The 2024 NFL season has been a lot of things, but one feature that is extremely hard to miss is the high performance of running backs of a certain ilk. The group is young by the standards of other positions—still in their mid-to-late-20s—but older for the running back position. And the group is defined by recently being told their services were no longer needed by teams they had served admirably for years, all teams that let them leave without putting up much of a fight to keep them.
The Las Vegas Raiders were fine allowing Josh Jacobs to head to free agency, where he was scooped up by the Green Bay Packers, who had held the financial line with the beloved Aaron Jones, who was welcomed into the Minnesota Vikings’ fold. Both Jacobs and Jones have been highly productive for their new teams.
Barkley played out a five-year rookie contract, followed by a sixth-year franchise tag, not seeing free agency until his seventh year in the NFL. Jacobs’s career was similar, not seeing free agency until his sixth year in the NFL. With such a short high-earning period of their career, that is a huge disadvantage for the financial realities of this position., pushing the top of the market beyond a $25 million annual average.
To be fair, most NFL teams have wrestled with whether to pay veteran running backs; we certainly did when I worked for the Packers. And most teams subscribe to the credo that, “It’s better to move on from a player a year too early than a year too later.” We certainly operated that way at the Packers as well. But in recent years, the market has shifted for other positions, but not for this one.