Another top running back is coming up on the end of his rookie deal and he is reportedly asking for a lot of money, so I guess we’re doing this again. This time around, we have Dalvin Cook taking center stage in the latest episode of NFL Twitter’s favorite show: Does This Running Back Matter?
Admittedly, it’s not an overly entertaining show and it ran out of new ideas about two years ago. At this point, it’s just recycled jokes and memes that were never all that funny in the first place. And we’ve gotten to the point where it’s hard to celebrate (or even enjoy) undeniably fun players without someone pointing out that running backs are highly replaceable.
I don’t blame the nerds for continuing this crusade, though. After all, they’re right — running backs don’t matter — and it has to be frustrating as hell to produce so much compelling evidence only for some meathead to just say “Nah.” As long as there is a significant number of analysts and fans out there making the same old arguments — many of which have been thoroughly disproven by the #analytics — it will be a war worth waging for the sake of the discourse.
According to ESPN’s Jeremy Fowler, Cook felt “disrespected” by the Vikings’ initial offer, prompting him to begin holding out from official team activities. According to The Athletic’s Chad Graff, that offer came in around $8 million — or half of what Christian McCaffrey signed for in April.
Dalvin Cook isn’t asking for Zeke/McCaffrey money but something more like David Johnson: ~$13M.
Vikings offering more like Melvin Gordon ($8M per year) money. https://t.co/tJpDFmvAln
— Chad Graff (@ChadGraff) June 9, 2020
Since some folks think $13 million is a reasonable request, we’re forced to have this discussion yet again. Is the Vikings running back worth the investment? You probably already know what my answer will be, but for the sake of argument, let’s cover why it’s an emphatic “No.”
I’ll start out by acknowledging just how good Cook is at running the football. He’s undoubtedly a top-five running back right now, and that’s easy to see any time you pop on his tape. The 24-year-old is particularly good at executing the zone running plays that make up the bulk of Minnesota’s run game, which the entire system is seemingly based around.
Here comes the but: Cook was far and away the Vikings’ best runner in 2019 based on expected points added, but his running plays weren’t overly efficient. The Pro Bowl back averaged 0.03 EPA per attempt; compare that to the 0.16 Kirk Cousins averaged per play in 2019, according to Pro Football Focus. For the millionth time: Runs just aren’t as efficient as passes.
Of course, Cousins’ numbers were inflated by Minnesota’s high usage of play-action, and old school football types will tell you without a productive run game, those play-action fakes aren’t as effective. That’s when the nerds will tell you there is actually no evidence suggesting that’s the case. And I guess I’ll include myself in that group. I came to the same conclusion when I ran the numbers myself, finding running performance has little-to-no effect on a team’s play-action passing game.
[lawrence-related id=834340]
The Vikings aren’t some exception to rule, either. I charted all of Cousins’ play-action dropbacks in 2019, taking note of which running back was on the field. Though Minnesota did produce a higher EPA on the plays that included Cook (0.46 to 0.32 per dropback), the success rate was actually higher for the plays he was on the sideline (53.5% to 50%). Given all that we know about play-action passes, the difference in both categories is probably just noise. Vikings offensive coordinator Gary Kubiak has been producing dominant play-action pass games for two decades now, and he’s done so regardless of the talent he has at running back.
Contrary to popular belief, a running back’s presence on the field doesn’t seem to have any effect on a defense or how it lines up. You know the theory that having a strong running game forces a team to load the box? Yeah, that’s pretty much nonsense, as I covered in an article looking at Ezekiel Elliott’s value to the Cowboys offense.
A team’s willingness to drop an extra player into the box has more to do with the structure of an offense more than anything else. If the offensive formation creates an extra gap by adding a tight end or full back to the equation, the defense is going to have to add a defender in the box to account for it, regardless of the running back’s reputation.
The offensive formation largely dictates how a defense will line up. That was certainly true for the Vikings in 2019. It didn’t matter which player was in the backfield, the number of defenders in the box was pretty much the same for each of them.
Maybe Cook didn’t have an effect on the passing game in that regard, but what about his contribution as a receiver? He caught 53 passes for 591 yards, both numbers were near the top of the league for running backs. But unlike the Christian McCafferys and Alvin Kamaras of the NFL, Cook is not a back who threatens a defense downfield. That’s no exaggeration, either. His deepest target last year? It traveled a whopping FOUR yards through the air. In fact, his average depth of target was -1.39 yards.
Cooks isn’t a player you line up out wide to create a mismatch, either. He was targeted exactly once when lined up outside of the backfield. The play went for three yards.
So where did all of those receiving yards come from? Well, Cook was dominant in the screen game, leading the league in total EPA (18.7) on 24 plays, per Sports Info Solutions. But we probably shouldn’t expect that to continue. Over his first two seasons in the league, Cook was not very efficient in the screen game, compiling -1.5 EPA on 20 targets. It turns out that performance on screen passes is extremely volatile year-to-year, which makes sense given the sample sizes we have to work with. The correlation between a player’s average EPA on screen passes in 2018 and 2019 was non-existent when I ran the numbers…
Cook’s performance on screen plays in 2019 tells us nothing about what he’ll do in 2020. If his receiving numbers are your argument for paying him, you’ll have to find another argument.
Cook is a brilliant runner and not much more. But there are a lot of talented running backs out there and they will come at a more reasonable price. And chances are, those other running backs haven’t missed 40% of their games due to injury as Cook has through the first three seasons of his NFL career.
(Minnesota already has one of those talented running backs on the roster. While Alexander Mattison’s efficiency numbers don’t touch Cook’s, he did outperform his more heralded teammate in Sports Info Solutions’ Total Points metric on a per-snap basis. Total Points appears to be more predictive than EPA.)
As the Vikings front office sure knows, thanks to the new CBA, Cook’s holdout threat is completely hollow. As Brad Spielberger of OverTheCap.com points out, a player who fails to report to training camp now loses an accrued season. So if Cook showed up after camp, he’d only receive a credited season, meaning he’d be a restricted free agent next offseason. The Vikings could slap a first-round tender on him, which would automatically give Cook a 2021 salary of about $3.5 million, and force another team to give up a first-round pick in order to sign him. That isn’t going to happen.
Minnesota has all the leverage and, based on all of the evidence suggesting running backs don’t matter, it should have little motivation to cough up the money Cook is looking for. But the same has been true in just about every situation in which a team has decided to pay its star running back (hello, Carolina Panthers). I’d like to think NFL teams have learned by now; but, if that were actually the case, I wouldn’t have had to write this same article again.