INDIANAPOLIS — The final question New York Giants general manager Joe Schoen answered during his NFL Scouting Combine podium news conference turned out to be the most revealing about the team’s ongoing contract negotiations with star running back Saquon Barkley.
Asked whether he’s viewing negotiations with Barkley through the lens of the running back market value or of what Barkley — a team captain and the franchise’s Walter Payton Man of the Year nominee — means to the team and city that drafted him with the No. 2 overall pick in 2018, the general manager kept it short and sweet.
Advertisement
“Running back market.”
While he said plenty of nice things about Barkley during his meeting with the media, those three words seemed to carry the most weight and will be felt not just by Barkley but by all running backs after their market bottomed out last offseason.
If that market remains as frigid as it was, there is a horde of talented running backs who will be feeling this chill this offseason. Barkley, Josh Jacobs, Tony Pollard, Derrick Henry, Austin Ekeler and D’Andre Swift headline that star-studded group.
GO DEEPER
What did we learn at the NFL combine about teams with top-10 draft picks?
Barkley and Jacobs are facing deja vu after trying to negotiate extensions with their teams before being franchise tagged last offseason. Each ended up signing one-year deals ahead of training camp. Pollard is in a similar position, though he played on the $10.1 million tag last year. Ekeler, meanwhile, got the Chargers to add $1.75 million in reachable incentives to the $6.25 million he was set to make in the final year of his contract.
This season, the franchise tag number has risen to $12.1 million, though numerous reports have suggested that none of the aforementioned running backs are expected to be tagged, which makes this year’s market even more intriguing.
It seems decision-makers across the league, like Schoen, are waiting to see how the market materializes following the franchise tag deadline (Tuesday at 4 p.m. ET) and leading into free agency at the start of the new league year (March 14).
“When I was a kid, I collected baseball cards, and every month I’d buy the Beckett Card (Price Guide),” Cardinals GM Monti Ossenfort said last week at the combine. “And I’d open it up and take it to my dad and say, ‘Oh, I got this card, and it’s worth this much.’ And my dad’s response was, ‘No, it’s worth whatever somebody’s willing to pay you for it.’
“Unfortunately, that’s a little what the free agency market is, whether it’s running backs or any position. You’ve got to wait and see how the market plays out.”
Advertisement
Recent history has set a tough bar for running backs.
“Just because they’re a lower value position right now doesn’t mean they don’t provide a great impact to a team,” Vikings GM Kwesi Adofo-Mensah said. “All it takes is one team, one deal to reset a market and change things. I’m not going to say that it’s not going to be this year, but there’s a lot of exciting options on the market.”
GO DEEPER
NFL free-agent rankings: Brian Burns, Saquon Barkley, Kirk Cousins lead the top 150
There appeared to be a breakthrough in the market early last season when the Indianapolis Colts signed Jonathan Taylor to a three-year, $42 million extension that included $26.5 million guaranteed. Taylor signed the deal as he was set to come off the PUP list in Week 5 during the final year of his rookie contract.
Of course, that contract followed months of contentious negotiations, highlighted by Taylor requesting a trade and a social media spat between Taylor’s agent, Malki Kawa, and Colts team owner Jim Irsay.
In the end, though, Taylor became the first running back since the Cleveland Browns’ Nick Chubb to sign a multiyear deal worth at least $10 million annually.
Following the deal, The Athletic’s Jeff Howe polled eight NFL decision-makers to gauge whether they believed the deal to be a positive harbinger for the running back market. Unsurprisingly, opinions varied. Some thought a new precedent had been established, while others believed Taylor’s deal represented special circumstances.
Who was right? We’re about to find out.
“You pay good players,” Colts general manager Chris Ballard said during the combine when asked about the upcoming running back market. “Each team chooses to do that. I can’t give you what other teams are going to do. I know what we did. We like our guy. We like Jonathan, and it ended up working out.”
Through the lens of the Taylor deal, Jacobs’ case is an especially interesting one to consider. He only recently turned 26 years old, meaning he’s the youngest of the top-tier backs about to hit the market and is one year removed from an All-Pro season in which he played all 17 games and led the league in rushing (1,653 yards). He is, however, coming off a down season in which he totaled just 805 rushing yards in 13 games.
Advertisement
As previously mentioned, Jacobs didn’t play for the Las Vegas Raiders on the franchise tag last year. He held out throughout OTAs and training camp before signing an incentive-based, one-year contract worth up to about $11.8 million ahead of the start of the regular season. He missed out on four games’ worth of per-game active roster bonuses, which were worth $100,000 per game. In the end, he made about $11.4 million last season
As a result, the price to franchise tag Jacobs this year is higher than it would’ve been otherwise. Players who are franchise tagged a second time receive a salary equal to 120 percent of their previous season’s salary, so his franchise tag number would be $13,669,200. When asked whether he may use the franchise tag on Jacobs, new Las Vegas GM Tom Telesco said it’s unlikely.
“As a GM you never want to take anything off the table,” Telesco said last week, “but I don’t anticipate using that tag this year.”
Telesco said Raiders will “explore” ways to bring Josh Jacobs back pic.twitter.com/BYiRzkNmLU
— Vic Tafur (@VicTafur) February 27, 2024
Jacobs will surely be looking to use Taylor’s deal as a precedent for his own, though Jacobs has been healthier and more productive than Taylor over the past two seasons and could theoretically demand a better deal. Of course, he’s also two years older than Taylor was when the Colts RB signed his deal.
A complicating factor is Raiders running back Zamir White, who made four starts when Jacobs was hurt last year. He could make Las Vegas comfortable with allowing Jacobs to test the open market.
“The way we’re going to play, and the way a lot of teams play, is you need more than one back,” Telesco said. “I don’t really see a lead-back type thing. You’ve got to have more than one. You need to have two; you need to have three. They all have different roles with the team. The way this game is played, it’s hard to put that all on one person.”
While Jacobs offers one interesting test case for the 2024 running back market, Ekeler will offer another. The 28-year-old is coming off a sub-par season, but the Los Angeles Chargers star finished among the top 10 in scrimmage yards in both 2021 and 2022 while scoring a league-leading 38 total touchdowns in that span.
Advertisement
The Chargers, under new GM Joe Hortiz and coach Jim Harbaugh, will be faced with a tough decision on how to implement backs in their new system and where they see value. Does Ekeler still fit in the picture?
“Running backs are important for an offense,” Hortiz said this week. “I’ve been in Baltimore for 26 years, and running backs were extremely important. Certainly in Jim’s offense and (offensive coordinator) Greg’s (Roman) offense, it will be. The value placed on it, the monetary value, those are the things we talk through and work through, but there is value in the running back position, for sure.”
GO DEEPER
Chargers' salary cap, changes at running back and more from GM Joe Hortiz
While the Buffalo Bills don’t have a significant free agent running back this offseason, GM Brandon Beane expects a similar market to last season based on how the league has evolved.
Those who can do more will be paid more, he said. Those who can’t are getting left behind.
“I just think it’s a passing league, and so the running backs that you can line up out there and can play receiver (have more value),” Beane said. “I think those backs who can run out of the backfield but can also be a mismatch in the passing game, they’re going to have more value than your traditional, old-school, line-them-up, 3-yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust running back.”
Not only do GMs need to determine how they value the running back position when it comes to veterans, but they also need to weigh those valuations against the new crop of running backs entering the league. Can they easily find a cheaper replacement in the draft? Some years, the answer may be yes. This year, however, the group isn’t viewed as positively, and that could play a big role in what teams do on the veteran market.
One other factor to consider is building around players drafted by the organization and who have become fan favorites.
Advertisement
Derrick Henry has been the face of the Tennessee Titans for years. He’s 30 years old now but is coming off another Pro Bowl season. How will Titans fans feel if the front office elects to let him finish his career somewhere else?
“People will come and the first thing they’ll say is, ‘Hey, we’re not going to lose Derrick, are we?’ … In my 12 months on this job, I have probably gotten more Derrick Henry questions than anything,” Titans GM Ran Carthon said. “So I understand that piece of it, too. But, I have a responsibility to build this team long term. And like I said, we’ll cross that bridge with Derrick and his team when we get there.”
Barkley falls into that category, too. He has become the face of the Giants franchise amid the transition from quarterback Eli Manning to Daniel Jones. He’s a beloved player in New York, from the fans to the locker room. He has said repeatedly he wants to play in New York for his entire career.
Schoen insists the organization wants Barkley back. It’s just a matter of negotiating. And after more than a year of the same conversation in different formats, everyone’s a little more experienced this time.
“I think we’ve all grown, Saquon, myself, the organization, through the last 12, 13, 14 months,” Schoen said. “Saquon may be in a different place now than he was then in terms of understanding the market and the business side of it.”
Perhaps they work something out this time. Or maybe the running back market still has to hit rock bottom. We’ll find out soon enough.
Daniel Popper contributed to this report.
(Photos of Barkley, Jacobs and Henry: Kathryn Riley, Chris Unger and Wesley Hitt / Getty Images)