Justin Jackson did not lack for suitors when he became a free agent in March, but while a handful of NFL teams were interested in signing him as a backup running back/kick returner/jack-of-all-trades insurance policy, most were offering veteran-minimum type deals.
Jackson averaged 4 yards per carry as the Detroit Lions’ No. 3 running back and caught 12 passes in 187 offensive snaps last season. He ranked sixth in the NFL in kick return average. And while no one would confuse him for Saquon Barkley or Josh Jacobs, he spent most of the offseason in limbo, like his more famous running back counterparts, a victim of the league’s evolving views on what once was its premier position.
“For me, it was just, I wanted — it was a respect thing and I felt like I outplayed my contract last year, so I just wanted just a little respect,” Jackson told the Free Press this week. “And that’s really what I was looking for and I just trusted that I would get that and thankfully (the Lions) came back and offered some incentives to beef up the contract a little bit and that’s really all I was looking for.
“But yeah, I definitely think, obviously, the running back position is very devalued and that’s tough. I think we all feel it. But at the end of the day, we got to come out, we got to work. That’s what we got to do and just keep proving to everybody that we’re a very valuable position and that Super Bowl teams need that position to do well.”
Super Bowl teams may need a running game to do well, but the makeup of their running back rooms has changed over the years, and that’s helped drive down prices at the position across the league.
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Jacobs, the NFL’s leading rusher last season with 1,653 yards — more than Hall of Famers Tony Dorsett, Marshall Faulk or Thurman Thomas ever had in a season in their careers — was one of three backs (along with Barkley and Tony Pollard) who were franchise-tagged this offseason.
Pollard, who emerged as the Dallas Cowboys’ lead back last fall, signed his one tender worth $10.091 million. Barkley, who helped the New York Giants reach the playoffs while rushing for 1,312 yards in 2022, signed a revised one-year deal this week worth a reported $11 million. Jacobs has not signed his tender and is not currently in training camp with the Las Vegas Raiders.
At just over $10 million, the franchise tag — which is calculated as the average of the five highest-paid players at the position over the previous five seasons, figured as a percentage of the salary cap — offers life-changing money for some, but it comes on a one-year deal and at a cost: It restricts the free agent market for the best players at a position, limits movement of those players and keeps top salaries from escalating too quickly, which in turn holds down the position’s middle class.
After kickers and punters ($5.393 million), running backs have the lowest franchise tag number in the league. Quarterbacks, at $32.416 million, have the highest, while tight ends ($11.345 million) and safeties ($14.46 million) are the only other positions with a tag south of $18 million.
Market forces have contributed to the middling salary growth of running backs, and from a team’s perspective, it seldom makes sense to spend big on the position. Running backs take more punishment than players at most other positions due to the nature of their work, and replacement-level backs can often be found in free agency or late in the draft.
Accomplished veteran running backs like Kareem Hunt, Zeke Elliott and Leonard Fournette, for instance, are currently free agents. None is more than 28 years old. And last year’s Super Bowl winner, the Kansas City Chiefs, used seventh-round pick Isiah Pacheco as their primary back.
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“It’s one of the toughest subjects, man, because it’s so hard on both sides,” said Lions fullback Jason Cabinda, the team’s NFL Players Association representative. “You understand from a business standpoint. The running backs touch the ball so much. They get hit, they get tackled. Guys get hurt, etc., etc. But at the end of the day, they bring so much value to your team.
“Those rushing yards are huge, the first downs, the catches out of the backfield. I mean, they do a whole lot for an offense and you look at a guy like Saquon who got hurt and it’s easy for a team to label a guy who gets hurt. ‘OK, he’s not going to be the same guy, etc., etc.’ But when a guy like that comes back and he goes and has another 1,000-yard season, 10 touchdowns, those type of stats, and then he still doesn’t get the satisfaction of getting that long-term deal, I think it can be a very, very frustrating thing.”
And frustrating for more than just the player involved.
Cabinda said seeing a player like Barkley not get a fair-market contract “definitely rubs a lot of guys the wrong way, regardless of position.” And Los Angeles Chargers running back Austin Ekeler, a member of the NFLPA’s executive committee, hosted a Zoom call for top running backs this month to discuss the market forces affecting their position.
Ekeler told USA TODAY he hopes the franchise tag is abolished in the next CBA and called it “detrimental to us as players.”
Cabinda, who was not on the call, said other solutions are being brainstormed. Some possibilities include making rookie contracts for running backs different from other rookie deals in terms of length or value, or tweaking how much veteran running back contracts count against the salary cap.
It seems unlikely owners would agree to open either of those doors, given potential future ramifications, but Cabinda said “we hope that there’s some type of resolution” as an NFLPA “cause it’s necessary.”
“Obviously, you got to keep in mind it’s a business, you get that aspect, too,” Cabinda said. “But this game that we have, and since we’ve been playing since we were kids it’s all been about family, about the right things, about taking care of each other, all those kinds of things. You do need to stay along with that theme, of what our game means. And obviously, you add the business aspect and it can shake things up and kind of make things muddy, but I think at the end of the day things need to be made right.”
Jackson said the Lions ended up doing right by him, and neither he nor fellow Lions running back David Montgomery, who landed a three-year, $18 million deal in free agency this offseason — one of the biggest by a running back who changed teams — left free agency disenchanted with the league’s other 31 teams.
“Your value is what your value is,” Montgomery said. “That’s how I see it.”
Now, Jackson said, it’s up to running backs, individually and collectively, to boost their value and help teams realize it on the field.
“I know everyone’s got their own truth,” he said. “You just got to keep going out there and working. That’s mine.”
Contact Dave Birkett at dbirkett@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @davebirkett.
Exhibit A: Giants
Matchup: Lions (9-8 in 2022) vs. N.Y. Giants (9-7-1 in 2022), exhibition opener.
Kickoff: 7 p.m. Aug. 11; Ford Field, Detroit.
TV/radio: Fox; WXYT-FM (97.1).
For openers: Lions at Chiefs, regular-season opener; 8:15 p.m. Sept. 7, Arrowhead Stadium, Kansas City, Missouri; NBC.