Why Elliott, Cook, others remain free agents, and what it means
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Bill Barnwell, ESPN Staff Writer
Something feels wrong about what’s happening for running backs in the NFL. As teams approach training camp later this month, four respected veteran rushers remain free agents, seemingly with little interest. Kareem Hunt wasn’t re-signed by the Browns after his contract expired, while Ezekiel Elliott, Leonard Fournette and Dalvin Cook were released by their respective franchises to create salary cap space. None of the four has signed elsewhere.
Popular veterans getting cut toward the tail end of their careers is nothing new, but the age at which these players have become free agents stands out. Cook, Elliott and Hunt are 27. Fournette is 28. 27-year-old stars at other positions are years from being cut candidates. No team would dream of moving on from Myles Garrett, Deebo Samuel or Budda Baker, each of whom is 27. Those 27-year-olds who play other positions are in the primes of their careers. Meanwhile, 27-year-old running backs are being portrayed as fossils hanging on to any hope of a meaningful NFL career for dear life.
Players are getting squeezed on both sides. With the first round of April’s draft as an exception, draft capital used on running backs continues to fall. Bijan Robinson and Jahmyr Gibbs became the first running back duo to be selected in the top half of Round 1 since Fournette and Christian McCaffrey in 2017, a feat that happened far more often in the past. In 2022, no back came off the board in the top 32 picks, something that didn’t happen even once over a nearly 50-year span between 1964 and 2012. Teams are using less draft capital on backs than ever before, and they appear to be more aggressive in moving on from their lead backs once they sign extensions.
A league that was once built around star backs dominating offensive workloads and competing for MVP awards now feels like something entirely different. When the Falcons and Lions drafted Robinson and Gibbs, they had to bring up the possibility of the backs as receivers around the formation to justify their choices. Backs who have received the franchise tag (such as Josh Jacobs this year) or who are approaching the time when they might earn their first extension (such as Najee Harris) are publicly wondering about whether running backs are getting a fair shake. It’s reasonable to wonder whether star high school and college players should even consider playing running back when other positions offer more professional upside and stability.
None of this is brand-new, but the stress on running backs to produce and get paid before they’re cast aside feels more acute than ever. Has there been an even more significant shift in recent years than what has been perceived? Is it a case of analytics run amok? Are teams being foolish in how they’re valuing even the best backs? And is there any way to break the cycle and get running backs paid more money in the decades to come?
There’s no single factor dictating the situation with running backs, but let’s establish the playing field for the position before we focus on the four backs left in free agency.
Jump to a topic:
Six reasons RBs have been devalued
Have teams actually gone too far?
Are star backs getting as much time?
Why are there four veterans still available?
What happens now with Barkley, Jacobs?
RBs do deserve to get paid, right?
How can the market change now?
When did the shift away from valuing star running backs happen?
Ask 10 people this question and you’re likely to get 10 different answers. The most recent example was a person who is eminently qualified to answer it: former Chargers and Broncos back Melvin Gordon, who won a Super Bowl last season without ever playing a snap for the Chiefs. Gordon tied it to Rams coach Sean McVay and star back Todd Gurley, suggesting McVay had regretted paying Gurley and had decided to rotate his backs from that point forward.
I certainly think the Rams regret giving Gurley an extension in 2018, as we’ll discuss in a minute, but the tactic reared its head before Gurley’s downswing and hasn’t reflected how L.A. has used its backs since. McVay has been comfortable using Cam Akers as something close to an every-down back when the coach and his back are simpatico, with the 2021 postseason win over the Buccaneers (in a game in which Akers was the worst player on the field) and the final few weeks of last season as examples. Akers, a second-round pick in 2020, isn’t getting paid significant money on his rookie deal, and McVay isn’t rotating his backs for the sake of keeping their value down.
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From my perspective, the running back value conversation dates back to McVay’s old boss and one of the league’s best offenses. Mike Shanahan’s Denver teams produced huge numbers with a series of unheralded rookies, undrafted free agents and journeymen rotating through at running back. The most famous and successful back of the bunch, Hall of Famer 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. Take the defending champs. The Chiefs’ lead back last season was seventh-round pick The RB value shift in the draft
| Year | Round 1 | Rounds 2-4 | Rounds 5+ | Undrafted |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1981-85 | 51.4% | 27.1% | 20.0% | 1.4% |
| 1986-90 | 55.0% | 25.0% | 18.6% | 1.4% |
| 1991-95 | 38.7% | 32.4% | 26.8% | 2.1% |
| 1996-2000 | 41.4% | 40.1% | 15.1% | 3.3% |
| 2001-05 | 44.0% | 44.7% | 2.5% | 8.8% |
| 2006-10 | 46.9% | 34.4% | 7.5% | 11.3% |
| 2011-15 | 35.0% | 36.3% | 13.8% | 15.0% |
| 2016-22 | 26.5% | 51.1% | 11.7% | 10.8% |
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.
The other side of this is: Should teams be drafting backs more often in Round 1 before simply letting them leave in free agency? While I’ve heard this often as a plan, I don’t believe it’s an ideal way to approach the issue, and I laid out why in my article on Bijan Robinson. There are two factors at hand. One is the success rate of those first-round picks; whether you use the 2011 post-CBA rules or go back further, into the 1980s, they haven’t been good bets in the first round relative to other positions.
Another argument is opportunity cost. It’s easier to find useful running backs in the later rounds of the draft than it is to find players at any other position. When you factor in the outsize value in landing a wide receiver, edge rusher or cornerback in the draft relative to what they make on veteran deals, the value in taking a running back in the first round simply isn’t there.
Are star backs not getting as much time as they did in previous years?
It certainly feels that way. Take the case of Todd Gurley, who was Offensive Player of the Year at age 23, third in that race at age 24, cut after his age-25 season and out of football after his age-26 campaign. The backs on the free agent market now would have been considered as players in the prime of their careers 20 or 30 years ago. This idea is worth testing.
It’s tough to have an empirical example of what qualifies as a star back and his run as a starter, so I had to come up with my own definition. For every decade going back through the AFL-NFL merger in 1970, I identified the running backs who made the Pro Bowl at least once among their first three seasons. (I excluded backs who earned their nod because of their special teams work, such as Tarik Cohen.) Then, with the help of Pro Football Reference, I tracked how many seasons they lasted as a primary back in the league from Year 4 onward.
The numbers in the past might not be as large as you think. In the 1970s, the backs averaged 3.7 seasons as a starter after Year 3. In the 1980s, that dropped to 3.3, but the number spiked to 5.7 seasons in the 1990s and stayed high at 4.7 during the first decade of the 21st century. The average over that four-decade span was 4.2 seasons.
If we get to the window between 2010 and 2019 and focus on the backs whose careers as starters are definitely over, the average is scary: It’s 1.8 seasons. Players who seemed as if they could be standouts for years to come have quickly fallen off of the mountaintop. Gurley’s knee hindered his explosiveness. Devonta Freeman and Alfred Morris fell off after offensive coordinator Kyle Shanahan left for another city. David Johnson wasn’t able to stay healthy. Le’Veon Bell wasn’t the same after leaving Pittsburgh. DeMarco Murray wasn’t consistent. Melvin Gordon couldn’t protect the football.
Of course, that’s subject to some major selection bias, as it doesn’t include the backs whose careers are still going. In the case of Nick Chubb or Christian McCaffrey, they might have another half-decade to go as starters, which would dramatically improve those numbers. Josh Jacobs just had a career year. There’s a chance some of the backs from that decade — or Jonathan Taylor in the current one — could last for years to come.
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And yet, of those nine backs, it feels as if many are closer to the end than the beginning. It includes Dalvin Cook, Ezekiel Elliott and Kareem Hunt, each of whom are free agents. Alvin Kamara hasn’t been the same since Drew Brees retired after the 2020 season. James Conner hasn’t completed a single full season and is playing for a tanking Cardinals team. McCaffrey and Saquon Barkley were healthy last season after missing most of the prior two seasons with injuries. I wouldn’t be surprised if one of those backs broke through and lasted another seven or eight years as a starter, but unless a handful sustain their success, the 2010s are going to be an era in which promising young backs had shorter shelf lives than at any point since the AFL-NFL merger.
I’m not sure I can make a strong case that teams are giving up on those backs too quickly, either. When I looked at the 16 backs who are already finished as starters from the 2010s, it’s tough to find many who were playing well after leaving their initial teams. C.J. Anderson looked great in a late-season stint for the Rams in 2018 but got only 16 carries with the Lions afterward. Ryan Mathews had one solid season with the Eagles but retired after suffering a herniated disk in his neck. The only player from this group who left his first team and proceeded to make a Pro Bowl afterward was Murray, who made it with the Titans in 2016, dropped off the following season, then retired.
It’s also fair to point out that veterans at other positions don’t always return to form after they get off to hot starts. Ask the Rams about Allen Robinson. If we take wide receiver as an example, though, we’re not seeing the same sort of drop-off for players from that decade. Of the 30 wide receivers who made a Pro Bowl before Year 4, we’ve seen Tyreek Hill, Amari Cooper and DeAndre Hopkins excel after moving elsewhere.
On the whole, the NFL is getting younger. In terms of snap-weighted age — the average age for a player weighted by how many snaps each took during a given season — the league has been in a steady downswing toward youth. In 2007, the first year ESPN has snap data available, the average age of a player was 27.8 years old. That figure has declined in 13 of the 15 subsequent seasons, dropping all the way down to an even 27.0 last season.
But why are there four solid backs in the prime of their careers still left in free agency in mid-July?
Those four aren’t quite as impressive as their names might indicate. Kareem Hunt averaged 3.8 yards per carry last season, was a situational back in Cleveland and is a no-go for some organizations after he shoved and kicked a woman in 2018. Ezekiel Elliott’s efficiency as a runner and receiver has dropped each of the past three seasons, and he has played through injuries since 2021 in Dallas. Leonard Fournette arguably was the league’s least productive starting back in Tampa Bay a year ago. And while Dalvin Cook stayed healthy for 17 games for the first time as a pro, he posted below-average rush yards over expectation (RYOE) marks and has battled myriad injuries throughout his career with the Vikings.
Each of those backs still has something to offer in the right situation, but it would be foolish to project them as the players they were at their peak. More important is the market into which they’ve landed. Teams have had all offseason to shore up their running back rotation in free agency and with draft picks. No team has had a key running back suffer a significant injury in minicamp or during offseason workouts to open up a starting job.
I say it a lot because it’s important: NFL contracts are about leverage as opposed to talent. Players need talent to have leverage, but talent alone doesn’t explain anything. Right now, there are four backs who are qualified for steady NFL work available in free agency. How many teams actually have an opening? In terms of starting work, it might only be the Buccaneers, who are in a difficult cap situation and like 2022 third-rounder Rachaad White.
Other teams could consider a rotation player — the Dolphins, Rams, Bengals or Ravens make sense — but there’s no team in desperate need of a starter. Even if they were, they would be able to play these four backs against one another, which would keep their potential earnings down. If Cook or Elliott wanted to sign tomorrow for the minimum and just wanted to be in a training camp, they would have no trouble landing a job. Given the landscape and the paucity of openings, it’s tough for them to land meaningful money.
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This is an issue that only seems to come up in conversation around running backs. I’ve never heard anyone argue that safeties or centers or gunners on special teams don’t make enough money, even though they train just as hard and are also putting their bodies on the line. Of course, those positions never held a position of outsize significance and competed for MVP awards, so we don’t think of them as misvalued or the product of an unwanted change in the same way that the running back landscape has changed over the last decade.
The reality is we have a soft spot for players who touch the football. It’s fine! Running backs are more fun than offensive linemen or safeties. I understand. The outsize importance of running backs in fantasy football is always going to make them a bigger piece of the puzzle than those players impact actual wins and losses. It’s not just a fan thing, though. Players routinely placed as many or more running backs on their top 100 list than they did offensive linemen, even given that there are five linemen and just one or two backs on the field at all times. The number of backs voted into the Hall of Fame over the past 25 years isn’t far off from the number of offensive linemen, either.
How can the market change so more running backs do get paid?
We’re not about to reverse to the universe in which backs are consistently competing for MVP awards and ranking as the highest-paid non-quarterbacks. I’m also not sure whether there’s a back who will push the top of the market past Christian McCaffrey’s $16 million annual average, either. Jonathan Taylor has a shot if he returns to his 2021 form, but after him, the next in line for that sort of massive contract might be Bijan Robinson and Jahmyr Gibbs, neither of whom has taken a single NFL snap. (For more on this, CBS Sports’ Joel Corry recently wrote at length about the stagnation of the top of the market.)
Calls for more fanciful solutions aren’t realistic. Running backs aren’t going to be able to form their own union. Players aren’t going to hold out en masse. A player such as Jacobs refusing to sign a long-term deal is more likely to hurt Jacobs than it is move the line forward for the backs to come. The economic reality for backs, at least at the pro level, isn’t going anywhere.
What about college, though? With backs still producing Heisman-caliber season at the amateur level, it’s fair to expect the best in the nation to accrue more NIL money during their college careers. One estimate suggested Robinson was worth $1.5 million in NIL money during his final season at Texas through deals with various companies. That’s more than most rookie backs at the NFL level made a year ago.
With the NFL pushing all but the truly elite college backs out of the first round of the draft, college players are going to be facing scenarios in which they can stay in school and earn more money than they would by moving to the pros. Everyone dreams of playing in the NFL, but players might not be as aggressive about declaring for the draft if they can stay on campus and get paid even more in the process.
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The CBA isn’t going to change soon — it runs until 2030 — but when the players sit down with the league during their next set of negotiations, I’d like to see them push for a path to playing one’s way out of a rookie deal. Owners aren’t going to want to pay players earlier than they have in years past, which will make this a tough sell, but it’s the only realistic way for running backs to make more money.
The easiest way to do this would be some kind of statistical threshold, where a running back immediately becomes eligible for an extension if he puts up some round number (let’s say 1,500 yards from scrimmage) in his first two seasons. Given that other positions don’t rack up statistics, though, applying a statistical benchmark for certain spots might not be realistic. One simpler way to do it would be to use year-end awards: If a player is voted to the Pro Bowl in either of his first two campaigns, he would become eligible for an extension after his second season as opposed to his third.
It’s a fanciful idea, but one that’s years away from even being considered, let alone actually coming into play. Given the extent of how the league has changed and the way the running back market has stagnated, though, it’s going to take something creative to return backs to their prior position of glory as one of the most celebrated positions in football.
