Week 13 Hitchhiker's Guide + RB MVP Talk

And Reactions to the James Conner Extension

How ‘Valuable’ are RBs?

The ‘RBs Don’t Matter’ wars have always been annoying.

Most of all because the ostensible position of the RBDM crowd being that Running Backs *literally* do not matter is of course patently absurd if taken literally.

First of all, they are living breathing human beings who deserve joy and happiness and human rights and all that jazz.

Second of all, maybe outside the most ardent ideologue I don’t think anyone actually thinks that the quality of running back play is truly irrelevant to the quality of a football team. We can easily demonstrate this by taking the thought experiment to an unrealistic extreme. If I played running back for an NFL team, that team would clearly be much worse for it.

But it is absolutely true that on any given play only one RB can carry the ball, and there are far more than 32 RBs on the planet capable of doing that at an NFL-caliber level.

This is the key paradox of the RBDM position after all. It’s not that RBs don’t matter because they are all bad or even replaceable inherently. It’s that there are simply far too many good ones relative the the number of available jobs, and so the utility of rostering the best one is just not quite as important.

The other element to this is that running the ball is a group effort, and the results of a running back are quite dependent on the quality of the scheme, the o-line and the ability of the quarterback to alter how many resources the defense can allocate to stopping your running back.

Naturally, the same linemen who block for your RB block for your QB. And whatever impact your QB has on the run game, they likely have a larger impact (for better or worse) on your passing game.

Throwing to running backs is not very efficient. And running the ball is typically less efficient than throwing. So the difficulty with valuing the RB position is that the main path for them to provide value is through running, which is the less efficient way to move the ball, and they are just one element of that facet of the game, while every other key driver to the success of a running game is also a more essential component of the passing game.

For that reason, if you’re building an offense with scarce resources, you want to be prioritizing the passing game over the running game. And to the extent you are prioritizing the run game, you’d rather do so by investing in players who will also have a larger impact on the passing game than most RBs do.

From a labour perspective, the problem in all of this is damn salary cap.

The entire way in which we analyze sports is through the prism of the cap. A “good” contract is a contract that has favourable terms for the employer, and thus undervalues the employee. The term “bad” contract will almost always be thrown around in reference to the player being “overpaid” relative to their “value.”

This is of course antithetical to how 99% of us think about labour relationships in our daily lives.

You probably don’t walk into a grocery store, and immediately ponder whether the deli meat slicer is being underpaid relative to the cashier.

Unless you are a complete ghoul, when your happy-go-lucky friend who is conspicuously free for Friday afternoon golf gets a raise at work, your first thought is probably “good for Jack” and not “what an albatross of a contract for Acme Corp.”

Sports are the only business in which every postal worker and crane operator magically sounds like a CFO rooting for wage suppression every time when of their highest performing employees is eligible for a contract extension.

It’s preposterous, every single one of us is complicit in this racket, and of course it’s completely unnecessary. The people who own these teams are a bunch of Scrooge McDucks with so much money burning a hole in their pocket they spend a cool billion for the right to play franchise mode in real life, all the while demanding that the playground for their favourite little hobby be subsidized by city council and a wage cap be placed on the employees who make this charmed existence possible.

Respectfully, every owner of a major sports franchise who falls into the above description (so about 98% of them) can get fucked.

It is only in the context of anti-competitive wage theft that we have these debates about the relative ‘value’ of positions in the first place.

Saquon Barkley is more or less just as skilled a running back as Myles Garret is an edge defender, or Ja’marr Chase is a wide receiver, or Lamar Jackson is a quarterback.

Saquon Barkley plays (almost) as many snaps each week as these players, is hit by the far most of any of them, and has the ball in his hands more often than any save for Jackson.

By any objective measure, Barkley works just as hard as any of these players, and is just as skilled. His athletic gifts are just as exceptional, and he is undoubtedly — and similarly to all the above players I named — one of the most entertaining players to watch every Sunday.

From the perspective of who creates the most ‘value’ for the entertainment product of the league, I hardly think it’s controversial to say Barkley has more impact on the average NFL fan than Tristan Wirfs, the highest paid offensive lineman in football ($28.1 M per year).

I’m not writing this to mourn for the underpaid RB. Saquon Barkley is making more than 99.9% of people and gets to earn it playing a sport professionally. He’s worked exceptionally hard at his craft, and deserves every penny, but I’m not going to pretend he’s the face of late-stage capitalism gone awry.

I’m simply pointing out that the way we talk about what “matters” or what’s “valuable” is relative, and often reflective of a very specific context: that context being what each player produces in terms of their impact on winning football games relative to the opportunity cost of the resources in salary cap or draft capital spent to acquire them.

That’s far from the only context in which we could discuss these players. It would not have to be the context we discussed these players at all if we didn’t have a salary cap to contend with, through which our 32 favourite plutocrats have imposed upon themselves the ‘problem’ of scarce resources.

But I nonetheless accept that if we are going to discuss and analyze football, we are going to discuss and analyze how to build football teams in a fashion that prioritizes winning football games, and in the context of the modern NFL that means allocating scarce resources toward some players and away from others.

Running Backs often get the short end of the stick here.

However, in 2024 the emergence of several healthy, thriving bell cow RBs on good teams has led some to push back against the recent consensus that RBs should not be prioritized when building football teams.

Most infamously, we got this very stupid tweet:

Whenever someone posts a very stupid tweet, we the enlightened naturally compete to see who can dunk on the village idiot with the most force.

A common rebuttal of course was pointing out that the teams who let these running backs walk in free agency were 20-31 last year while the three teams who signed them were 33-17.

It’s quite obvious to anyone who is interested in a good faith discussion about the topic that had each of the previous teams retained their RB they would likely still be clearly inferior to the teams who signed them this year — albeit perhaps not by quite as wide a margin.

I’d go further to say that all these teams made perfectly reasonable decisions.

I’ve argued that paying high-end free agent RBs to start for you is generally sharp. I went into far more detail in that piece as to why, but the TLDR is that there is no opportunity cost in terms of elite players at the most “valuable” positions when it comes to raw salary cap not allocated to extending your own draft picks.

If signing a big ticket free agent RB somehow results in you not having the cap space to retain an elite WR then it’s certainly not an optimal allocation of resources (ahem, Titans). But otherwise, you’re better off spending your surplus cap space on top-end starters positions which are in less demand rather than spending up on inflated salaries for second rate starters at positions in which the true difference makers rarely hit the open market. Doing this also allows you to spend your high-end draft capital — the most important resource any team has — on taking an abundance of shots on the highest “value” positions.

The Ravens and Eagles in particular are sharp organizations who clearly understand this. Both organizations have spent high end draft capital consistently on the wide receiver position in recent years, and have been proactive in attacking the quarterback position. Spending up on Saquon Barkley or Derrick Henry was clearly a good process decision which allowed them to leverage the depressed market for RBs in order to add an elite play maker at a limited opportunity cost who could add a boost to their team in a super bowl window.

These other teams would not have gotten nearly as much ‘value’ out of these same contracts to the same players. First of all, they aren’t competing for anything in the short term so what good would it be to waste the final prime years of these players? Second of all, part of the reason these players have been such massive hits for fantasy this year is because each of them is having a substantially better season in 2024 than they did in 2023 — in large part because of the improved environment they’re now in.

A RB for MVP?

This brings me (finally) to the main reason I’m writing about all these RBs at this moment: the conversation of whether one of these big ticket RBs — most often Saquon Barkley — should be the MVP of the league.

As you will be constantly reminded, “MVP” of course means Most “Valuable” Player.

Typically we see two paths presented in these conversations. On one hand, there will be a load of people who typically type out either a big whack of counting stats or a pile of platitudes in support of their RB MVP case. Then the other side will point out one or all of the following rebuttals:

• Betting lines rarely move much on an injury to a star RB

• The impact on EPA/play from the addition or subtraction of a RB is often minimal: this includes the Eagles offense from 2023 to 2024

• The impact on EPA/play, betting lines, or good ol’ win-loss is far greater in the event of a QB injury — even with QBs who are not generally considered MVP contenders

All these above arguments are true of course. If you took Barkley off the Eagles today or Lamar Jackson of the Ravens, and changed nothing else about these rosters, it is patently obvious which loss would have the greater impact. In that sense, Lamar Jackson is clearly the more valuable player.

However, despite presenting as the objective side of the argument, there are some clearly subjective assumptions made in presenting this as the right way to measure value.

This mode of analysis makes sense in the context of either of these players suffering an in-season injury. But I’m not sure that’s a particularly helpful baseline to judge against. If it were, Peyton Manning would have won MVP in 2011 when the Colts instantly plummeted from perennial super bowl contenders to a two-win team without him.

The way I view it, it would be quite unfair to RBs (or any skill player) to hold the salary cap against them when it’s time to discuss whether they “matter” or whether they ought to receive a big contract, but then seemingly throw it out the window when it’s time to discuss awards.

Rather than assuming a player simply vanished from the roster as it is to assess value, why don’t we instead assume as our counter-factual that this player retired at the start of the off-season? Or perhaps that they never were drafted or signed by the team in the first place?

Yes, it was made clear how valuable Tua Tagovailoa is to this dolphins team if you compare the team with and without him. But had Tua Tagovailoa never been on the dolphins this year it’s not like they would have rolled out Tyler Huntley or Skylar Thompson as their Week 1 QB. They’d have had an alternate plan at the position, and potentially part of that plan would have been re-allocating the remainder of Tagovailoa’s salary elsewhere.

I don’t present this view to substitute one overly strict mode of analysis for another. If you wished, I’m sure you could point out several holes of logic that make this an imperfect heuristic to choose an MVP.

But my point is that the hyper literalists have decided we have to award MVP based on the strict definition of the award, but there is no clear and obvious way to determine the parameters by which to measure ‘value.’

For what it’s worth, I’m more than happy to tiebreak toward a dominant QB over a similarly dominant player at another position in a year with several good options. I think that’s the case in 2024, and my hypothetical vote would go to Josh Allen or Lamar Jackson right now.

But in a different year? Why not consider WRs? Edge Rushers? Heck, why not a Left Tackle? Or yes… even RB.

The world will not stop if we hand out a subjective piece of hardware to the player who most entertained us or impressed us in a given year, rather than the one who produced the most EPA per play.

James Conner Extended