Running Backs Should Get In A Picket Line
Saquon Barkley and Karl Marx walk into a bar…
Now that Hollywood has descended into a battle zone, the most fragile labor peace in America appears to be between NFL running backs and the teams that employ them. Monday was the latest crack in the armor, and the situation looks very combustible.
Here’s where we are:
Josh Jacobs, #1 in rushing for 2022, is debating sitting out in 2023
Derrick Henry, #2 in rushing, Tweeted “at this point, just take the RB position out of the game”
Saquon Barkley, #4 in rushing, is actively threatening to sit out the year
Christian McCaffrey, #9 in rushing, called the current negotiations “criminal”
What prompted the complaint is a precipitously dropping market. The top 10 running backs are set to make just about $11 million this year - that number is astronomical for the US but low for the NFL. The top 10 wide receivers average $25 million and that’s $14 million for tight ends and $46 million for quarterbacks. And most teams think that’s rich for running backs: Minnesota & Philadelphia intentionally fired their top-6 running backs rather than pay them that market rate.
Whining on Twitter and sitting out won’t change that. The invisible hand is too strong. Running backs need to get substantially more radical or they will continue to get obliterated at the negotiating table. They need to go farther than any group of athletes has gone before in these labor fights. They need to form their own union, and to abolish the draft.
The Rules Of The Game
Before we can get into the specifics, a quick recap on the highly regulated world of NFL contracts. In the NFL, the league dictates all the rules about how teams can pay players. The players are capped at receiving 48.5% of total league revenue. This year, that’s $225 million per team for 55 players. Every player and their agent negotiate contracts directly with the team, fighting over their piece of the $225 million pie.
Running backs get an increasingly small part of that pie. Using team spending data for the last 10 years, we can see a sharp drop for running backs, who are now the lowest paid group of players in the league1. They get just 4.7% of the pie - down nearly 2% from two years ago. The only other group that saw even a comparable decline? Linebackers: the people on the football field largely tasked with defending running backs.
But this understates the problem. The NFL is generally a rising tide. Since 2013, the league has continued to get more and more popular. Revenues have risen quite a bit, and player salaries - as a fixed percentage of league income - go to the moon with them. Growth has dumped two billion dollars of extra salary into the players’ laps, but while most position groups were vacuuming up cash, running backs were scrambling for handouts. Between 2013 and 2022, running back salaries got just 1.7% of that new money - 33 million. Adjust for inflation, and they actually got paid 21 million less than they did in 2013.
OK - so as a recap:
Running backs are the worst-paid position group in the NFL
They’re watching their peers do snow angels in a growing pile of cash
But they’re making less now than they did in 2013
Where Running Backs Lose
But why? Running backs are undoubtedly some of the most popular players in the NFL. They are central to the league’s marketing efforts: since 2000, the league’s signature video game, Madden, has put more running backs on the cover than anyone but the quarterbacks. The explosion of fantasy football - where running backs are the most important players - has only helped their marketing value. Why don’t they see any of the moolah? There are a couple theories.
The one you read often: running backs are less and less important to the NFL game of 2023. With the growth of the passing game, so the argument goes, teams are redirecting dollars to quarterbacks and wide receivers. This is certainly supported by the data above, but I’m a bit skeptical. Here are the average rushing / passing attempts for the NFL over the last 20 years:
2022: 33.3 passes, 27.3 rushes
2017: 34.5 passes, 25.9 rushes
2012: 34.7 passes, 27.2 rushes
2007: 33.3 passes, 27.3 rushes
2002: 33.8 passes, 27.5 rushes
The numbers are basically indistinguishable. It’s not that teams have gotten dramatically better at passing either: passing yards have gone from 212.2 to 218.5 per game, and rushing yards from 116.1 to 121.6 per game. I don’t see it.
There are two theories I like better, both of which are grounded in clear labor economics. The first is that the labor pool is simply too oversaturated with equivalent talent. The best any employee can do in a salary negotiation is roughly the cost it would take the employer to replace them. If there’s an equally good candidate willing to do the same work for less money, they’ll get the job. Barkley and Jacobs may think they’ve clearly shown themselves to be head and shoulders above the field, but their teams - and the NFL overall - disagrees. An NFL scout said the quiet part out loud: teams would rather give a four-year contract to a good 22-year-old prospect out of college than a 26-year-old star.
His comment reflect the market reality. Running backs are seldom given contracts lasting into the late 20s. Work past 30 is nearly unheard of. Below, I’ve graphed the contract terms for the top 64 players (2 per team) in each main offensive position. The y-axis shows the % of players with a contract going through a given age. A 24 year old with a 3 year contract is guaranteed to be paid through age 27. What this says is that exactly 5% of top NFL running backs have a contract in place that will pay them past age 30. That’s three guys. Three!!! None are even starters. All have small contracts, making close to the league minimum for their experience.
Why can teams afford to do this? It’s because there is a huge amount of talent entering the league every year through the draft. Of the 64 highest paid running backs, 35 are on their 4-year rookie deal. That’s 10 candidates each year, entering the market at bargain salaries (average of ~$1.7 million a year). Rookies are cheap and healthy, not having fought in the NFL coliseum. Barkley and Jacobs have proven they’re a lot better than the average new candidate so far, but they’re asking for 10 times the salary, with four years of accumulated injuries.
This theory explains the problem well. Even if running backs were providing a lot of value - and I’d argue they still do - there’s a constant discrepancy between demand, fixed at 32 starting jobs, and supply. Said in general terms, the running back economy gets a constant influx of new workers toiling at lower salaries in the same difficult jobs. Not an environment for wage growth.
But this theory fails in one important dimension. It gets the culprit wrong. The problem is not necessarily an oversupply of new running backs every year, it’s an oversupply of low-wage running backs. Because rookie contract terms are specified directly by the collective bargaining agreement the NFL player’s union signs with the league, those players are not subject to the free market and ruin the market for everyone else.
Consider this scenario: in your neighborhood, 100 new apartments spring up. They’re roughly as nice as yours, but rent-controlled at 30% of your rent. The city announces nobody can move into your neighborhood either, so they’ll sit empty unless you use them. The rent in your neighborhood would crash immediately, probably around the level of the new apartments.
The draft is the constant supply of rent-controlled apartments. It’s what ruins the market for all the existing landlords - the veteran running backs in our analogy.
The key part is that the new units are rent controlled. The oversupply wouldn’t mean much otherwise: take the same scenario, but the apartments are not rent-controlled. Even if nobody moves into the neighborhood, the prices will stay fairly steady. Yes, maybe the new landlord drops the prices a bit to attract renters to try the new unknown building, but your rent would stay roughly the same.
The players blame the teams. The media blames the market. I blame the draft.
How To Fix It
A logical next step would be “let’s eliminate the draft”. I would support that too, but it’s even less actionable than my crazy idea. The reason why is for most NFL players, the draft is a good thing. Since the pool of player salaries is fixed, eliminating the draft and moving to an open market will increase salaries for rookies, cutting the pool for everyone else. The NFLPA is made up almost entirely of veteran player reps. They’re not looking out for rookies, and won’t ever do anything that helps them at their own expense.
But running backs are uniquely victimized by the draft process and have an incentive to care.
Rookies comprise the largest proportion of the labor force. In my analysis of contracts, rookies made up 55% of top running backs. They made up just 26% of quarterbacks and 36% of wide receivers.
They reach the top of their profession fastest - ESPN recently ranked running backs and just two of the top 16 were older than 27. Seven are on the rookie deals.
They have the shortest careers (see graph above)
For these three reasons, the vast majority of the value they’ll create for teams in their careers will come in the first five years - most under their draft contracts. This is why the NFL scout strategy works so well: drafting a good running back gets the best years at the cheapest price. Other positions peak later (offensive line, defensive tackle, quarterback) or have longer careers (cornerback, safety, wide receiver) and so generate most of their value while the market is willing to pay them fairly for it.
Running backs won’t ever convince the union to drop the draft, or fight hard for their rights. The first graph showed as teams pay less to running backs, it flows into the pockets of everyone else. Structurally, they need to be their own advocates.
The mechanics of this are likely quite difficult, but all union politics are by nature. This union would start with less in guaranteed benefits than the NFLPA, and heavy backlash from all parties to get off the ground.
But let’s live a world where sufficiently determined leadership gets it done. Every running back coming out of college would sign with the running back union, not the NFLPA. All running backs would go straight into free agency along with all the veterans, and teams would pay what they thought the player was worth. Top draftees would get salaries five or six times their current rate, commensurate with their value. The market would still be quite tough, but the players would take all the surplus value back from the owners.
If players felt they were underpaid, they could hold out as a unit - a likely far more effective strategy than what Barkley and Jacobs are planning to do. By ridding the market of all supply, they’d turn the economics more in their favor. Imagine a running back version of the 2012 NFL referee lockout, where the NFL only came back to the table reluctantly after seeing how bad the outside option was. Their importance to NFL marketing could be a tool to leverage in seeking to eliminate anti-market practices like the franchise tag that also disproportionately punish them.
It sounds crazy, I admit. But in an environment where running back real wages are falling and their market power is waning, crazy might just be what it takes.
Special teams players were not included in the analysis.