On Wednesday, the football analytics site Pro Football Focus released another of its offseason position rankings. In it, Ben Linsey ranked the NFL’s running back units.
Earlier this offseason, I ranked the top-20 starting running backs in the NFL. There’s going to be some similarity between these rankings and that list, but the league is shifting more and more toward a running-back-by-committee approach, as just one running back — Najee Harris — played on over 70% of his team’s offensive snaps in 2021. That makes running back units a better way of evaluating a team’s backfield contributions than merely looking at where its starters stack up.