Brian Burke
Appearances
Freakonomics Radio
620. Why Don’t Running Backs Get Paid Anymore?
The run-pass balance. It was this perennial question, do teams run too often or do they not run often enough? That is Brian Burke, a sports data scientist with ESPN. And so there was this question, and so people came along and they started to analyze the question, and they didn't really have the right tools.
Freakonomics Radio
620. Why Don’t Running Backs Get Paid Anymore?
I won't argue against it. I was part of a larger movement that I may have been at the forefront of it, but I certainly wasn't alone.
Freakonomics Radio
620. Why Don’t Running Backs Get Paid Anymore?
My role in this was my hobby, which was football stats and what eventually became known as analytics.
Freakonomics Radio
620. Why Don’t Running Backs Get Paid Anymore?
Navy pilot, correct? Yeah. Went to flight school, made it into F-18s, flew single-seat fighters for my career in the Navy. They sent me to Monterey to grad school, and that's where I learned my stats. I thought, this is completely useless. Like, how am I ever going to use this in the Navy? But once I got out of the Navy, I thought, gosh, the level of analysis in football is so bad.
Freakonomics Radio
620. Why Don’t Running Backs Get Paid Anymore?
What were your early jobs between getting out of the Navy and doing what you do now? I have to be a little bit careful. I live in Northern Virginia. I was recruited. By something with three letters, maybe? To do some government stuff for a while that didn't last too long. Your choice or their choice? It was complicated. I became a single dad and raised two kids. So it was just incompatible.
Freakonomics Radio
620. Why Don’t Running Backs Get Paid Anymore?
But you ended up working around another three-letter institution, the NFL. A lot of three letters. Most of my time between the Navy and doing football for the day job, I was a defense contractor. And I was a tactics and strategy expert and instructor. And I would shirk all my daily responsibilities to crunch football numbers all day long.
Freakonomics Radio
620. Why Don’t Running Backs Get Paid Anymore?
So I'll tell you the origin story, kind of a water cooler conversation with my good friend, coworker, John Mosier. The conversation came around to like defense wins championships, right? The old standby, you know? And I was like, well, does it? I don't know. Like they say that, but does it really? What do people mean by that? And I thought, my God, I have this software left over from grad school.
Freakonomics Radio
620. Why Don’t Running Backs Get Paid Anymore?
And, you know, they put all the stats online now. So this is like 2006. I said, hey, you know what? We can just download the data. And by the end of lunch, we can answer this question forever. And that was the genesis of, you know, football analytics for me. When I began doing this, I hadn't read Moneyball. I didn't know that existed. It was an advantage because...
Freakonomics Radio
620. Why Don’t Running Backs Get Paid Anymore?
The baseball people tried to put it onto football for a long time. The kind of tools and the kind of analysis just doesn't work on football. I came from this military background, and I'm like, this is war. This is zero-sum, two-player game theory. And that paradigm took hold.
Freakonomics Radio
620. Why Don’t Running Backs Get Paid Anymore?
There's this optimization element to it. In the same way in the military, you have a mix of strategies. It's not like always do this or always do that. You have to be unpredictable in a way that keeps your enemy or your opponent on his heels. There's a famous thinker in military aviation named John Boyd who invented this thing called the OODA loop, if you've ever heard of that. And
Freakonomics Radio
620. Why Don’t Running Backs Get Paid Anymore?
Keeping the enemy confused and disoriented and in a state of ambiguity is one of the goals in American fighting theory. Football works the same way.
Freakonomics Radio
620. Why Don’t Running Backs Get Paid Anymore?
I was able to build something called expected points and expected points added. It's a point expectancy model based on down distance and yard line. Once I built that model, the very first thing I did was just aggregate by play type and And it was very, very clear at that moment that passing was far superior to running. Teams are running far too often.
Freakonomics Radio
620. Why Don’t Running Backs Get Paid Anymore?
And the way you know that is because if they're doing each in the optimum mix, the payoffs would equalize. There would be what people commonly refer to in game theory as the Nash equilibrium. As long as you have an intelligent opponent, you can assume that that equilibrium is going to be the optimum mix. And they were far out of whack. From that moment on, we knew that you need to pass more.
Freakonomics Radio
620. Why Don’t Running Backs Get Paid Anymore?
What year was this? 2008 is when I first did this, but it took years to permeate the football world. It was a slow process.
Freakonomics Radio
620. Why Don’t Running Backs Get Paid Anymore?
I think Franco Harris is a good starting point for the modern era. That's where people of our age grew up learning our football, and same with coaches. This is the 1970s. In those days, passing was very, very difficult. So running was a much better strategy. And then in 1978, the league massively rewrote the rules that had to do with passing, not just illegal contact.
Freakonomics Radio
620. Why Don’t Running Backs Get Paid Anymore?
The way linemen could pass block radically changed. And the league is still catching up to this day in terms of exploiting those rule changes. Over time, different systems started to exploit the new rules. Then 2004, they changed the rules again. So over time, the potency of the running game compared to the passing game has decreased steadily.
Freakonomics Radio
620. Why Don’t Running Backs Get Paid Anymore?
Well, he's just not going to be as valuable. This star running back is not going to carry you to a Super Bowl. It hasn't happened in generations.
Freakonomics Radio
620. Why Don’t Running Backs Get Paid Anymore?
I think that's one of the core developments that's affected the running back position is that teams have realized that you don't necessarily need a great running back. What you need is a great running game.
Freakonomics Radio
620. Why Don’t Running Backs Get Paid Anymore?
Yeah, there's going to be eight or nine blocks that are all essential. You need these kind of consecutive miracles for run play to really work. Coaches will draw them up and it looks perfect on the whiteboard. But then in the chaos of the game, so many things have to go right for it to work. But when it does, it's beautiful.
Freakonomics Radio
620. Why Don’t Running Backs Get Paid Anymore?
The way to think about it is the line and the blocking and the scheme are responsible for the first three or four yards of a gain on a run play. And then from there on, it's the elusiveness of the running back. It's like a threshold system.
Freakonomics Radio
620. Why Don’t Running Backs Get Paid Anymore?
Where if I have a good enough line to get a running back out to three, four, five yards, now he's into the secondary and it's up to him to make defenders miss their tackles. And then you get these big explosive gains. So if you want to improve your running game, you don't go out and just get a great running back.
Freakonomics Radio
620. Why Don’t Running Backs Get Paid Anymore?
I would say start with the offensive line, make sure you're calling good plays, and then the cherry on top might be a star running back.
Freakonomics Radio
620. Why Don’t Running Backs Get Paid Anymore?
By holding out, he cut his career short, maybe not by a full year, but a lot of the perishability is just age-based, not necessarily wear and tear based. The effect can be very slight, but the next guy up who costs a fraction of what Le'Veon wants to be paid, like I would much rather pay a million dollars for 95% of what Le'Veon Bell is than pay $15 million for 100%.
Freakonomics Radio
620. Why Don’t Running Backs Get Paid Anymore?
I would have advised him to just take what he can get. It's outside of his control. I understand what he's trying to accomplish, but he's just up against reality. He's lucky to find the Jets. If there's one... foolish team out of 32 that's going to overpay you, then it only takes one.
Freakonomics Radio
620. Why Don’t Running Backs Get Paid Anymore?
The concept is intransitivity. There is no, like, one superior tactic here. It's circular. The other 31 teams are all chasing pass blockers and receivers and throwers and everything. And there's a whole bunch of run blockers and running backs left on the table. There's inefficiencies like I'm going to go grab them and I'm going to be the best running team they've ever seen.
Freakonomics Radio
620. Why Don’t Running Backs Get Paid Anymore?
And they're going to be unprepared for us. And that's going to be pretty effective. But only one or two teams can get away with that.
Freakonomics Radio
620. Why Don’t Running Backs Get Paid Anymore?
Once I built that model, it was very, very clear that passing was far superior to running.