By the time the current crop of players hit their free-agent years, the league will be ready to move on to a new (cheaper) generation. Teams are no longer willing to take that risk. But for every Henry, you can point to Ezekiel Elliott or Todd Gurley, stars who shone early and then faded as soon as they inked a long-term deal. He has been consistently brilliant, and will have earned $56m when his contract expires at the end of the season. There are outliers – Derrick Henry is entering his eighth year with the Tennessee Titans. As a practical team-building measure, teams have settled into two camps, either mining through the middle rounds of the draft to find cheap production at the position, or selecting a back in the first round, cycling through the six-to-seven-year run, and then moving on to someone else. But under the current Collective Bargaining Agreement, their wages can be controlled by franchises for seven seasons: five years of a rookie contract (if they’re selected in the first round), with two additional tag years. A back’s shelf life, the data says, is four years before their body starts to crumble and their production nosedives. It’s tough.”įew positions on the field take as much punishment as a back, and it’s precisely because of that that teams have pulled back on big-money deals. If we go out there and run 2,000 yards with so many carries, the next year they’re going to say, you’re probably worn down. We’re the only position that our production hurts us the most. “We’re kind of handcuffed with the situation. “Right now, there’s really nothing we can do,” Chubb said on Sunday. Some of the best running backs in the NFL – Barkley, Chubb, Austin Ekeler, Derrick Henry, Christian McCaffrey and Josh Jacobs – were part of a conference call to discuss the position’s declining pay and to chart ways forward. Former players have lobbied for youngsters to switch positions in search of a better deal.

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