If DeMarco Murray Wants to Really Get Paid, He'll Continue to Lead the League in Touches

DeMarco Murray has been touching the ball a lot through the first 6 weeks of the season, as the Dallas Cowboys have surged to a 5-1 start. He has 159 carries and another 21 catches for a nice even 30 touches per game.

This, of course, raises concerns about his long term health and outlook as he is on pace for over 400 carries. He also happens to be in a contract year and will be a free agent next season (though Dallas can certainly use the franchise tag). So is this a case of Dallas using up a running back who is going to walk, or a player that will increase his value to the team?

There has been plenty of discussion about workload and what it means for running backs. Chase Stuart over at Football Perspective has done work that shows the following when taking a look at workloads at a certain age.

"The career carries variable seems to hold little predictive power. In fact, the analysis here suggests that cumulative workload isn’t a thing. Or, perhaps more accurately, it suggests that to the extent cumulative workload is a thing, it’s offset by the fact that a large number of career carries is so strongly correlated with quality, even if the player is coming off a down year."

I have also written fairly extensively on this topic. One of my first big posts at this site in 2010 was about single game high workloads being the problem, not cumulative numbers. In other words, consistently getting 22 carries a game doesn’t show much risk of injury above normal, but having a large 30 carry game does show increased serious injury risk immediately afterward. I also provided my thoughts on the Curse of 370 and why rush attempts matter more than receptions when it comes to evaluate workload risk, and if you want to read more on the topic, this on higher leverage games leading to more injuries is also pertinent.

But I’d like to turn the discussion on Murray to what he should prefer. Football is a violent sport, and all running backs take hits, so we are merely talking the degree. Murray was a third round pick–he doesn’t have the pedigree of an Adrian Peterson who immediately came in as a recognized star–and though he has been productive has yet to put in a truly elite season.

That appears to be changing this year. He has the 4th most carries all-time through six games in a season. He has 233 more yards than the 2nd leading rusher, LeVeon Bell.

While I think that he probably doesn’t need consecutive games of 29 and 31 carries like he has had the last two weeks, I think it is also in Murray’s best interest overall to be the bell cow.

Football is a violent collision sport and all backs are taking a beating, so we are just talking a matter of degrees. With the timing of a contract year, Murray will likely get paid if he is the dominant back of 2014. That means continuing to get a lot of carries behind the Cowboys’ offensive line.

We can talk about how the teams should be smarter about running back longevity and how they can age quickly. It’s harder when you are the one making the decision, and a guy that just made up a significant chunk of a successful offense is at the contracts crossroad.

Here’s Stephen Jones this week on Murray:

"“We couldn’t ask for it to be any better, and I hope he keeps going,” Jones said. “I’ve told him that. Our goal is to keep good players, to keep the people that play well on the field and are even better off the field. He fits that to the nines. “I hope we have our work cut out for us in the off-season and that we’re coming off a big year and two or three of the players that are up for contract have great years. That’ll be a good problem to have.”"

And what about the backs that have held the designation of being the “highest paid running back” after signing a new deal? Going back through the Lexis archives, the following backs have signed deals where they were referred to as such (year is final year before signing deal): Eddie George (2000), Clinton Portis (2003), LaDainian Tomlinson (2003, a few months after Portis), Shaun Alexander (2005), Larry Johnson (2006), Steven Jackson (2007), Chris Johnson (2009), Adrian Peterson (2010).

Those backs averaged 380 touches, 1977 yards from scrimmage, and 16 touchdowns the year before signing those deals. Three of them were younger backs who had much larger seasons two years before signing the deal (Portis, Jackson, and Peterson) and got those deals despite missing some games in the year before the contract extension.

Four of the other five had over 400 touches, and the only one that did not, Shaun Alexander, led the league in rushing attempts and touchdowns in the year that they got paid. So while it may be in DeMarco Murray’s longevity interest to not run quite as much, it’s probably in his fiscal interest to continue to rack up the numbers and lap the field.

Oh, and it doesn’t hurt for legacy reasons either.