It’s not a good time to be a running back in the NFL and according to Melvin Gordon, the Rams are partly to blame for that.
Gordon, who’s currently a free agent, said on the “Jim Rome Show” recently that running back is “literally the worst position to play in the NFL right now.” It’s never been a high-reward position, given the wear and tear running backs sustain for the amount of money they earn compared to other players, but it’s especially bad right now.
And it all went downhill after the Rams paid Todd Gurley prior to the 2018 season, Gordon says.
“In my opinion, I think after Todd got paid and then Sean McVay came out and said, ‘I will never pay a running back again; I’ll just use them and rotate them out,’ I think after that statement was made — and then I think they won the Super Bowl — it was like everybody just followed suit, I think,” Gordon said. “I kind of think that’s where everything just started going downhill.”
"It's literally the worst position to play in the NFL right now. It literally sucks."
–@MelvinGordon25 on a brutal offseason for running backs. pic.twitter.com/omUUB7PRXu
— Jim Rome (@jimrome) June 21, 2023
The Rams gave Gurley a four-year deal worth up to $60 million in 2018 after he won Offensive Player of the Year and led the NFL in scrimmage yards and total touchdowns. It made him the highest-paid player at the position, resetting the market for running backs. It helped Le’Veon Bell get $52.5 million from the Jets in 2019 and Ezekiel Elliott land a $90 million deal that same year, but otherwise, running backs have struggled to break the bank the way players at other positions have.
The clearest example of the declining running back market is in the franchise tag values, which are an average of the highest-paid players at each position. The tag for quarterbacks has increased from $21.3 million in 2017 to $32.4 million this year. The wide receiver tag amount has gone up from $15.7 million to $19.7 million in the same span.
Every position’s tag value has increased in the last seven years except for running back. The franchise tag went from $12.1 million in 2017 to $10.1 million this year, bottoming out at $8.7 million in 2021. There’s simply no denying the declining running back market.
Where Gordon’s claim gets questionable is in his statement about McVay. The Rams coach never came out and said he was never going to pay running backs again. It’s hard to find McVay saying something even remotely close to that. Internally, the Rams probably regret paying Gurley when they did, but they still managed to win a Super Bowl a few years later so it didn’t set them back badly enough to derail their championship hopes.
However, during the Rams’ Super Bowl run in 2018 – the same year they paid Gurley – they did get some excellent play out of C.J. Anderson in the playoffs, who helped them get all the way to the big game. Even with a $60 million running back on the roster, the Rams leaned on Anderson, who they signed off the street late in the year.
That may have caused some teams to realize just how easy it is to find running backs for cheap. None of the most recent Super Bowl champions have had a high-priced running back, either – not even the Rams in 2021 or the Chiefs last season.
Los Angeles felt Gurley was a generational talent and game-changer, thus the massive contract extension given to him. It obviously didn’t work out because Gurley was cut prior to the 2020 season, before his new contract even kicked in, but that was largely because of Gurley’s degrading knee.
Gordon is right about the running back market declining and Gurley’s failed contract extension probably scared some teams off from making the same mistake – the Raiders and Giants have been reluctant to do that with Josh Jacobs and Saquon Barkley – but he can’t blame McVay for comments he never made.
