A specter is haunting the National Football League — the specter of the running back. While it would be an exaggeration to say that all the powers of the N.F.L. have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this ghost, it would not be a gross one.
The N.F.L. has been fostering the passing game at the expense of the running game since at least the mid-2010s. Various rule changes — some designed to make the game higher-scoring and ostensibly more exciting, others meant to improve player safety — have had a pass-happy effect. The league experienced an increase in passing offense (including the highest passing seasons ever in 2015 and 2016) and a drop-off in rushing yards (those two seasons had the lowest totals since 1999).
But the dialectic of history is restless, and the running game is reasserting itself. Over each of the past four seasons, passing yards per game declined, and in the first few weeks of this season they dipped even further. In 2015, only seven players finished the regular season with more than 1,000 rushing yards. This year, with one weekend of regular-season games remaining, 20 or more rushers could reach that milestone (if they haven’t already). Saquon Barkley of the Philadelphia Eagles, who is 100 yards shy of the single-season rushing record of 2,105 yards set by Eric Dickerson in 1984, could become only the second non-quarterback to win the league’s Most Valuable Player Award since LaDainian Tomlinson in 2006.
To those who don’t follow football, the notion that running backs are experiencing a revival may sound strange, like hearing that the Bible is making a comeback among Southern Baptists. But the trend defies not only the N.F.L.’s cultivation of the passing game but also the conventional wisdom of football analysts. For years there has been a popular “Moneyball”-like theory that star running backs are overvalued. Analysts tell us that running the ball is less efficient than passing, and that a platoon of two or three half-decent running backs can produce the same stats as a more expensive star.
The idea, ubiquitous among general managers as well as sportswriters, is that unlike passing or catching, running the ball successfully is a kind of industrial process, like making cement. While quarterbacks and their receivers can still be discussed romantically and lauded for statistically irrelevant no-look passes and one-handed sideline catches, what running backs seem to accomplish is explained away as the bloodless result of tinkering by whiz-kid offensive coordinators, who can “scheme” what they call “production” into existence with a faceless assortment of players making the rookie minimum.
There is doubtless some truth in this. The New England Patriots won six Super Bowls between the 2001 and 2018 seasons with no star running backs (with the possible exception of Corey Dillon in 2003). Since 2017, the Kansas City Chiefs have had only one 1,000-yard rusher and have otherwise made do with an assortment of castoffs and late-round picks — while appearing in four Super Bowls and winning three. Even teams that have made rushing a more important part of their offense have approached it with all the gravitas of finding a guy to patch up drywall: Before acquiring the All-Pro running back Christian McCaffrey in 2022, the San Francisco 49ers had cycled through half a dozen unmemorable lead backs without a single 1,000-yard rusher since 2014.
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