Najee Harris is heading into his third NFL season, which means he’ll be up for a new contract soon enough and he’s keeping a close eye on what’s happening on that front for other players at the position.
Saquon Barkley, Josh Jacobs, and Tony Pollard all failed to land multi-year deals after receiving franchise tags and Barkley signed a revised one-year pact that offers him about $900,000 incentives over the $10.1 million franchise tag value. Harris noted Barkley accounted for “almost 30 percent of the offense” while noting that teams lean heavily on running backs before saying “well, you have wear and tear” when it is time to talk about contracts.
“They ask me alone — ‘The game’s going to rely on you, you need to do this for the team, you got to do this right here. Hey, it’s time to close out the game. Hey, we need to lean on you right now,’” Harris said, via Brooke Pryor of ESPN.com. “And it happens a lot of places like Cleveland, Tennessee, even with the Niners; there’s numerous teams where this happens at. . . . Only time when they choose to say that [the position] is devalued is when it’s time to pay the running back. . . . It’s not devalued at all. They just don’t want to pay a running back.”
It’s tough to argue with Harris’ view of the situation for running backs, but it’s unclear what the players will be able to do to change the state of affairs when it’s clear that teams aren’t going to go out of their way to reward players at the position.
