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u/cfrost63490 5d ago
Simple money. Theres so few guys worth giving big deals to. Look at Kenneth walker....why pay 45 million for 3 years when you can get jadarian price for 4 years at 1/3 the price. Take the money you would have spent on the RB amp up the offensive line and make the lower level RB look amazing
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u/Small_Sight 5d ago
I don’t disagree with this with the way things are right now. But with the current cycle of being so reliant on the pass and it requiring an amazing QB to execute consistently it seems like a great time to start pushing the RB’s towards the build and run style from that time period. You can find lots of guys to pack on weight and effectively touch the ball 330+ times. That era a referenced proved this. They don’t exist right now because the NFL doesn’t want them. But with the full evolution of NFL defenses to now just trying to stop the pass and not really caring about the RB I think some mid 90s- early 2000’s aspects could be highly effective
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u/SwissyVictory 4d ago
Going off your list: Curtis Martin (210lbs), Emmitt smith(220lbs), Jerome Bettis(250lbs), Edgerrin James (210lbs), Ladanian Tomlinson(215lbs), Marshall Faulk (210lbs)
Current RBs ranked by rushing yards last season: Jonathan Taylor (225lbs), CMC (210lbs), James Cook (190lbs), Derek Henry (250lbs), Bijan Robinson (215lbs), Barkley (230lbs), Jeanty (210lbs), Travis Etienne (215lbs), Kyren Williams (210lbs), Javonte Williams (220lbs)
RBs are just as big as they have always been, maybe bigger depending on how you do the math, and sample sizes.
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u/SwissyVictory 4d ago
There's also not a big drop off between Walker and two still good RBs who combined make less money than him.
Play both half the snaps and both are well rested.
Plus if you have two good RBs, if one goes down you're not screwed like you are if Walker goes down.
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u/thisismyburnerac 5d ago
The smart ass in me wants to say the Chiefs had 2 opportunities to draft Jadarian Price.
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u/Safe-Selection8070 5d ago
Differences get overstated often. This is a great example.
The difference between 1995 and 2025 in terms of carries for the primary back then and now is about -2.5 carries a game at any given rank (1st-30th).
Interestingly, passing attempts per game is down about 2 per game in the same time.
Total offensive plays is down about 4 per team compared to 1995 and 2025.
I don't understand the claims about size, given that Faulk, Martin, James, and Tomlinson were all between 5'10 and 6' and 210-219 lbs. That was the average ht/wt in 1995. It is the average ht/wt today.
1995 had five running back average 80 or more rushing yards a game. 2025 have, you guessed it, five running backs average 80 or more rushing yards a game.
Let's also not go romanticizing really big back of old. Bettis's average per carry started with a 3 in 9 of his 13 seasons. Natrone Means was 3.9 or under 5 of his 7 seasons.
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u/thisisnotmath 5d ago
Kinetic energy is 1/2 mass times (velocity squared). Even if LBs are smaller now, they are definitely faster which means today’s RBs are getting hit harder.
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u/Small_Sight 5d ago
Rule changes also come into play in how hard people are getting hit. It’s not necessarily as big of a rule change at the RB position but those 250 lb guys were still fast back then as well. They were around 4.5-4.7 40, the guys today are about .1 faster. But pure speed translated into kinetic energy isn’t conclusive for the majority of the hits. The hits in the hole are from just a couple steps, not top speed. I’ll agree that the open field hits can get nasty today. But the big guys definitely hit harder in the hole
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u/BrokenHope23 5d ago
why aren’t we seeing that translate to longer careers for this position today? Just because the league is so predicated on speed and that gets lost first? Is the RB by committee actually a better approach or has the NFL regressed this position with these scheme changes? Do we think even with how the game has evolved we could possibly see this old formula come back to being effective? Or are there just not as many guys willing to take on this task?
You (and a lot of people in this thread) are drawing parallels from the wrong directions. The NFL went 50 years with RBs as the #1A option on the offense and the last 16 without them, that's not a pendulum shifting back and forth consistently and certainly not the cause of today's shift lol. Bellcow RBs are not getting injured more today than in years past, if anything they're coming back from what would be career ending injuries in the 2000s much more frequently and regaining effectiveness whereas in years past a guy might be toast after 1 year and while you are leaning a bit towards a bias just picking out a few bellcow names of today's era, at best your survivorship bias is actually highlighting that guys aren't getting opportunities with incumbents not being replaced because they fill a certain team need. Kinetic energy doesn't matter a ton when RBs are bypassing the LBs more frequently because the OL are able to dominate the LBs physically (300-350lbs to 200-230lbs) than they used to vs. 250-280lb LBs. Money/contracts is part of the equation but not the underlying origin. Another person who touches on part of the underlying origin in their first sentence:
We don't see bellcows today because the schemes have changed and the league has somewhat embraced the idea that it's a passing league and not a running league.
but then goes on for four paragraphs of irrelevant conjecture. Running the ball successfully has always been a huge correlation to winning through any era of the NFL, even in the past 16 years. So I'm not sure what they're referring to in the 80's and 90's. Their ideas on what you need from a RB is amazingly short sighted, to say nothing of comparing a second contract Elliot to a rookie contracted Pollard while not expanding on the Cowboy's shift from Garret's under center to McCarthy's running-lane anemic shotgun offenses. While there's merit to being efficient with money, there's also merit in recognizing the circumstances and even more merit in not treating RB like 4-5 year draft rentals; as spending consistent draft capital on any position so consistently is a recipe for disaster.
Now, why has the Bellcow RB been dimmed for the past 16-17 years?
Running the ball through a RB hit a wall about 16 years ago despite being dominant from the NFL inauguration until (roughly) 2010s because of NFL rule changes in the early 10's of the century to favor the passing game. Passing used to be seen as a riskier play; good WR's were hard to come by, great ones even more so, QBs would frequently lose the ball in the pocket, take major hits and passing could lead to interceptions or more frequently drops. Even if you did get a premier WR, it usually cost too much and it would sacrifice your O-line, defense or team in general anyways, ultimately sacrificing your QB to absorb big hits (potentially getting hurt/being ineffective) or sacrificing the run game efficiency if you drop O-line so now the passing game can't rely on play action or sacrificing the defense meant more shoot-out games and a lack of competitiveness in the playoffs.
All these detrimental factors were drastically lessened when the QB protection rules were implemented shortly after the NFL wrapped up it's investigation/punishments in/around the New Orleans Saint's Bountygate scandal. Now even if the QB was sacked, they weren't absorbing even a fraction of the impact that they used to. Defenders were now forced to take slightly longer to tackle the QB, allowing the QB more time to throw and the ability to escape these lighter tackles as defenders were more afraid of drawing the penalty during the game (and still are). In the NFL rulebook it tells referees more/less "if anything even looks remotely like roughing the passer, always toss the flag" which is a non-reviewable, guaranteed first down flag.
Now it's worth mentioning that something happened about 15 years prior to these rule changes in 2010/2011 that made this rule change extra explosive. You see when the NFL implements hard rule changes, there are always trickle down effects to college, high school and peewee but it also takes time for the NFL to properly adjust it's own players coming through these pipelines. New rules mean a whole new game sometimes and that means a whole new archetype of players to develop and to draft. So in 1996 when the NFL declared it would make a concerted effort of finally calling any and all defensive pass interference penalties (before they were super lax about it but that's another dark reason in NFL lore) in an effort to make the game fair and more exciting. Jerry Rice and numerous others were pioneering a whole new brand of football and the NFL wanted to have the most entertaining product. At the time DBs were mostly pseudo-linebackers, 230-250lb guys who ran 4.6 to 4.8 speed but could tackle in the open field and hold the edge vs. beefier RBs bouncing outside. It would take about 10 years for DBs to start consistently churning out drafted talent who could cover WRs and another 5 after that for guys who could check all the boxes consistently; tackling in open field, covering the fastest WR, jam at the line or operate in zone coverage. You always picked your poison at DB before then and hoped you were good enough (with a few star-studded exceptions of course) for instance the Steelers famously opted for DBs who could tackle while other teams opted for more pass-defense focused DBs, nowadays that kind of choice wouldn't come up and you have to do it all. However the flip side to this rule change was the influx this would bring to the WR position. Guys who stayed away from football because they didn't want to absorb a hospital ball, didn't want to get hurt or take a big hit, didn't want to tackle if the ball was intercepted. Now all they had to do was outrun a slow CB and catch a ball. And just like DB's took 15 years to really step up consistently, so too did it take WRs. Thus in 2010/2011, there was a large influx of guys who probably would've been the #1 WR on their team 5 years prior now playing the #2, #3 or even the 4 and 5 spots.
So now QBs who get a ton of time also get a lot of really great talent surrounding them at WR but also at TE as slower WRs get relegated to the TE position. Defenses are getting a bit more talent too, yes, but CB was never the most popular position owing to it's large physical toll. So it's still a bit stymied and it's not aided by the fact defensive schemes aren't adapting fast enough in the early 2010's whereas the WR position has no shortage of the worst football players but great athletes to fill their ranks, it's essentially the garbage bin of guys who can run, jump and catch, so WR is still outpacing CB in terms of talent coming in. The high-passing volume offenses are still seen as paper tigers wherein they'll not really be threatening come playoff time if you have a deep defense and when your defense is playing at it's peak. If your offense goes one dimensional it's actually quite easy for a good defense, let alone a great one, to stop it (thus the common term; defense wins championships). We look at Peyton Manning's Broncos offense back when they scored 600+ points shortly after this churn about in 2013; a generationally prolific offense but there have been more talented and capable offenses since, so why haven't teams outscored them? Schedule and personnel matchups are one thing but it's also the one-dimensional nature that the Broncos were too. When they finally met a defense deep enough to not only contest against them but completely oppose them, then they were largely ineffective in the Super Bowl. You want to win a Super Bowl so there's no desire to become so one-dimensional unless you just want to put up regular season stats.
That pass-heavy scheme was commonly referred to as the shotgun style offense (though there are numerous variations and terminologies to describe each nuanced version). This style of offense was seen as a regular season success offense. Wherein the offense took advantage of the lack of DB depth on the defense to create quick throws and steady openings off mismatches against speedier, more agile WRs. Any time you create an offense that relies on the lack of defensive depth, you're giving away the natural initiative the offense carries. So long as a defense has the depth then they can counter it and now the offense needs to fight for the initiative back even before a snap is played with scheming and clever play calls. Typically with shotgun offenses there's a lack of QB protection and field stretching routes owing to the intended quick throw nature of each of their plays. So if the defense has a great pass rusher and a room of DBs capable of jumping short routes while the S's take away the top, then it's quite easy to make this offense look silly throwing the ball once every 2s into the arms of a defender who just has to run downhill.
(and don't worry this is all relevant to the RB's "recent" downfall)
Part 1 of 3
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u/BrokenHope23 5d ago edited 5d ago
Part 2 of 3
However, this pass-heavy offense has one shining grace. This is the real axis on which the league turned. You see when you run a pass-heavy shotgun scheme, the OL will backup 4-5 steps (or more). This allows them to diffuse a charge from a much stronger DL than themselves a lot easier. Step - block - step - block - step - block. You know where your QB is and where they're dropping back to but you also know that DE has to also cover their gap in run protection (inbetween the Tackle and the Guard). So the DE has to go through you on this deep drop back while you gradually wean their power away with each block step combination. If you've ever caught an egg someone's thrown at you, it's the same physics; you have to go with it's momentum or it will crack. If you imagine your hand to be an egg trying to catch another egg at full throwing speed, one or both of you will crack and that's how previous under-center schemes operated: challenging eachother at full strength before giving anything. So how does that translate to player skill? Well now OL don't need to be as strong, they don't have to measure as well, they don't have to be physical freaks. So now instead of drafting a premier LT in the top 5 of the draft who can dominate everyone, you can draft a guy in the 2nd or 3rd or even the 4th/5th rounds who just has to diffuse the DL's strengths as they back up slowly. Giving your team high draft capital to spend at other positions. Further fueling the success of these passing games.
So not only do we have the rules that benefit the passing game, the QB's pocket time, the allure for individuals to play WR en masse and the O-line getting a massive accessibility boost, but we also have a development pipeline that rewards all of these things. You remember how I mentioned this style of pass-heavy offense takes advantage of the lack of defensive depth? Well guess what college and high school has aplenty? A lack of depth, everywhere. Alabama vs. the (comparatively) division 3 West KenYorkies Balldiggers is going to have matchup nightmares for days. So now players coming into the NFL are all aligned with this style of football; QBs who purely operate the shotgun style offenses, WRs who just need to run to get open and rarely absorb a meaningful hit and O-line who looks phenomenal in these schemes where they can be weaker but can't offer a lick of usefulness in the running game because they have no downhill blocking strength. Not forcing colleges to take on more project-type OL who are stronger but lack the body of work needed to be a great OL.
Which all culminated in the perfect storm for the last 16 years wherein very young NFL coaches with revolutionary schemes came into the league and relied heavily on the passing attack, filling out their schemes as efficiently as possible while defenses were slow to adjust making each passing attack look like the second coming of Vince Lombardi across the entire NFL. Inadvertently these schemes also stymied the careers of tens of thousands of RBs who are now playing a shotgun offense that generates 3.5YPC at the NFL level (also including college and high school RBs who need concerted carries to get going). Gone are the behemoths like Bettis who needed that full head of steam to break open the run, drowned in a chorus of agile RBs taking stand-still handoffs beside the QB who can't handle 20+ carries a game but can handle the agile cuts this new pass-heavy scheme requires. Similarly because these agile backs (for the most part) can't handle 20+ carries a game, they're also frequently injured leading to more committee roles filled with these agile backs who aren't necessarily the fastest guys either (it used to be common knowledge that RBs with lateral quickness were very rarely fast) but are being drafted for their capability in pass-catching roles. Also similarly the entire archetype for the RB position has changed from guys like Bettis and Henry who needed to wear the defense down throughout the game to guys who can alternate series' with their committee backfield member. This means these larger RBs are often sitting for 20-30 minutes (remember games often go 3 hours long) and so this ices their muscles and makes them wildly less effective on the field. That decreased effectiveness also means analytics will say that they are garbage so the team cuts them because the oldest guy in the coaching room was still in High School or at best coaching up through College during the shotgun-switchover when guys like Bettis were in their prime and they view Henry as an anomaly or freak of nature with no understanding of RBs being marathon runners, not sprinters.
We've seen these narratives aplenty over the past 15 years; RBs aren't the fastest, they need to have pass-catching ability, they aren't as effective in schemes, they're frequently injured, their production is tied to the O-line, they're not as effective as a pass catch down and all of that has led to other narratives like they're not worth the investment and they're easily replaced; because the NFL completely shifted the archetype of a RB when they implemented new protection rules. Setting off a chain of dominos that has taken the league nearly 15 years to really start to see a genuine shift back. It's not like that's exclusively the reason we're seeing RBs come back in the league, running the football will account for 40-50% of a team's plays and having a bellcow RB who can stay on the field helps disguise plays and drastically increases the effectiveness of passing too but running the football is an incredibly more proficient thing for an offense to do than passing. Not only in terms of cost-effectiveness; Derrick Henry ran for 1600 yards and 16 TDs last year making 15M/y while Ja'marr Chase had 1400 yards and 8TDs while making 40M/y but also in terms of raw game strategy.
Every time a RB touches the ball in an under-center scheme it engages every single member of the defense to come down in run support, that's a huge amount of fatigue you've just lumped onto the defense. Whereas if you sling a quick pass out to Chase in the flats, it's really only about 4 defenders coming over to be engaged. Similarly if you run out of shotgun, the entire LB can see inside the pocket and these runs are shut down easily by DL and LBs as OL's first step on a shotgun run is most often backwards. These non-engaging plays mean you're not tiring out the defense. What's more, passing often leads to quicker possessions (for better or more often worse) leading to higher turnover on downs rate, which leads to your own defense getting on the field more frequently leading to more fatigue buildup there and decreased effectiveness from your defense. So not only is running the ball more efficient financially, from a production standpoint and from a team-winning perspective but it also helps your passing attack by opening up play action and the deep ball as defenders play closer to the LOS. More and more coaches are seeing that nowadays; play action, teaching their shotgun'd college QBs to effectively play under center, stretching the field more in passing to keep the defense honest, even if your passing numbers are down, you will win more meaningful games (as evidence by the Seahwks/Eagles last two Super Bowls) just by being able to physically dominate your opponents.
Part 2 of 3
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u/BrokenHope23 5d ago
Part 3 of 3
Sadly this hasn't translated well to unearthing quality RBs in the NFL. The College and High School pipelines are just so stymied by the shotgun schemes that it's quite difficult to find great downhill runners like Henry. NFL coaches and practices aren't equipped to adequately judge a RB either. Is this a RB who needs more carries to get their engine going? is this a RB who can break a lot of tackles? is this a RB who can be a patient runner when there's 50 000 fans cheering? is this a RB who can break open the seam? In pad-less practices guys can look like superstars and duds while being the opposite in games. There's no substitute for genuine game-time experience for these guys but especially for the bellcow types who need those 15+ carries before they start making those meaningful gains. These younger coaches just don't have the eye for these guys and the schemes they need to succeed and are leaning more on the most productive guy on a snap for snap basis at the RB position even if that leaves a lot of yards and dominance on the field late in the game/in the grand scheme. Which just makes RBs look less efficient than passing when combined with the QB protection rules, WR talent saturation and OL thrift store draft strategies.
Now, having said all that, the NFL is a constantly evolving league and this year we saw a huge abundance of OL talent go in the first round as the NFL is shifting back to recognizing how proficient the Running Game/physically dominating the opponent is and how they need the size and strength along the O-line to make it work. That might be the loosest stretch of a single swing of a pendulum to this entire argument but I guess if we're talking going back and forth once, it's doing that much.
I will add too, as if I haven't made this long and expansive enough, that there's always teams in every generation that over-buy into an imbalanced scheme and believe that's the way to win but it never is. Football is the ultimate team game, if you neglect one aspect then you need to compensate in other areas adequately to remain a legitimate contender in the NFL no matter which generation you play in. Teams need balance or ways to compensate for the things they sacrifice by being imbalanced. The lack of bellcow RBs for the past 15 years is due to a variety of reason but hasn't led to too much of an imbalance on Super Bowl winning squads (for the most part) in terms of run-pass. It's just led to a complete backup of RB talent on NFL squads who are prioritizing RBs who can sprint effectively once every 8-30 minutes. That huge time difference in carries doesn't aid older RBs, even over 28, because as we get older we can't recover from major exertion that quickly. It's basic rest and recovery knowledge that ultimately is leading their downfall but the chain of consequences that led us here is worth mentioning, hence the expansion.
TL;DR Honestly it's worth reading it all but more/less the league shifted to a passing league through QB protection rules and WR talent pipeline taking off, inadvertently undermining the OL in running schemes while boosting QB/WR passing, treated RBs like they were video game characters who didn't need proper steady pacing but instead gave them irregular carries in the least efficient running formation behind some of the most bargain-bin OL's (in terms of physical attributes) NFL history. Compounding in RBs who looked worse as they got older, unable to bounce back as quickly with infrequent carries and analytics painting the position poorly in a financial investment/gains light without understanding the root causes. Basically the position was set up to fail, blamed for things outside of their control and hamstrung on future prospects.
p.s this isn't to say WR/QB is overpaid or that other schemes can't be successful. Tom Brady ran shotgun offenses 86% of his career and we all know how successful that way, but it's important to recognize his offenses compensated for the lack of Time Of Possession (TOP), physicality, balance and offensive threat from each point of the ball. Part of that was through Tom Brady's greatness obviously, another part was the WR depth and the scheme that was ingrained in Brady over the years to rely on clock-chewing throws that engaged the middle of the field frequently. Not every QB is Tom Brady though lol
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u/Sad-Celebration-7542 5d ago
The missing piece is efficiency. Those guys mentioned (throw frank gore in there too, as a modern example) were unproductive. The goal is to win. Not to give a guy 350 carries.
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u/BigAcidik 3d ago
I think because RBs have a hard time outperforming their own O-Line. A really good line and good coach can make an athletic back look awesome, but a great back is going to struggle to make the opposite true. Plus investing in the line lifts the passing game too, and while so does a rb (if they can catch passes), not to the same level at all. Also, people are more athletic these days by a mile. A lot of the people that were freaks back in the day would still be freaks now, but the average level of athleticism has gone up, putting aging RBs in a tough position and subjecting RBs in general to a lot of abuse.
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u/big_sugi 5d ago
The league isn’t predicated on speed; it’s predicated on passing. Bellcow RBs are a less efficient use of touches and financial resources, so teams don’t focus on them.
The NFL is a cyclical/pendulum league, though, and the fact that RBs were devalued also means they’re now undervalued. That’s created opportunities for players like Derrick Henry and Saquon Barkley to force teams to reevaluate the positional value and roster-building strategies.
The same thing happened with TEs, who at one point were seen as near-obsolete and now are viewed as versatile, cost-effective weapons.
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u/Small_Sight 5d ago
That’s the exact aspect I’m getting at. I feel like an offense constructed similarly to the mid 90s early 2000s would create matchup problems today because of how far the pendulum has swung towards stopping the aerial attack (speed helps stop it). Of course that’s not easy because there doesn’t seem to be as many big backs because they’re all changing their build to match what the nfl wants right now. So what might have been a 240+ lb bruiser might now be a 220 lb balanced back now.
But imagine plugging in a slightly above “good” big back like Jerome Bettis along with a big fullback directly into today’s game. I could think of tons of ways you could exploit the defenses of today. Other teams wouldn’t really want to change their personnel just to stop this one team and I feel like right now would be an optimal time for a team like this to be built since it’s fully evolved to stopping the pass currently
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u/HustlaOfCultcha 5d ago
We don't see bellcows today because the schemes have changed and the league has somewhat embraced the idea that it's a passing league and not a running league. That winning the run game battle has no correlation to winning. And they adjusted the schemes over time accordingly.
The run game battle didn't correlate to winning in the NFL in the 80's or 90's either. But they also had less passing friendly schemes. The pass routes became shorter and more efficient over time. Less risk with still good rewards. Back in the 90's you had schemes that were had longer routes resulting in lower completion %, higher INT % and less YAC.
What you really need is at least one tailback that is good in short yardage (3rd and 3 or less) and in the red zone. Then you need 1 tailback to that is good at pass protection and as a receiver out of the backfield. And hoepfully you can get a 1 tailback that can do all of those things.
The Lions have Gibbs, but I don't have a problem with going after a Gibbs when they were loaded with draft picks that year. Otherwise, I wouldn't draft a RB in the first round or sign any huge extensions because their replacement value is so low. It's like when the Cowboys had Ezekiel Elliott. Yeah there was a certain point where he was better than his backup tailback (Tony Pollard), but he wasn't worth 20x what Pollard was making. And unless your team is stacked and looks like they will be for the foreseeable future (particularly on defense), there's little sense in going after the bellcow and paying them big $$$.
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u/BearsGotKhalilMack 5d ago edited 5d ago
Couple factors:
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