. A dude like Saquon Barkley can be that good, and you’d rather pay Daniel Jones. How the hell is that fair? 

Let’s pull back here, just in case you haven’t been following the recent psychodrama with the New York Giants that McCoy was talking about. Saquon Barkley is a name that comes up again and again in the argument about the value of a running back — in part because of the monster season he has had this year with the Eagles, but it’s 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 used what’s called a franchise tag — that’s an N.F.L. 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 this year? Barkley had one of the best seasons an N.F.L. running back has ever had, and his Eagles are in the Super Bowl; Daniel Jones played so badly that the Giants benched him, and then released him. Like LeSean 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.

BURKE: 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.

BURKE: 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. 

DUBNER: 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 is perhaps most responsible for that decline, it might be you. Do you want to claim that credit or blame? 

BURKE: 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. 

DUBNER: Describe your role in that larger movement then. 

BURKE: My role in this was my hobby, which was football stats, and what eventually became known as analytics.

DUBNER: Now, football stats were only a hobby at the time because you were a U.S. Navy pilot, correct?

BURKE: 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. 

DUBNER: What were your early jobs between getting out of the Navy and doing what you do now? 

BURKE: I have to be a little bit careful. I live in Northern Virginia. I was recruited. 

DUBNER: By something with three letters, maybe?

BURKE: To do some government stuff for a while. That didn’t last too long. 

DUBNER: Your choice or their choice?

BURKE: It was complicated. I became a single dad and raised two kids, so it was just incompatible. 

DUBNER: But you ended up working around another three-letter institution, the N.F.L.

BURKE: A lot of three letters. Most of my time between the Navy and doing football for the day job, I was a defense contractor, and I was a tactics and strategy expert and instructor. And I would shirk all my daily responsibilities to crunch football numbers all day long. So I’ll tell you the origin story, kind of a water cooler conversation with my good friend, coworker John Mosier. The conversation came around to like, “Defense wins championships,” right? The old standby, you know? And I was like, “Well, does it? I don’t know, like they say that, but does it really? What do people mean by that?” And I thought, my God, I have this software left over from grad school. And 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 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. 

DUBNER: 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?

BURKE: 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.

BURKE: 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 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 were doing each in the optimum mix, the payoffs would equalize. There would be what people commonly refer to in game theory as a 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. 

DUBNER: What year was this? 

BURKE: 2008 is when I first did this. But it took years to permeate the football world. It was a slow process. 

DUBNER: Let’s back up a bit. You don’t have to go back to the 1920s or the 1950s, but pick whatever seems like a sensible starting point in modern N.F.L. history and tell me how the running game evolved, and was eventually superseded by the passing game. 

BURKE: I think Franco Harris is a good starting point for the modern era. That’s where people of our age grew up learning our football. And same with coaches. This is the 1970s. In those days, passing was very, very difficult. So running was a much better strategy. And then in 1978, the league massively rewrote the rules that had to do with passing — not just illegal contact; the way linemen could pass-block radically changed. And the league is still catching up to this day in terms of exploiting those rule changes. Over time, different systems started to exploit the new rules. And in 2004, they changed the rules again, so over time the potency of the running game compared to the passing game has decreased steadily.

DUBNER: 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? 

BURKE: Well, he’s just not going to be as valuable. The star running back is not going to carry you to a Super Bowl. It hasn’t happened in generations.

Could it be that this generation is different? And is Saquon Barkley the difference-maker? Over the past 20 Super Bowls, the top rusher on the winning team has averaged only 70 yards. If you look at the betting markets for this year’s Super Bowl, Barkley is expected to gain 115 rushing yards. When the Eagles beat the Washington Commanders last week to get into the Super Bowl, Barkley ran for 118 yards and three touchdowns; this led Fox Sports announcer Kevin Burkhardt to call the Eagles’ pickup of Barkley “one of the best free-agent signings of all time.” Still, the Eagles’ opponent in the Super Bowl, the Kansas City Chiefs, are going for their third Super Bowl in a row, which would be a record, and their fourth win in six years. Even a casual football fan can name the Chiefs’ starting quarterback, Patrick Mahomes, and their superstudly tight end Travis Kelce, who is even better known for dating Taylor Swift. But can you name the running backs who helped the Chiefs win all these Super Bowls? Probably not. They’ve been practically interchangeable, most of them earning between $1 and $3 million a year — compared to Kelce’s $17 million and Mahomes’s $45 million. Now, you may be thinking — I understand that running backs have become somewhat less valuable, but why are they that much less valuable? The answer to that question has to do with something that happened in 2011.

WHITNEY: The average fan doesn’t fully appreciate that the N.F.L. is a huge business.

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Back in September, at the start of the N.F.L. season, the economist Roland Fryer and I decided to team up and 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 N.F.L. draft. In 1990, twelve running backs were taken in the first two rounds of the draft; this year, there was one. 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 N.F.L. adopted to privilege the passing game. But there was another big change, in 2011, that shook things up for N.F.L. rookies generally and running backs in particular.

TURBIN: The team has control of you for five years. 

That is Robert Turbin. He was an N.F.L. 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.

FRYER: Why do you think the running back market is so challenging today? 

TURBIN: Number one, the C.B.A. That’s the meat and potatoes of the conversation when it comes to the running backs.

The C.B.A. is the Collective Bargaining Agreement, the contract between N.F.L. teams and the N.F.L. Players’ Association, the union that represents the athletes. The negotiations over a C.B.A. are long and often contentious, as they establish pay standards and other terms for years to come. The current C.B.A. was agreed to in 2020, and runs through the 2030 season. The one before that went into effect in 2011. Overall, the 2011 C.B.A. was a lucrative affair for the players; their share of league revenues rose from forty-two percent to forty-seven percent. 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.”

TURBIN: 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 until you’re 27 years old. 

For some positions in football, including quarterback, a player is just coming into his prime at age 27. That is not the case for running backs.

TURBIN: By the time you’re 27 years old, if you’ve carried the ball 250 times per year, they’re going to look at those numbers and say, “Well, he may not have it the way he used to.” That may not be true for most running backs, it is true for some. The C.B.A. is really what devalued the position, because let’s say you were able to get out of that contract or re-up out of that contract after three years. Now you’re a 25-year old back still in his prime with an opportunity to maximize on economics from a contractual standpoint. 

FRYER: It seems like there is some relationship between the C.B.A. and durability which is, if you’ve got to wait for five years and, as you say, you’ve carried the ball all this number of times, then executives are going to look at that and say, “How much more does he have in the tank.” So durability is part of it through the C.B.A., right? 

TURBIN: One hundred percent. I mean, five years, that’s obviously not a full career. That’s not the type of career you would imagine for yourself. But we know that the average is less than three. I was fortunate to play eight — for a back, that’s pretty damn good. I’ll never forget when I was in Indianapolis, this was 2017, I’m 27 years old, and I’m talking to a scout from another team. I dislocated my elbow in week six of that year. So I was coming back. He asked me, he says, “How old are you?” I said 27. He said, “Okay, so you got about another year or so left.” I said, “What?” 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 twenty years, the average career length for an N.F.L. 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 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.

SMITH: 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 N.F.L. and college games for Fox Sports. His reverence for the running back position goes deep.

SMITH: Only the quarterback has the ball in their hands more. And so you have one of the greatest opportunities to impact the outcome of a game. On every running play, eleven 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 N.F.L. 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 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.

SMITH: I tore my A.C.L. my rookie season, but in that injury I also broke the bottom of my femur, and did some damage to the articular cartilage, which is the smooth cartilage that’s on the tip of the bone. And I needed to have a microfracture, it’s a procedure where they tap on the exposed surface of the bone. And then I needed to have that again after my last season in the league. So there I was, a couple of months shy of my 29th birthday. It was the only season I didn’t miss any games, and I still needed to have knee surgery after the year. And the thing that I said was, you know, if you would pay any amount of money to get your health back if you lost it, then what amount of money is worth the very real chance that you’ll lose it? It was the calculation that was going on in my head. That’s why I left the game when I did. I’m thinking quite literally, it’s better to walk away early than to limp away late.

Robert Smith had a lot of reasons to walk away, a lot of things beyond football that excited him. He’s an amateur astronomer, a prolific reader, and in addition to his broadcasting duties, he is working on a health-and-wellness startup. Plus which: he made good money as a younger man. His final contract paid him $25 million over five years. In his last season — the best of his career — he ranked second in the N.F.L. in rushing yards. But it was clear by then that running-back money was drying up. Every team has a league-imposed salary cap, and they are constantly trying to figure out which players they can give less money to, in order to give more to the players they think they cannot win without. And running backs had fallen off the cannot-win-without list. Over the past few decades, N.F.L. revenues have more than doubled, to about $20 billion a year. Since players get a percentage share of revenues, that means the overall player pool has also more than doubled. But running backs have barely shared in that gain. The pay for running backs and fullbacks over the past two decades has risen around eleven percent; for all other offensive positions, salaries have risen at least ninety percent. If you don’t believe me, just ask an agent:

WHITNEY: Jeffery Whitney. I am one of the founders and president at the Sports and Entertainment Group, a full-service sports agency in Washington, D.C. We’ve been doing it for 20-plus years. 

DUBNER: So how many athletes do you represent now, your firm? 

WHITNEY: We represent about 40 N.F.L. players at any given time. So we’re one of the larger agencies. 

DUBNER: It would appear to me that an agent is busy and important when you’re making a deal. But I don’t know how much maintenance that deal requires as time goes on. Can you just talk about, in the lifecycle of an athlete, how involved are you? 

WHITNEY: We’re involved in every aspect of our clients’ lives on a daily basis. We spend probably the least amount of time actually negotiating contracts. I’m a family therapist, a relationship therapist, some type of preacher or pastor when need be. 

DUBNER: Financial advisor. 

WHITNEY: Financial advisor. Just day-to-day counselor. That’s what I love doing. No day is the same. I got up today, and I get a call from a player who’s injured, and so I have to deal with that. I get a call from a player who’s moving, and he needs to be guiding in the right direction. Young players, they’ll call me and ask me what TV they should purchase. We’re in many ways, with these young people, involved with them in a very intimate and deep fashion.

DUBNER: Among agents that represent N.F.L. players, what would you say that you’re most known for?

WHITNEY: In the past, we were actually known as the running back agency. We represented more running backs over the last twenty years than any other agency.

DUBNER: Name some for me.

WHITNEY: Maurice Jones-Drew. Matt Forte. Tevin Coleman. Jordan Howard. James White, “Sweet Feet” from New England. Kendall Hunter. Le’Veon Bell. Michael Carter. We have Cody Schrader this year, who’s now with the Rams.

DUBNER: Do you still represent the same share of running backs? 

WHITNEY: We have pared down. The market has spoken, and over the last few years, we got into the receiver, cornerback, that kind of market. We’ve never got out of the business of representing running backs. But we did start shaping our roster a little bit. 

DUBNER: I don’t mean to accuse you of chasing the money yourselves — you say, you’re “responding to the market,” but in a case like this, where you guys were known as a running back agency and then the market for running backs changes really pretty dramatically, I mean who ends up representing the running backs? Just different agents who are starting out, who don’t have as much luxury to pick their roster the way you guys do, is that the way it works? 

WHITNEY: That’s exactly what you saw. There were agents during the last few years who just didn’t represent running backs at all. And there literally are running backs in the market looking for representation. There’s a supply and demand issue. There are more running backs than positions. It is a position where you can find really good players all across the draft, and after the draft. There also is this: the running quarterback. You can look at the total number of yards that a team has. Now a lot of that yardage is coming not from the running backs, but it’s coming from the quarterback. So now probably half the league has quarterbacks who can run as well as the running back.

DUBNER: What about rule changes that facilitated an opening up of the passing game? 

WHITNEY: The average fan sometimes doesn’t fully appreciate that the N.F.L. is a huge business. It is a business at the highest level. It’s $20 billion. It’ll go to twenty five. The ultimate goal, I’m hearing it’s going to be a $50 billion industry in the next ten years. I think we’ve seen over the last 10 years kind of a cultural shift, not just in the N.F.L., but across sports. As fans, we simply see the outcome of the game, and we don’t really understand that at the end of the day, these are corporations that are going to be responsive to their shareholders and consumers. In the N.F.L., it’s no different. People like to see the ball in the air, the acrobatic catches, and the leaps. The fans want to see long balls. They want to see passing. I still can watch a 10-to-7 game, a defensive battle, the best player is the middle linebacker, and the running back, and I’m happy with that. But for younger generation, absolutely boring. We can talk supply and demand, we can talk the running quarterback, and those all do have some influence in the devaluation for the running back position. Ultimately, if we really dig down and look at root causes, it’s really the corporation, the actual N.F.L., responding to their consumer base, and what their consumer base wants to see.

DUBNER: When you say that the N.F.L. responded to what the market wants, give me some specific examples of how the league has added leverage to make passing more prominent, either passing and/or quarterback play more prominent. 

WHITNEY: You’ve seen a ton of rule changes, obviously to make it a higher-scoring game with more offense. The defenses have been handicapped, the pass-interference rules, you can’t hit the quarterback. Some of the rules are good for the safety of the players. But certainly the root of the reason is to increase the scoring, and the way you do that is through passing.

DUBNER: Let’s talk about injuries and perishability generally. Just talk about the physical punishment that comes along with the running back position, where it ranks with other offensive players. 

WHITNEY: Make no mistake about it, the running back is the most violent position in the most violent sport on the planet. Running backs are getting hit on every play. In pass protection, they’re getting hit. You’ve got a running back who’s 5’10”, 215 pounds, and he’s blocking a 325-pound defensive lineman. The defensive players are getting bigger and faster every year. That physicality for the running back is real. The likelihood of a running back getting through the season unscathed, no injuries, is slim to none. And so a lot of teams, because of that, they go with running backs by committee.

What Whitney is talking about here when says “running backs by committee” is when teams substitute in multiple players throughout the game, or the season, to share the workload. Here again is Brian Burke, the ESPN analyst.

BURKE: I think that’s one of the core developments that’s affected the running back position is that teams have realized that you don’t necessarily need a great running back. What you need is a great running game. 

DUBNER: I think when most people watch football, they see the quarterback hand the ball to the running back who, when a play succeeds, he gets through the line and then keeps running and gains a bunch of yards and finally gets tackled, and they think, “Oh, my God, that running back is so talented.” Explain what’s actually happening to make that run a success.

BURKE: Yeah, there’s going to be eight or nine blocks that are all essential. You need these kind of consecutive miracles for a run play to really work. Coaches will draw them up, and it looks perfect on the whiteboard. But then in the chaos of the game, so many things have to go right for it to work. But when it does, it’s beautiful.

DUBNER: And then the people executing those blocks, let’s just talk about the offensive line. There’s one running back who carries the ball, who succeeds. But then there are five or six other guys who are probably averaging, what, around 290 pounds on the offensive line?

BURKE: Oh, gosh, probably more now, yeah. 

DUBNER: Some football fans really do pay attention to offensive linemen, but really it’s mostly their moms. But there are a lot of them that are necessary for it to work. So what does that mean about the market?

BURKE: The way to think about it is the line and the blocking and the scheme responsible for the first three or four yards of a gain on a run play, and then from there on, it’s the elusiveness of the running back. It’s like a threshold system, where if I have a good enough line to get a running back out to three, four, or five yards, now he’s into the secondary and it’s up to him to make defenders miss their tackles and then you get these big explosive gains. So if you want to improve your running game, you don’t go out and just get a great running back. I would say start with the offensive line. Make sure you’re calling good plays, and then the cherry on top might be a star running back. 

Do running backs have any chance of returning to their previous glory?

WHITNEY: Everything is cyclical, right? If you keep those bell bottoms long enough, they’ll come back. 

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Most of us don’t respond well when something is taken away from us. Psychologists like to talk about “loss aversion,” the fact that we feel more pain from loss than we feel pleasure from a gain of the same size. Well, imagine being an athlete who’s been working hard since age five or six, driven by the very slim hope that you might live out your dream and become an N.F.L. running back, only to succeed — and discover that your position has been downgraded. An elite running back in the N.F.L. can still make millions of dollars but keep in mind that a) running-back careers are short; and b) many of your teammates will be making more millions than you. So what are your options? You could stage a holdout. That’s what both Saquon Barkley and Josh Jacobs did in 2023, sitting out training camp after being franchise-tagged by their respective teams, the New York Giants and the Las Vegas Raiders. Both of them left their teams at the end of the season, and both have prospered with their new teams: Barkley with the Eagles, Jacobs with the Green Bay Packers. But a holdout doesn’t always go as planned. In 2018, Pittsburgh Steelers running back Le’Veon Bell, one of the best backs in the league at the time, held out for the entire season rather than play under a franchise tag. Here again is Brian Burke, the ESPN data scientist:

BURKE: By holding out, he cut his career short, maybe not by a full year, but a lot of the perishability is just age-based not necessarily wear- and-tear based. The effect can be very slight. But the next guy up who costs a fraction of what Le’Veon wants to be paid. Like, I would much rather pay $1 million for 95 percent of what Le’Veon Bell is than pay $15 million for 100 percent. 

DUBNER: He got a big-money contract with the Jets, but then he wasn’t very good there. Then his career was kind of over. What would you have advised him when he was doing really well with the Steelers on his rookie contract? 

BURKE: I would have advised him to just take what he can get. Like, it’s outside of his control. I understand, what he’s trying to accomplish, but he’s just up against reality. He was lucky to find the Jets. If there’s one, foolish team out of thirty-two that’s going to overpay you, then it only takes one. 

DUBNER: And it’s usually the Jets, to be honest. 

BURKE: He found that one, for sure.

Bell’s agent at the time was Jeffery Whitney, who we heard from earlier. He told us he didn’t want to discuss the Bell situation. Beyond a holdout, what other options are available to dissatisfied running backs? A few years ago, there was an attempt at creating a carveout — a running-back-specific labor designation proposed by a group called the International Brotherhood of Professional Running Backs. They petitioned the N.L.R.B., the National Labor Relations Board, for what labor lawyers call a “unit clarification”; they argued that the unique physical demands of the running back position set them apart from other football players, and that they should therefore be allowed to break away from the N.F.L. players’ union and negotiate on their own. A clever idea, maybe, but the N.L.R.B. rejected their request. I asked Robert Smith, the former Vikings running back, what he thought of this idea.

SMITH: Well, as you guys have talked about in countless episodes on Freakonomics, you have to be very careful about trying to change one variable in a system without impacting the system in a way that you haven’t anticipated. And ultimately the market is going to decide where they value players the most, and where that money is going to make the most sense for that team.

So if carve-outs and hold-outs aren’t the answer, how about a good old-fashioned running-back Zoom call? In 2023, Austin Ekeler, now with the Washington Commanders, organized a Zoom with other top running backs including Barkley, Jacobs, Christian McCaffrey, and Nick Chubb to discuss the state of their position. “Right now, there’s really nothing we can do,” Chubb said afterward. “We’re kind of handcuffed with the situation. We’re the only position that our production hurts us. If we go out there and run 2,000 yards, the next year they’re going to say, ‘You’re probably worn down.’” Still, it’s worth wondering: given the exceptional season that Saquon Barkley had with the Eagles, if he also has a great Super Bowl and the Eagles beat the Chiefs — maybe the N.F.L. will fall back in love with the running back?

WHITNEY: The last couple of years you’re seeing a little bit of resurgence in the running game. Everything is cyclical, right? If you keep those bell bottoms long enough, they’ll come back. 

That, again, is the sports agent Jeffery Whitney.

WHITNEY: You ask a running back what’s the most important duty that they have? The vast majority will be like, “Running the football.” And it’s not. It’s pass protection and catching the ball, and running is part of it. I think we’re seeing some young running backs again who can do it all, can catch it, can run it, good in pass protection.

DUBNER: Let’s say you have a relative or a family friend who’s eleven, twelve years old, great athlete. What would you tell that kid if they’re hoping for a long career in the N.F.L. Do you say, “Get the heck out of the running back position”?

WHITNEY: I’d tell them to become a long snapper. I’d tell them to become a specialist, a long snapper or a kicker, you play forever. You don’t get touched. That’s what I would advise them to do. If you’re not going to be the quarterback, be the long snapper or be the kicker. 

We once made an episode about the economics of the long-snapper position. It’s called “Why Does the Most Monotonous Job in the World Pay $1 Million?” Episode 493 if you want to listen. As for running backs: LeSean McCoy, the six-time Pro Bowler, was more optimistic about their future; here he is again, talking with Roland Fryer:

McCOY: Now it’s a copycat league, right? If the Eagles go on to win the Super Bowl, they want to copycat that. You look at some of the better teams, right? They’ve got good running back play. Like, the Packers — are they even a playoff team without Josh Jacobs? Or look at the Eagles. I love the Eagles. A lot of talent on that team. Are we the same though, if Saquon Barkley is not there? Let’s look at the Ravens. Lamar Jackson was the M.V.P. last year. This year, they look totally different. What’s the difference? Derrick Henry. That’s why you see Lamar Jackson throwing the ball better than he’s ever thrown before. You play-action — like, who do I guard? I feel like the market has to go up because these players are earning these things. When owners see that because, one thing about owners, they want to make their money, and they want to win.

There is some evidence to back up McCoy’s optimism: in recent years, the running game has recovered a bit. In 2016, only 40.6 percent of the plays from scrimmage were run plays; that was a 20-year low. This year, it was 43.4 percent run plays. I asked Robert Smith, the former Vikings running back, what he thought of this uptick.

SMITH: I’d be interested to see the breakdown. Number one, is it running backs, is it quarterbacks? You have more quarterbacks that can run the football, and they’re extremely difficult to stop, whether it’s a Lamar Jackson, even a Patrick Mahomes, a Josh Allen, you’re going to have some guys that may distort those numbers. I mean, some of it’s selection bias, because the better teams are constructed in a way where they can run the football in the red zone the way they want to. And then they have the lead and so they’re going to get more runs that way. 

DUBNER: Is it possible that there might be somewhat of a return to the retro world of run-first? 

SMITH: I don’t think so. It goes back to the point of what it takes on a running play. A lot of people would point to Saquon Barkley and Derrick Henry, and those guys are outliers. Look at what Saquon Barkley did with the Giants last year. Look what Derrick Henry did with Tennessee last year. Look what they’re doing with their new teams this year, with Philadelphia and the Ravens. The offensive lines are just that much better. So it almost proves the point the other way that, Yeah well, of course, you put these guys behind the great offensive lines. Saquon Barkley in particular, he set a record for number of yards before first contact this year. So when you look at the performance of running backs, there’s no way that it would be significant enough where everybody would say, “Well, all we got to do is go get a Saquon Barkley. All we got to do is go get a Derrick Henry.” Oh and by the way, it didn’t work for those guys behind those other offensive lines. So you’re still going to have to spend the money to get the offensive line in place that’s going to allow those guys to have Saquon Barkley-like numbers or Derrick Henry-like numbers. 

Brian Burke of ESPN agrees with Smith, that Henry and Barkley are the exceptions that prove the rule. But his reasoning is different, and it goes back to his military training:

BURKE: The concept is intransitivity. There is no one superior tactic. It’s circular. If the other 31 teams are all chasing pass blockers and receivers, and throwers and everything, and there’s a whole bunch of run blockers and running backs left on the table, there’s inefficiencies. It’s like, I’m going to go grab them and I’m going to be the best running team they’ve ever seen and they’re going to be unprepared for us and that’s going to be pretty effective. But only one or two teams can get away with that. 

I went back to my economist friend and co-host Roland Fryer and I asked him: if a young running back came to him for advice, what would he say?

FRYER: Learn how to throw. I mean, I don’t know what you want me to say. When market demand changes, particularly in something as intricate as the N.F.L., then certain positions will be more or less valued and going in, people will expect that. The other option would be to say when you do get the ball —

DUBNER: Run further. 

FRYER: Exactly. Be more productive. 

DUBNER: And yet, the end of your Wall Street Journal piece goes like this: “The economist in me likes the results” — meaning the results of your analysis, finding that running backs get paid less because they’re less valuable relatively. “But,” you write, “the kid in me hopes for a running back renaissance.”

FRYER: That’s right. 

DUBNER: So as, you know, as cool, calm and collected and economist-acting as you are right now, saying, “Come on, the market is the market,” there’s part of you emotionally that’s attached to my argument. 

FRYER: A hundred percent. This duality has lived in me since I became an economist. But you didn’t ask Juju, the kid from Daytona, to advise the players. But as an economist, again, this is all being driven by market forces.

Market forces are real but are they unstoppable? And what happens when they meet an immovable object? Or, even better, an object in motion, like Saquon Barkley, who also appears to be unstoppable? We’ll find out soon. Thanks to Roland Fryer for inspiring and collaborating on this episode; he was right: it was a lot of fun. And big thanks to all our guests: LeSean McCoy, Robert Smith, Robert Turbin, Jeffery Whitney, and Brian Burke. I think they all did a great job explaining a complicated game that many of us love, but which many others are often baffled by.

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Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. This episode was produced by Theo Jacobs. The Freakonomics Radio Network staff also includes Alina Kulman, Augusta Chapman, Dalvin Aboagye, Eleanor Osborne, Ellen Frankman, Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Greg Rippin, Jasmin Klinger, Jeremy Johnston, Jon Schnaars, Morgan Levey, Neal Carruth, Sarah Lilley, and Zack Lapinski. Our theme song is “Mr. Fortune,” by the Hitchhikers; our composer is Luis Guerra.