I always wondered why every single time a RB receives a record breaking contract, Twitter spirals into an outrage.
“This is WAY too much money for a RB!!” I angrily type as the thought of drafting AJ Dillon in the 2nd round to replace Aaron Jones crosses my mind. It turns out I was right, but I was only *partly* right.
The dollar value that a RB sees is one thing, but the actual cap percentage that they take up is another. In the first year of Aaron Jones’ contract, he’ll occupy 2.4% of the cap. In year two it’ll go up to 4.4% and in year three it’ll balloon to 8.6%. However, because of the way Jones’ contract is structured, the Packers could cut him after year 2 for $6.5m in dead cap and save $12.75m on their 2023 cap. The way the contract is structured is super important and it makes Jones’ contract extremely team friendly.
Let’s take a look at this excerpt from Caponomics and use it as a guide:
From this excerpt we can expect to pay between 3–6% of the salary cap for a high end RB. Jones in year 1 and 2 is occupying within this range at 2.4% in year 1 and 4.4% in year 2. For record breaking deals, the average cap % for a RB is around 4.67%
We use percentages because percentages hold through no matter the era. The salary cap changes every year and record breaking RB contracts occur every year, but comparison by percentages allows us to look at historical data to figure out whether or not that record breaking contract was too big.
So what’s the metric for success?
Well, what’s the goal of an NFL team? Winning the Super Bowl. When we look at past Super Bowl winning teams, here’s how much they paid their RB:
Notice the “% of Cap” Column. On average, a Super Bowl winning team is paying their RB ~3.57% of the salary cap. There are definitely exceptions on this list (Emmitt Smith, Reggie Bush), but those are outliers, not the rule. In recent years no RB on a Super Bowl winning team has breached 2% of the team’s salary cap:
2017 — Eagles
- Jay Ajayi — 0.2%
- LaGarrette Blount — 0.7%
2018 — Patriots
- Rex Burkhead — 1.3%
- Sony Michel — 1.0%
- James White — 1.4%
2019 — Chiefs
- LeSean McCoy — 1.6%
- Damien Williams — 0.9%
2020 — Buccaneers
- Leonard Fournette — 1.2%
- Ronald Jones — 0.9%
- LeSean McCoy — 0.4%
In fact, the cost of most of these team’s entire RB rooms is less than 4%. I believe that NFL teams are aware of this phenomenon and with more and more RBs demanding larger slices of the salary cap pie, teams trying to re-sign their stud players have been trying to backload their cap hits to go into win now mode. The following graph is sorted by contract start time. You can see that in recent years, teams have been paying less in year 1 and backloading the contract to future years:
It’s not a surprise then that from the last 5 years of large RB contracts being signed, there are no Super Bowl winning teams, in fact, 64.3% of teams that sign a RB to a huge contract don’t even make the playoffs the following year and only 1 team out of the 28 teams eligible on this list won the Super Bowl:
Why are teams still paying exorbitant amounts for RBs if the formula for winning a Super Bowl involves a balanced RB room? I won’t pretend to know the front office reasons for this, but from a football fan standpoint, one reason could be that RBs are now more dynamic players than they used to be. RBs that get paid lots of money are usually good players, and you know they will produce in the next year. Once you’ve found that player, that production is hard to replace.
Elite RBs are expected to run, block, and catch passes.
If the 2020 Panthers are paying Robby Anderson 3.8% of the cap and DJ Moore 1.5% of the cap, they can give Christian McCaffrey 3.7% of it. The Panthers can only do this because compared to Aaron Rodgers’ commanding ~10% of the cap, Teddy Bridgewater only takes up 6.7%. It’s also expected that the Panthers will draft a rookie QB, a formula for alleviating cap space.
However, since football is such an injury prone sport, investing a ton of cap into a single player (that’s not a QB or edge rusher) is a poor idea. In 2020, we saw an injury to Christian McCaffrey that sidelined him for 374 total yards costing the Panthers roughly $19,608.02 per yard and forcing Carolina to finish 5–11. There’s a rough negative correlation between the dollars spent per yard and a team’s number of wins:
Let’s subscribe to the Bill Belichick’s school of accounting for a minute. Christian McCaffrey is an elite player, but how many elite players exist? They’re in high demand and they come in low supply which makes purchasing this type of player extremely expensive and inefficient. Belichick’s philosophy has always been, let me isolate the skillsets I need in my system and break that into multiple players. I need a power guy, I need a pass catcher, etc and he ends up with a 2018 running back room that looks like
- Rex Burkhead — 1.3%
- Sony Michel — 1.0%
- James Develin — 0.9%
- James White — 0.6%
- Total — 3.8%
Belichick ended up winning this Super Bowl with Sony Michel finishing for 94 yards on 18 carries for 1 TD. Contrast that to the Rams who paid Todd Gurley 4% of their cap for only 35 yds on 10 carries. Did Gurley have an incredible season leading up to this point? Yes, he did, but the investment into a single workhorse RB crippled the Rams when they rested Gurley in the most important game of the year for his knee arthritis.
So, what are the fantasy implications?
Generally from a fantasy standpoint if your RB is getting paid big money that means they’re “good” and they’ll keep producing. Alvin Kamara in his first contract year put up 1,688 total yards, Dalvin Cook put up 1,918 total yards, and Derrick Henry topped our list with 2,141 total yards. Even RBs that were on the “downturn” or “sell highs” such as Ezekiel Elliot and Le’Veon Bell put up 1,777 total yards and 1,250 total yards respectively.
Assuming no injury, on average, you can expect a record breaking contract RB to put up ~1,327 total yards in their first season, ~1,118 in their second season and ~1,251 in their 3rd season (assuming they aren’t cut/traded/retired/etc by then):
It’s inefficient to pay your RBs big money even when they’re dynamic weapons like Christian McCaffrey or Alvin Kamara. They are well worth their production money wise, but you sacrifice roster construction in other ways and historically, there’s no proof that their production puts you into playoff contention. If you’re looking to build a Super Bowl contending team with a RB that occupies more than 3.57% of your cap, history isn’t on your side. There’s a reason why the Bill Belichick’s and the Andy Reid’s of the world are consistently successful and that process doesn’t include giving your RBs record breaking contracts.
Mama always said, don’t pay your RBs ✌️
