This weekend, nfl.com ran a feature on running back holdouts, going through the history of some notable ones. Being the kind of guy who cannot simply accept conventional wisdom or partial examples, though, I had to go digging through the old newspaper archives and see if there is any indication that holdouts hurt players. We are quick to point out when a back gets hurt after a holdout, but may not always remember those where the player went on to a successful season.

So I went through the newspaper archives using a keyword search of “running back” + “holdout” + “contract” for the months of August and September since 1990. Although it can be somewhat arbitrary and some things are labeled as holdouts that last one day of camp, I settled on finding all backs who held out or had not signed as a rookie within 30 days of the first game of the season. There were 37 such occasions up to and including Chris Johnson last year, excluding Bobby Humphery in 1991 holding out all season. Here they are, broken into two tables by resolution of holdout relative to the start of the season.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And those ending a holdout between 16 and 30 days of start of season.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Update: Thanks to Tom Gower for pointing out that Lorenzo White held out also in 1991, signing after the start of the season and missing the first 3 games. White went on to have 676 yards and 4 touchdowns at age 25, after 1,070 yards and 12 touchdowns the previous year.]

Overall, the group missed an average of 3.5 games and played in an average of 12.1 that season (0.4 games were missed due to holdout going into start of season). They averaged 840 yards from scrimmage and 5.2 touchdowns. There was a vast array of ages and experiences, from rookies to star backs to guys wanting to get paid who were probably very replaceable. To compare them, to see how they did, I settled on finding the two most similar comps during the same years for each player from the previous year based on age, yards from scrimmage, touchdowns and games played. For rookies, I used the most similar players based on age and draft position.

The 74 comps for those players averaged 1016 yards from scrimmage the following (non-holdout) season, with 6.8 touchdowns and 13.3 games played, so we can see that they did still have some tendency to play in a few more games (1.2 on average, but that includes those lost to holdout), gain more yards and score more touchdowns.

What if we break it down by distance to start of season?

 

 

So, yes, while that group of holdouts that resolved more than 21 days from the start of the season did not produce as much, they also were not expected to do so based on prior year’s production, age, and draft status (for rookies). There was minimal difference for those players. Not as much for those who resolved a holdout within 20 days of the start of the season, where the games played and production per game were across the board lower, by about 10 yards per game.

Matt Forte, Maurice Jones-Drew, and Ray Rice are all top backs who have been trying to get a long term deal. They have leverage in the sense that their teams need them; I don’t think any of them are the equivalent of Errict Rhett or Barry Word. The teams, though, aren’t going to pay too much because of the risk of the position and the aging curve for running backs. As they play a game of chicken heading into camp, both have an incentive to get something done before we approach the final two preseason games. The real deadline is not the start of the season, as Chris Johnson found last year, but probably about the middle of August.

[photo via US Presswire]