At no other position — perhaps in all sports — is it harder to be rewarded for excellence than running back in the NFL.
Last season, Saquon Barkley had his most productive season by almost every measure. He was an important part of the Giants’ resurgence. Still, he’s demanding fair compensation this week, and speaking to reporters after his New Jersey youth football camp last Sunday, he said he wasn’t looking for a market-changing deal.
Josh Jacobs led the league in rushing and was arguably the best running back in the league last season not named Nick Chubb. While only 25 years old, he only has the franchise player title on the table to date, with no long-term contract in sight.
The main reasons teams are reluctant to give running backs long-term contracts after their rookie contracts expire are longevity and saturation. Running backs are tough, their careers don’t last long, and often even great running backs can sportively fall off a cliff sooner than expected. Also, there are many good running backs on the market who, given the right situation, can perform at near elite levels. This phenomenon does not often occur in other positions.
Pro Football Network’s Arif Hasan examined every running back contract signed since 2016 with an average annual value consuming at least 4 percent of the cap and compared those players’ performance two years before signing to their performance three years after signing. He found that only four out of 17 were honoring their contracts. Dalvin Cook, who signed a five-year contract extension, was dropped last week after just two years on the contract.
If Jacobs and Barkley get long-term renewals, to meet them they must buck the trend and stay healthy while producing at a much higher level than potentially cheaper substitutes — two feats that have rarely been matched. First, to answer whether Jacobs and Barkley are worth the expansions they’re aiming for, I watched a movie and looked at Telemetry Sports data derived from Next Gen Sports microchip data.
Roaring explosiveness — Next Gen Stats defines expected yards as the rushing yards a ball carrier is likely to gain on a given carry, based on the relative position, speed, and direction of blockers and defenders. These factors are measured by microchip data. Telemetry defines an explosive run as a run in which actual yards gained is at least 10 yards more than expected yards gained.
Rushing volatility – A percentile that measures a player’s volatility based on facts such as yards after contact and tackles avoided.
game speed – A percentile value that accounts for linear velocity, acceleration, and direction change.
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Last season, Jacobs ranked 35th out of 69 players for rushing explosiveness. To add context, Jacobs led the league in rush attempts against two deep security defenses. Teams kept their safeties low out of respect for Davante Adams, which benefited Jacobs, who, by Telemetry’s definition, simply lacked the long pace to make many explosive plays. His game speed was ranked 44th out of 69 and has been on the low end throughout his career. Though the Raiders’ offense gave him room to run, he was exceptionally good at missing multiple tacklers in tight spaces when dealing with penetration and unblocking players. He was a tackle-break machine and placed 7th out of 69 in the Rushing Elusiveness category.
With dead money on his contract, Adams will likely be a raider in the long run, but will teams continue to respect his ability to beat them with Jimmy Garoppolo, who is one of the rarest deep ball pitchers in the league? at the helm? Can Jacobs produce at a high level with more loaded boxes? Those are legitimate concerns. Jacobs is making players miss with his deft footwork and power, and it doesn’t look like it’s going anywhere anytime soon. Since he doesn’t rely on sheer speed to win and he’s never suffered a major injury in the league, it looks like Jacobs has at least a few more seasons to play at a high level, if not more can.
Barkley is almost the opposite of Jacobs. He doesn’t break many tackles but is explosive in the open field. Barkley placed 19th of 69 in rapid explosiveness and 16th of 64 in game speed. Early in the season, Barkley looked like breaking tackles more often, but as time went on he struggled with it. He ranked 54th out of 70 in the Rushing Volatility category.
His carries were also reduced over the course of the season. From weeks 1 through 10, Barkley averaged 19.8 carries per game. From weeks 11 to 17, he averaged 13.8 broadcasts per game. But the downward trend in carries could be due to how the defense played against the Giants and how their passing game developed.
“If you come back to my situation, to me personally, I feel like I’ve helped our team a lot,” Barkley said. “I feel like a leader not only on the field but also off the field. I feel like there’s obviously talk of my numbers going down. I think there’s a whole bunch of other stuff that played randomly. It’s the NFL. At the beginning of the season we were a one-dimensional team. We let the ball go.”
Injuries are a bigger problem at Barkley than at Jacobs. In 2020, Barkley tore his ACL in Week 2 and in 2021 he missed four games with a lower ankle injury. With a back built for explosiveness and speed, how effective will Barkley be when his athletics are compromised by injuries?
Non-contracted Raiders running back Josh Jacobs was absent from mandatory mini-camp as he seeks a new contract. (Stephen R. Sylvanie / USA Today)
Despite the risk, the Giants and Raiders are likely to sign long-term deals with their star running backs. To understand what those deals look like in this modern, sluggish running backs market, I spoke to Brad Spielberger, a salary cap analyst for Pro Football Focus, and Jason Fitzgerald, founder of Over the Cap.
“I think they’ll be similar when they’re done, with Jacobs obviously being more productive last season, but Barkley has the draft status cache (second overall draft),” Spielberger said. “I’d say the first one that gets signed gets about $13 million a year, and the second then a little more, between $13 (million) and $14 million, over a three-year or four-year term . At four years, the total warranty is about $30 million.”
Fitzgerald thinks it makes sense that Barkley would get a deal similar to Derrick Henry’s. Henry signed a four-year, $50 million deal with a $13.5 million guarantee.
“Basically guarantee him the equivalent of two tags plus maybe a few dollars more — in the range of $12 (million) to $13 million a year,” Fitzgerald said. “Jacobs is a bit more difficult as I don’t think the Raiders invest that much in him. Maybe a deal like Aaron Jones pays about $10 million a year on the front end but has weird money on the back end so the average goes up to $12 million a year.”
Spielberger believes it will be a couple of years before we see a deal as big as that of Ezekiel Elliot ($15 million APY) or Christian McCaffrey ($16 million APY), while Fitzgerald thinks it’s highly unlikely that we see a market-changing deal for a running back in the foreseeable future, unless it was some weird money that’s pushing up the APR. As unfair as it is for a position with such a short lifespan, teams have been burned too many times in the past.
If the Giants and Raiders could, they’d likely let Barkley and Jacobs play at the franchise tag year after year until they saw signs of decline. But football also has a human side. Both players are leaders in their dressing rooms, they have signed new contracts with their game and having disgruntled players in the dressing room is not ideal. What those contracts are likely to look like will frame what elite running back contracts look like.
(Top photo by Saquon Barkley: Jamie Squire/Getty Images)