When telling the story of the 2024 NFL season, it's hard to begin anywhere but with the league's most maligned position.
This past offseason saw a resurgence of the running back market in free agency, with five different veteran running backs signing multiyear deals that pay at least $7 million per season, with two of them exceeding $12 million per year. For context, consider that between 2018 and 2023, only three free agent running backs signed multiyear deals for a $7 million AAV or more.
Fast forward to the season itself, and two of them, in particular, have retaken the league by storm, using their new surroundings to reach a level we haven't seen them hit in several years. The NFL's two leading rushers are 27 and 30 years old, respectively, operating in the best offensive environments of their respective careers.
Saquon Barkley heading to the Eagles to play alongside Jalen Hurts and behind the Jeff Stoutland University offensive line has allowed his skill set to shine through in a way it never did even early in his career with the Giants. And Derrick Henry playing with Lamar Jackson and the Ravens has allowed him to recapture his Offensive Player of the Year form.
If you take a look at their rushing stats, you see that they have put together almost identical performances this year. Rushes, yards, yards per rush, yards before and after contact (via TruMedia), rush yards over expected (via NFL Pro), success rate ... everything is within a very narrow band.
| Player | Saquon Barkley | Derrick Henry |
|---|---|---|
| Rush | 223 | 221 |
| Yards | 1,392 | 1,325 |
| Yards/Rush | 6.24 | 6.00 |
| YBCO/Rush | 2.76 | 2.45 |
| YCO/Rush | 3.48 | 3.55 |
| RYOE/Att | 1.99 | 2.02 |
| RYOE % | 45.7% | 46.0% |
| Success % | 44.8% | 45.7% |
It's only once you dip under the hood a little bit that you start to see slight differences. Henry has been tackled at or behind the line of scrimmage less often. He's created first downs and explosive runs more often. He's converted in short yardage more often. And he's done it while facing stacked boxes quite a bit more often.
| Player | Saquon Barkley | Derrick Henry |
|---|---|---|
| Negative % | 15.2% | 12.7% |
| 5+ Yards % | 39.9% | 38.9% |
| 1st Down % | 23.8% | 27.6% |
| Explosive % | 7.6% | 10.4% |
| 3rd/4th-and-1 % | 40.0% | 76.9% |
| % 8-Box | 23.3% | 33.9% |
There are also the differences in running style.
With Barkley, you get a bit more bouncing around, a bit more getting skinny through the hole. He obviously has the top end speed, but he's not a pure, one-cut runner in the same way that Henry is. Which makes sense. Henry is so big that if he tried to bounce and bob and weave the way Barkley does, things probably would not go well for him. But Saquon can do it, and seemingly with ease.
Playing behind that Philly offensive line, there is ample opportunity to do all that and then pick out the correct hole through which to run, then hit the jets once you get into open space. But because Barkley can also take even the narrowest hole and make it look huge, squeezing through it and creating an explosive gain anyway.
And then there's Henry. Playing alongside Jackson will create the kind of creases that a one-cut runner needs to thrive. And Henry is as good a one-cut runner as we have seen in a long time. His combination of size, speed and vision is unrivaled around the league, and at the first sign of a hole, he will plant that foot in the ground and burst through it with the kind of force that makes it almost impossible to either catch up to him or take him down before he really opens up the throttle.
Which of these two players has been "better" this year. It's probably a take-your-pick kind of thing. Barkley has the superior per-game numbers because he doesn't get scripted out of games the same way Henry does on occasion, and because his explosive runs have tended to somehow gain even more yards than Henry's. Taking a look at the more advanced stuff does make Henry look better on a per-carry basis, even with a 0.2 raw yards-per-carry advantage for Saquon.
In the end, it doesn't necessarily matter. What matters is that they have each played at exactly the level the teams with which they signed envisioned them playing.
It's important for the rest of us to remember, though, what we saw last year and the year before. Barkley and Henry were not doing this on the Giants and Titans. They are able to access the full breadth of their skill sets in large part because of the situations in which they now find themselves. There will likely be plenty of teams around the league that use their success to justify heavy investment in running backs as free agents or draft picks. But those backs will likely not be as talented as these two, nor their environments as advantageous, and it will likely not work out as well as these two moves have to date.