Even before Le’Veon Bell’s season-long holdout reached a bizarre conclusion in which his Pittsburgh Steelers teammates plundered his locker for gear, it gripped the NFL for a reason that had nothing to do with his specific melodrama. Bell’s holdout poked at a question much greater than one player’s value: How much is a running back worth in the modern NFL?
The smartest NFL teams have realized in recent years that committing major resources to a running back may not be the savviest move. The New York Giants spent the second pick of the draft on Saquon Barkley, and it has done nothing to lift the team’s malaise. The Arizona Cardinals signed David Johnson to a long-term deal and still have the worst offense in the league.
Then Bell held out for a long-term deal that he didn’t get and now he’ll sit out for the entire 2018 season.
The problem for running backs is that they aren’t the game changers they once were. Teams are passing more, which means they’re running less. Even the best running backs are often on the wrong side of the age curve by the time they hit free agency. And more and more, there’s reason to believe it’s one of the most replaceable positions in the sport.
The drama around Bell, arguably the best running back in the NFL, explains this best. From 2014 through last season, no player in the league had more combined rushing and receiving yards than Bell. And the only two running backs even within 1,000 yards of his 6,737 both played at least 10 more games than he did. But with the two parties unable to agree on a long-term deal, and Pittsburgh holding control over him through the franchise tag—a lucrative, but one-year deal teams can use to hold on to players—Bell held out.
That holdout lasted through training camp, the preseason and into the regular season. When he didn’t show up this week, a league-mandated deadline, it sealed his fate: Bell would sit all year, making him the first holdout on a franchise tag to sit an entire season in more than two decades. When the deadline passed, video surfaced of Pittsburgh players rummaging through his former locker to collect gear.
ut there’s a reason the Steelers weren’t wallowing in the disappointment that a star teammate, one who made the Pro Bowl in three of the previous four seasons, wasn’t returning for their playoff run. That’s because Pittsburgh became ground zero for realizing a running back’s fungibility. Bell’s replacement has performed just like Bell.
James Conner, who was slated to be Bell’s backup, is near the top of the leaderboards now that he’s the Steelers lead back. Conner is third in the league in rushing touchdowns, third in rushing yards and second in total yards from scrimmage.
While it isn’t clear how much Bell loses in the outcome—he gives up the nearly $15 million he would have earned this season but could still net a megadeal in free agency—the Steelers won their end of it. They resisted committing a lot of money to a running back. And they’re 6-2-1 on the season, averaging the fourth most points per game in the NFL. They aren’t hurting.
But some teams that are hurting made a different calculation. Last spring, the Giants had the No. 2 pick in a quarterback-rich draft and had an aging quarterback that most people believed needed replacing. Instead of drafting Eli Manning’s heir, though, they decided to support him with the consensus top running back prospect. Barkley became the highest running back selected since 2006.
Barkley is the paradox who explains the state of running backs in the NFL at a time when teams pass more than ever. His selection has been a success and a failure.
Barkley is unquestionably one of the best running backs in the NFL, and a modern one at that. He is on pace for more than 1,000 rushing yards and could become just the third running back ever, and the first since Marshall Faulk in 1999, with more than 1,000 rushing and receiving yards in the same season.
The problem for the Giants is that it’s unclear how much better he has made them. They are 2-7 and headed for a second consecutive season toward the bottom of the standings. They still don’t have a long-term answer at quarterback. And the cost of drafting Barkley was that they didn’t take Sam Darnold, Josh Allen or Josh Rosen—the three quarterbacks who went later in the top-10 of the draft.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/leveon...acks-in-the-nfl-1542378093?mod=hp_major_pos25
