On July 25, Saquon Barkley agreed to a contract for one-year and up to $11-million with the Giants.
No other position — maybe in all of sports — is as difficult to be rewarded for elite production in as running back in the NFL.
Last season, Saquon Barkley had his most productive season in nearly every metric. He was a vital part of the Giants’ resurgence. Yet, as of this week, he’s still being asked to be compensated fairly and said he’s not looking for a market-resetting deal, talking to reporters after his youth football camp in New Jersey last Sunday.
Advertisement
Josh Jacobs led the league in rushing and was arguably the best running back in the league last season not named Nick Chubb. He’s still only 25, yet as of today, he only has the franchise tag on the table with no long-term deal in sight.
The main reasons teams are hesitant to give running backs long-term contracts after their rookie deals expire are longevity and saturation. Running backs take a beating, their careers aren’t long and often, even great running backs can fall off a cliff athletically earlier than expected. Also, there are a lot of good running backs on the market who can produce at close to elite levels in the right situation. This phenomenon doesn’t happen often with other positions.
Read more: Best NFL futures bets: Why the AFC’s overall strength creates conference title value
Pro Football Network’s Arif Hasan looked at every running back contract signed since 2016 with an average annual value that consumed at least 4 percent of the cap and compared those players’ production two years before signing to their production three years after signing. He found that only four out of 17 made good on their contracts. Dalvin Cook, who signed a five-year extension, was cut last week after only two years into his contract.
If Jacobs and Barkley get long-term extensions, to live up to them, they’ll have to buck the trend and stay healthy while producing at a much higher level than potentially cheaper replacements — two feats that rarely have been accomplished. To begin to try to answer whether Jacobs and Barkley will be worth the extensions they seek, I watched film and looked at data from Telemetry Sports, which is derived from microchip data from Next Gen Sports.
Rushing explosiveness — Next Gen Stats defines expected yards as the rushing yards a ball carrier is expected to gain on a given carry based on the relative location, speed and direction of blockers and defenders. These factors are measured by microchip data. Telemetry defines an explosive run as a run in which the actual yards gained are at least 10 yards more than the expected yards gained.
Advertisement
Rushing elusiveness — A percentile score that measures a player’s elusiveness based on facts such as yards after contact and tackles avoided.
Play speed — A percentile score that factors in linear speed, acceleration and change of direction.
GO DEEPER
The pay disparity for NFL running backs is as wrong as it is wide
Last season, Jacobs ranked 35th out of 69 players in rushing explosiveness. To add context, Jacobs led the league in rush attempts against two-deep safety defenses. Out of respect for Davante Adams, teams kept their safeties deep, which benefited Jacobs, who simply lacked the long speed to create a lot of explosive plays according to Telemetry’s definition. His play speed ranked 44th out of 69 and has been on the lower end throughout his career. Though the Raiders offense created space for him to run, when he did deal with penetration and unblocked players, he was exceptional at making multiple tacklers miss in tight spaces. He was a tackle-breaking machine, ranking 7th out of 69 in rushing elusiveness.
Because of the dead money on his contract, Adams will likely be a Raider for the long haul, but will teams continue to respect his ability to beat them deep with Jimmy Garoppolo, who is one of the least frequent deep ball throwers in the league, at the helm? Can Jacobs produce at a high level with more loaded boxes? Those are legitimate concerns. Jacobs makes players miss with nifty footwork and power and that doesn’t look like it’s going anywhere soon. Because he doesn’t rely on pure speed to win and he’s never had a major injury in the league, Jacobs looks like he can still play at a high level for at least a few more seasons if not longer.
Barkley is almost the foil to Jacobs. He doesn’t break a lot of tackles, but he’s explosive in the open field. Barkley ranked 19th out of 69 in rushing explosiveness and 16th out of 64 in play speed. Barkley looked like he was breaking tackles at a higher rate in the beginning of the season, but as it wore along, he struggled to do so. He ranked 54th out of 70 in rushing elusiveness.
Advertisement
His carries were also cut down as the season progressed. From weeks 1-10, Barkley averaged 19.8 carries per game. From weeks 11-17, he averaged 13.8 carries per game. But the downtrend in carries could have been attributed to how defenses played the Giants and the development of their passing game.
“When you come to my situation, coming to me personally, I feel like that I helped our team a lot,” Barkley said. “I feel like not only on the field but off the field as a leader. I feel like obviously there’s a conversation of my numbers going down. I think there’s a whole lot of other stuff that happened to play. It’s the NFL. We were a one-dimensional team in the beginning of the season. We were running the ball.”
Injuries are a bigger concern with Barkley than they are with Jacobs. In 2020, Barkley tore his ACL in Week 2, and in 2021, he missed four games because of a low ankle injury. With a back that relies on explosion and speed, it’s right to question how effective Barkley will be when injuries start to take away from his athleticism.
Despite the risk, the Giants and Raiders likely will get long-term deals done with their star running backs. To understand how those deals look in this modern, sluggish running backs market, I talked to Brad Spielberger, who is a salary-cap analyst for Pro Football Focus, and Jason Fitzgerald, founder of Over the Cap.
“I think they’ll be similar, if they get done, with Jacobs more productive last season obviously, but Barkley carries the draft status cache (drafted second overall),” Spielberger said. “I’d say first guy to get signed gets around $13 million per year and then the second will get just above that, between $13 (million)-$14 million, on a three- or four-year term. If four years, total guarantee right in the $30 million range.”
Fitzgerald believes that Barkley’s getting a similar deal to Derrick Henry makes sense. Henry signed a four-year, $50 million deal with $13.5 million guaranteed.
“Basically, guarantee him what would be the equivalent of two tags plus maybe a few dollars more — $12 (million)-$13 million-a-year range,” Fitzgerald said. “Jacobs is a bit harder since I don’t think the Raiders are as invested in him. Maybe a deal like Aaron Jones did that pays around $10 million a year on the front end but had funny money on the back end to get the average per year up to $12 million.”
Advertisement
Spielberger believes it’ll be a few years before we see a deal as big as Ezekiel Elliot’s ($15 million APY) or Christian McCaffrey’s ($16 million APY), while Fitzgerald believes it’s highly unlikely we see a market-resetting deal for a running back in the foreseeable future unless it involved funny money that pumps up the APY. 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 probably would have Barkley and Jacobs play on the franchise tag year after year until they see signs of decline coming. But there’s a human side to football. Both players are leaders in their locker rooms, they’ve earned new contracts with their play, and having disgruntled players in the locker room isn’t ideal. How these contracts look likely will be the framework for how elite running back contracts look.
