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.
All of this has meant a grayer, sadder world. I have found myself looking back nostalgically at my childhood, when “Monday Night Football” was available without a cable subscription. There were giants on the earth in those days. Thurman Thomas, Emmitt Smith, Terrell Davis and Marshall Faulk were household names. Barry Sanders glided between defenders like the horses of King Erichthonius in the “Iliad,” which hopped between stalks of corn without breaking them and galloped over the sea.
But today even the coldest analytical arguments are back on the side of the ground game. Rushing in the N.F.L. is suddenly as good as it has ever been in my lifetime. General managers who adhered to best practices by dropping players like Barkley as if they were spare change in the “take a penny, leave a penny” bowl have realized too late that they were surrendering the crown jewels. (Barkley was thoughtlessly let go by the New York Giants after last season to help afford the gargantuan salary of the quarterback Daniel Jones, whom the team benched in November.) It is becoming clear that running backs are not indistinguishable units of input but prodigies in the original sense of the word — alarmers of heaven who do not fear the gods.
The return of the running back is not a miracle, though, even if it can seem like one. Much of the resurgence is a basic matter of strategy. To defend against pass-focused offenses, defensive players over the years had to become faster, lighter and less physically imposing. Coaches are now exploiting this weakness, running against defenses more accustomed to playing the deep ball than taking a helmet to the mouth.
And then there are the traditional advantages of running the ball. While incomplete passes stop the clock, even short runs eat up the time of possession while sapping the energy of the opposing team. A long drive built mostly on runs can last for more than half a quarter, keeping the other team from scoring and making turnovers less likely. This ancient approach to winning football games now looks cutting edge.
For football purists, this is sweet vindication. The attempt by the N.F.L. to transform the game into a kind of aerial ballet with higher scores and fewer nasty hits — a sport also more conducive to gambling and fantasy leagues and more sensitive to the investments owners have made in their star quarterbacks — is being foiled by the simple desire of teams to win.
In the 2025 N.F.L. draft I expect at least two running backs to go in the first round, instead of the usual zero or one of recent years. I also expect that in the near future running backs such as Jahmyr Gibbs of the Detroit Lions will be signed to long-term deals that would have been considered unthinkable a decade ago.
It is hard to say how long this new order of things will last. But even if it is short-lived, it reminds us that the star running back, once dismissed as a relic of a bygone era, like neck rolls or single-bar face masks, is still the most compelling symbol of the N.F.L.’s appeal: the ethereal beauty of one human being outrunning 11 others.
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