Barstool's Jon Gruden is loud wrong about Saquon Barkley and Derrick Henry's success this NFL season
Gruden rocks, but he couldn’t be more wrong about these running backs.
I love content creator Jon Gruden.
I'd just like to open with that. He's an electric factory. His TikTok brand is unbelievable. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, do yourself a favor and look it up. He is an incredible follow these days. Nobody is doing it on the internet like Jon Gruden is doing it, truly.
That being said, he fired off a take this week that is… well, not the sharpest. And it got a lot of run, so lets break where he went wrong, and what substantive lesson we can learn from it.
Coach Gruden decided he wanted to show some love to three of the league's best running backs toting the rock this season: Saquon Barkley, Derrick Henry, and Josh Jacobs. And seeing as all three were free agents this past spring and are now thriving with their new teams, Jon fell into a textbook causation-correlation trap:
It's true, the Titans, Raiders, and Giants are a combined 7-26 this year. That's a 0.212 win percentage. Not good! Meanwhile the Eagles, Ravens, and Packers are 25-9 (0.736). Much, much better.
But, obviously, the idea that the transfer of these running backs has been the difference is completely absurd. That should be obvious without having to look anything up, frankly. These are players who went from bad teams to good teams! But let's put some numbers on it anyways.
Last season, these three backs still played for the bad teams in question. They are bad this year without those players, and newsflash: they were bad last year with them too. 20-31 (0.392) was the combined record of the Titans, Raiders, and Giants when Henry, Jacobs, and Barkley still played for them.
The teams they now play for, the Eagles, Ravens, and Packers, were a combined 33-18 (0.647) without them in 2023. All three made the playoffs!
What does this tell us? It's not that running backs don't matter at all, because they clearly do. The Eagles, Ravens, and Packers all have the ability to really lean on their opponents in the second halves of games and snuff them out. When you're a good team who plays from ahead regularly, that's a very valuable ability to possess!
But that's the key: being a good team.
An elite, volume running back is a finishing piece. They're a flourish. They're a guy you add when you're at or near the apex of your team-building cycle. And perhaps more importantly, they're a guy you resist paying when you're at or near the bottom of the cycle. That's precisely what went on here. The teams that let their volume backs walk are better off for it because of where they are as a team. And the teams who signed up for the expensive volume backs are better for it because of where they are as a team. This is roster management 101.
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