These are anecdotes, of course, but the idea of a team landing a star back without much of a pedigree for much less than market value dates back a long time. The same with replacing a dominant back with someone untested or less notable and thriving anyway. Brown and Davis were truly incredible players, but it’s telling that their teams were able to replace them and continue to run the ball at a high level. It would be naive to pretend the offensive infrastructure surrounding those players didn’t have something to do with their success, even if it shouldn’t be used to explain away all of their success.

Other teams noticed. More offenses run the outside zone concepts the Shanahan offense used to break down opposing defenses, even as McVay, Shanahan and others have gotten away from their old calling card to build a more varied rushing attack. Different organizations value the impact of a top-end running back at varying levels, but is there anyone out there who believes you can’t find a useful running back in the later rounds nowadays? There are simply more good running backs than there are opportunities for those players to succeed.

We actually saw a shift away from the first-round pick as the lead back early in the 1990s, but the most dramatic change has come over the past decade. As recently as the final few years of the first decade of the 21st century, nearly half of top backs on teams were Round 1 picks. That figure has nearly been cut in half, with those players replaced by middle-rounds selections.

Quarterbacks are more involved in the running game. What was once an anomaly has become something far more regular. Last season, there were five quarterbacks who threw the ball and ran it at least 100 times: Josh Allen, Justin Fields, Jalen Hurts, Daniel Jones and Lamar Jackson. From 1951 to 2001 — a 50-year window in which running backs were treated as essential players to a team’s success — quarterbacks joined the 100-100 club a total of four times.

Even as recently as that 2006-10 window, there was only one quarterback who posted a 100-100 season: Michael Vick, who did it for the Falcons in 2006 and the Eagles in 2010. Eight signal-callers have 100-carry seasons over the past five seasons. The idea of a quarterback being a significant portion of the designed run game simply wasn’t a feasible idea in the pro game for most of the past 70 years. Now, with rookie first-rounder Anthony Richardson moving into the starting lineup for the Colts, nearly a quarter of the league will have a significant role for their quarterback as part of their rushing attack in 2023.

From 2006 to 2010, quarterbacks accounted for 9.6% of the league’s rush attempts, including kneel-downs and scrambles. Over the past five years, that mark has risen to 14.5%. That gap is even more pronounced near the goal line. Quarterbacks have gone from capturing just over 10% of all runs inside the 3-yard line from 2006 to 2010 to just under 18% over the past five seasons.

Perhaps more notably for the purposes of running backs racking up gaudy numbers, quarterbacks also score more often than they did before. They score nearly 20% of the rushing touchdowns on those plays inside the 3-yard-line, up from just under 12% in the 2006-10 range. We still see seasons in which running backs rack up plenty of touchdowns in short yardage, but quarterbacks are stealing a higher percentage of the scoring glory than they did 15 years ago, let alone further back into the past.

Teams also recognize that quarterbacks have an element of gravity in terms of creating efficiency for their running backs, which has depressed the value of those backs on the open market. Take Philadelphia, where the threat of Hurts as a runner creates numerical advantages in the box and freezes defenders whose responsibilities might otherwise be to target the running back.

During his time in Philadelphia from 2019 to 2022, Miles Sanders averaged 5.4 yards per carry and 3.7 yards before first contact with a defender with Hurts on the field. When Hurts was backing up Carson Wentz or on the sideline, though, Sanders averaged 4.7 yards per carry and 2.8 yards before first contact. Sanders didn’t turn into a bad player without Hurts, but teams didn’t value him in free agency as a runner who would generate 5.0 yards per carry in a vacuum, even if his career yards per carry mark starts with a five.

Teams have gone away from the lead back model. The magic number for star backs used to be 300. When the league moved to the 16-game schedule in 1978, it was routine to see top backs carry the ball at least 300 times. Leaving aside the strike-shortened seasons, between 1978 and 2010, each year delivered an average of 6.5 backs who toted the rock 300 or more times. As recently as 2006, 10 backs posted 300-carry seasons.

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The largest running back contract for a rookie was Reggie Bush’s six-year, $62 million pact as the No. 2 pick in 2007. Bush got $26.4 million guaranteed at signing, which has been topped only six times by veterans signing extensions since the 2011 CBA, even as the cap has more than doubled. Teams were assigned rookie pool allocations for cap purposes and generally negotiated off prior contracts at each draft slot, but the top of the first round became an undesirable place to land players at any position.

The slotting system in the 2011 CBA essentially eliminated negotiations for draft picks. Players received a slotted amount for where they landed, regardless of their position or pedigree. Cam Newton, the first No. 1 pick under the new CBA, signed a four-year deal for $22 million, less than half of Bradford’s guarantee. When Trent Richardson came off the board with the No. 3 pick in the 2012 draft, his four-year deal with the Browns was worth $20.5 million. While the guarantees were closer, Richardson’s average annual salary was about half of what Bush had inked with the Saints five years earlier, even under a more lucrative salary cap.

This might seem as if it made the landscape better for running backs, given that backs taken in the first round would be cheaper than they had been in years before. Instead, it made things worse because of where they ranked on the league’s financial spectrum. With a slotted system, players at more lucrative and difficult-to-fill positions became more valuable, given that they were worth more on the open market and their rookie deals became bigger bargains. The rise of the quarterback on a rookie deal, in particular, entirely changed the way teams built their rosters.

That gap has only continued to grow, as I documented in my pre-draft piece on Bijan Robinson, given that the running back market has stayed stagnant while other positions have grown along with (or faster than) the rise in the salary cap.

The drafts from 2006 to 2010 delivered a particularly brutal run of first-round running backs. Fourteen backs were drafted in Round 1 over this five-year span before the new CBA. Two were significant hits for their teams: Adrian Peterson won an MVP for the Vikings, while Chris Johnson posted a 2,000-yard season and made it to three Pro Bowls with the Titans. Marshawn Lynch developed into a superstar, but he did so for the Seahawks after the Bills gave up on him and shipped him off to Seattle in 2010.

Otherwise, these first rounds were mostly disappointing. The Panthers got solid stretches from DeAngelo Williams and Jonathan Stewart, but Bush never lived up to expectations as a difference-maker in New Orleans. Darren McFadden failed to make a Pro Bowl after being taken as the No. 4 pick in one of the best drafts for backs in league history (2008). Felix Jones, Donald Brown, Beanie Wells and Laurence Maroney never turned into solid starters. It’s fair to wonder whether that frustrating stretch helped push teams away from considering backs as often in the first round.

Even after the first round and looking at more recent decisions, landing on the right backs in the draft is harder than you might think. Maybe you want to believe that some of the mistakes teams have made in the draft are just a product of foolish teams making subpar decisions. Well, who in the NFL is an authority on running the ball? Let’s go back to Kyle Shanahan, who has been able to build an effective rushing attack virtually everywhere he has gone. If anybody should know whom to target at running back, it’s the San Francisco coach, right?

While having a strong say in personnel with the 49ers, Shanahan has repeatedly prioritized backs who haven’t worked out. In 2017, he reportedly pounded the table to move up in the fourth round and draft Utah back Joe Williams, who never played an NFL snap. The Niners signed Jerick McKinnon to a massive deal in free agency in 2018, only for the former Vikings backup to tear his ACL.

Shanahan couldn’t have anticipated McKinnon’s injury, but he went back to the well the next season and signed away Tevin Coleman from the Falcons. Coleman averaged 3.5 yards per carry in San Francisco. In 2021, the 49ers used a third-round pick on Trey Sermon, who fell out of favor almost immediately and was waived after one season. Finally, last year, they used another third-round pick on Tyrion Davis-Price, who averaged 2.9 yards per carry as a rookie and was quickly usurped in the lineup by a trade for Christian McCaffrey.

Until the trade for McCaffrey, once Shanahan got his players on the field, he almost always ended up preferring a less notable option to the players he had prioritized in the draft or free agency. Matt Breida proved to be a home run hitter as an undrafted free agent addition in 2017. Later that year, the 49ers signed special teams journeyman Raheem Mostert; he averaged nearly 6.0 yards per carry with the team and scored four touchdowns in the NFC Championship Game win over the Packers. Undrafted free agent Jeff Wilson and sixth-round pick Elijah Mitchell also had stretches as an effective lead back in San Francisco.

Early look at the 2024 NFL draft