The Chargers have allowed Austin Ekeler to seek a trade, and while I understand your first instinct may be to Google whether Ekeler and Aaron Rodgers are personal friends and what the Jets’ running back depth chart looks like, I can promise you this will be a bigger deal in December than we’re making it out to be right now.
Ekeler, 27, is one of the most valuable running backs in the NFL and has been instrumental in the development of Justin Herbert. I am far less interested in the fact that he’s scored 38 touchdowns over the past two seasons than the fact that he’s been responsible for almost 15% of the passing first downs logged by Herbert in that same time, in addition to 99 more first downs added on the ground.
As we wrote before the start of last season, the proliferation of Vic Fangio–style umbrella defenses has put us in a golden age of checkdown running backs. As a result, we begged the Panthers not to trade Christian McCaffrey and the Giants not to deal Saquon Barkley. To be honest, we didn’t consider the Chargers parting ways with Ekeler because his presence seemed to be so obviously and intimately tied to Herbert’s progress. The Giants, who raced to get a deal done with quarterback Daniel Jones in part because they’d already utilized the franchise tag for Barkley, and the 49ers, who traded almost the entirety of a draft mid-round to acquire McCaffrey, seem to agree.
