In football years, one decade might as well be a century. Ten years ago, the wildcat ripped the league in half, Aaron Rodgers made his first start for the Packers, Brett Favre played 16 games for the Jets, the Patriots missed the playoffs, and most shocking of all, Jeff Fisher coached a team that won—you’re really not gonna believe this—13 whole games. If you don’t know where you’ve come from, then you don’t know where you’re going. So, to better understand what’s ahead in 2018, we’re spending this week looking back on what happened 10 years before. Welcome to 2008 Week!

Ten years ago, a pair of safeties from the same division, on opposite sides of the league’s most brutal rivalry, ruled the NFL. Between them, Ed Reed and Troy Polamalu can count 17 Pro Bowl visits, 14 All-Pro appearances, and two future fittings for gold jackets. Neither was ever more impactful than in 2008. They combined to pull down 16 interceptions that season (Reed had nine, Polamalu seven) while captaining the league’s top two defenses to a meeting in the AFC championship game. “They were two of the most instinctive anticipators to ever play the position,” says Chuck Pagano, who served as the Ravens secondary coach that season.

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Ray Lewis may have been the face of the Ravens in 2008, but Reed was the undisputed king of that Baltimore defense. At age 30, he’d emerged as a football clairvoyant. He paired the remarkable physical gifts that helped him become a 2002 first-round pick with an almost supernatural ability to predict the future. “He made plays because he knew exactly what was coming,” Pagano says. “Before the ball was snapped, he had it whittled down to one or two plays, and then his instincts—which were off the charts—kicked in.”

To Pagano, the quintessential Reed moment of that season came in the Ravens’ wild-card-round playoff win over Miami. Facing second-and-12 from the Baltimore 15-yard line, the Dolphins set up in a formation they’d used earlier in the game. Reed recognized the alignment and surmised that, given the down and distance, Miami would attempt what the Ravens referred to as an “Ernie” or “Zampese” route combination. That meant a throw would travel to the opposite side of the field from where Reed was patrolling his deep-half zone. “[Baltimore cornerback] Corey Ivy’s getting ready to step in front [of the receiver], and all of a sudden, here comes Eddie Reed from the opposite hash mark [to make the interception],” Pagano says. “He had no business being over there. It’s one of those deals where you’re saying ‘Oh, no, no, no—great play, Eddie!”

Reed was a superstar long before the 2008 campaign, but that year he transitioned from bothering quarterbacks to tormenting them. While Reed was playing chess, AFC QBs were playing checkers ... while doing the football equivalent of dangling above a shark tank on a fraying rope. Quarterbacks going against Polamalu that fall experienced a similar feeling. The Pittsburgh icon spearheaded a defense that allowed 13.9 points per game, the best mark in the league. Reed had an expert ability to find the ball; in Polamalu’s case, it often felt as though the ball found him. Many of his interceptions that season came on physics-defying displays in which tipped balls should have hit the ground by every law that governs the universe.

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If 2008 was the peak year of safety value in the modern NFL, 2018 might be its deepest valley. This year’s free-agent class at the position included several players who analysts expected to secure lucrative deals based on their performance last season. Tre Boston and Eric Reid headlined the class, with Kenny Vaccaro—a pedigreed talent coming off a down season—leading the tier directly below. Yet when the market opened, suitors were hard to find. Boston waited by the phone for months before finally agreeing to a contract with Arizona (where Steve Wilks, his former defensive backs coach with the Panthers, is now the head coach). “I think we all expected to be top-paid safeties,” Boston says. “I was going into [the market] with two first-rounders, and first-rounders usually get a nice second contract. And I had the best [2017] season out of all of us. Going into it I didn’t think I was too far from [Rams safety] Lamarcus Joyner.”

“How did we get to a point where this is what we were worth? You can put my stats up against some of the best of them you’re gonna get me in the $7 million-plus range. It’s crazy that people aren’t really talking about how we managed to get paid less than $2 million.” —Tre Boston

Joyner signed the franchise tag with Los Angeles in April, setting his 2018 salary at $11.3 million. Boston’s base salary, by comparison, is just $1.5 million on a one-year deal, with incentives that could get him up to $3.2 million. Vaccaro, who signed with the Titans last week after Tennessee starter Johnathan Cyprien went down with a torn ACL, inked a one-year contract that’s reportedly in the same range. “How did we get to a point where this is what we were worth?” Boston says. “You can put my stats up against some of the best of them you’re gonna get me in the $7 million-plus range. It’s crazy that people aren’t really talking about how we managed to get paid less than $2 million.”

It does feel absurd that the free safety who recorded five interceptions for the Chargers’ defense, which finished fourth in deep-passing DVOA last season, per Football Outsiders, couldn’t find work until the eve of training camp. The question is whether that disappointing safety market is the product of the position’s marginalized standing in the NFL, a blip in the position’s trajectory, or a coordinated push among decision-makers to prevent one man—and one man only—from finding a job.

Boston, for his part, believes that the answer is obvious. “It’s right in front of our eyes,” he says. “Somebody’s got to call a spade a spade.”

It took only five years for Tyrann Mathieu to see both the highs and lows of life in the NFL. In August 2016, he signed a five-year extension with the Cardinals that made him one of the highest-paid defensive backs in the league. The negotiating process was knotty; Mathieu spent a significant portion of his snaps the previous few seasons as a cornerback, complicating his market value and leading to him landing a $62.5 million deal that made him the league’s “richest safety.” Just 15 months later, not far removed from an injury-plagued 2016 season, Arizona’s brass balked at his $18.75 million cap hit and cut him. “I got released, and any time a player gets released, it’s that reality check of, You have to prove yourself again,” Mathieu says. “I didn’t want to go anywhere where I was locked into a long-term deal. I wanted to go somewhere to prove myself.”

“You kind of get that vibe that [teams think], ‘Most safeties are replaceable, we don’t really need ’em, most safeties are system players.’” —Tyrann Mathieu

Mathieu was cut on the opening day of free agency, making him another member of the 2018 safety class that included Boston and Reid. Like his peers, Mathieu found a chilly market. He was offered a couple of multiyear deals, but they came from teams in cold-weather cities. The New Orleans native wound up signing a one-year, $7 million deal with the Texans. Mathieu’s payday was significantly more lucrative than the deal Boston got, but the leaguewide attitude he encountered was the same. “You kind of get that vibe that [teams think], ‘Most safeties are replaceable, we don’t really need ’em, most safeties are system players,’” Mathieu says. “I try not to really buy into it or feed into it. Most of the guys I talk to, I try to get them to understand the difference between a system safety and guys that actually bring value to a secondary.”

As the landscape of the league has shifted, the type of safety that is coveted has shifted, too. A steady increase in rule changes, including the NFL’s latest attempt at revamping the helmet rule, has diminished the need for bruising big hitters in the mold of Steve Atwater. Instead, front offices are placing a premium on safeties who can cover ground like Reed. “At one time you could get away with 4.6 [second 40-yard dash] safeties,” Browns general manager John Dorsey says. “You better have 4.4 safeties now.”

Dorsey’s beliefs about the state of the position explains the Browns’ March trade for Damarious Randall. Randall spent his tenure in Green Bay as a cornerback, but Dorsey saw him as a player ideally suited to become the roaming free safety Cleveland lacked. “To me, it’s [about] the dynamic of the athlete on the back end there, as opposed to the more traditional box safeties,” Dorsey says. “I think the game has gotten to the point now where it’s athletes in the back in the secondary.”

The changes in how the game is played, both from a rules and a strategy standpoint, have led to the thinning out of safeties who are built like Kam Chancellor. That’s been further compounded by a wave of offensive-scheme shifts. As spread concepts and run-pass options have taken hold in the pro game, the middle of defenses have become more vulnerable than ever. Talented coverage safeties are no longer necessary just because offenses are throwing more often; they’ve become necessary because of how offenses are throwing. “Not only has the game gone vertical, it’s stretched horizontally as well,” Dorsey says. “So what do you do? You have to increase the speed component on your back end.”

Before coming to Cleveland, Dorsey spent four seasons working as the general manager in Kansas City, where the NFL’s RPO revolution took off. The Chiefs have cooked opponents on option plays while using tight end Travis Kelce in a host of different ways across their formations. Kansas City’s success provides a window into just how many demands fall on a safety in today’s NFL. As RPOs seek to exploit the space between the numbers, gigantic pass-catching tight ends like Kelce also wreak havoc. “You’ve gotta play man coverage on a guy who’s big, strong, physical but at the same time runs like a receiver,” Boston says. “He’s got a little juice to him. They can split him out as an X receiver, where you’re guarding him like a corner. You can be a corner, a safety, and a linebacker on one play.”

That requisite positional flexibility is why this year’s underwhelming safety market felt particularly inexplicable to Mathieu. If anything, the changes in the sport over the past decade have boosted the value of safeties since the days of Polamalu and Reed’s reign. And that makes the disconnect between NFL safety salary and responsibility all the more curious. “They’re trying to put us in a box,” Mathieu says. “But the game is evolving, and it’s making the safety position more evolved.”

More evolved—and aware of the forces at play in depressing their value.

Safeties around the league are paying close attention to what’s happened over the past several months. Mathieu regularly talks with his counterparts at the position and says theories about the market have begun to form. Those differ depending on who you ask.

Before this year, each of the past two offseasons saw a safety reset the market at the position. In 2016, Vikings star Harrison Smith signed a five-year, $51.3 million deal that made him the highest-paid safety in NFL history. Less than nine months later, the Chiefs handed Eric Berry a six-year contract featuring an average annual value of $13 million. Surveying how this year’s market has crystallized, Vikings GM Rick Spielman says it’s important not to equate the experience of a single class with being representative of an entire position group. “Harrison Smith is a unique player,” Spielman says. “I don’t know if you look at it in terms of just pure ‘safety.’ It’s, ‘What is the person?’”

Spielman points to the undulations in the running back market as a useful comparison. When the Vikings gave Adrian Peterson a seven-year, $100 million extension in 2011, it shattered the financial ceiling at the running back position. Shortly afterward, the bottom fell out. “But now,” Spielman says, “that [market] is ready to take off again.”

Mathieu points to the same shift as a reason for guarded optimism. Todd Gurley’s record-setting contract with L.A. shows markets at marginalized positions can rebound if the right combination of players come along. In the realm of positional value, a rising cap number lifts all boats. And that transition can only happen, Mathieu says, if a group of safeties around the league strings together several quality seasons. “I think it’s gonna take not even one guy, but collectively, guys have great seasons and put them together back to back,” Mathieu says. “When you look at the safety position the past couple years: I signed a big deal, and then I got hurt. Eric Berry signed a big deal, and then he got hurt. And then Earl [Thomas] was struggling with injuries.”

Thomas’s ongoing contract stalemate with the Seahawks is a flashpoint among safeties around the league. “It’s discouraging,” Mathieu says, with a nervous laugh. To players at the position, the 29-year-old Thomas remains the gold standard. And if his value has diminished, the fear is the outlook for everyone else could get dark quickly. “It’s tough to see a guy like him going through the situation he’s going through,” says Titans safety Kevin Byard, who tied for the NFL lead with eight interceptions last season. “I know for a fact that he’s the best in the league at what he does. As a guy like me, a young guy, I’ve been watching Earl Thomas a long time.”

Few safeties in NFL history occupy the same rare air as Thomas. He feels that he deserves $14 million instead of $10 million. For players of Boston’s caliber, the figures in dispute are more modest, but the negotiations no less contentious. Initially, Boston was baffled when few teams came calling with the caliber of contract offer he expected. Soon, he developed a theory of his own. “Nobody could find a football reason why it was happening,” Boston says, “but people know why.” Boston doesn’t mention Eric Reid by name, but as he explains his reasoning, the reference is unmistakable.

“People have to think beyond just one person. How are you going to look at a whole market if you sign everybody and one person is left? You don’t put yourself in that predicament. You devalue the whole market.” —Boston

Reid was the first member of the 49ers to join Colin Kaepernick in taking a knee during the national anthem in 2016 as a way to protest racial and social injustice in the United States. After interest in Reid as a free agent didn’t materialize this March, the former LSU standout filed a collusion grievance against the NFL that mirrored Kaepernick’s case against the league. Onlookers have linked Reid’s continued unemployment to his connection to Kaepernick, and Boston suggests the effect of Reid’s apparent blackballing is more wide-ranging than it may appear. “People have to think beyond just one person,” Boston says. “How are you going to look at a whole market if you sign everybody and one person is left? You don’t put yourself in that predicament. You devalue the whole market.”

In Boston’s eyes, NFL teams are trying to cover themselves for not going after Reid. “Last year, [there were] three highly paid safeties,” Boston says, alluding to Berry, Chancellor, and Reshad Jones. “It was the highest our market has ever been. And then it just flops this year. It’s the first year any top-five group of free agents has waited into training camp. And a week into camp two of the top five sign. It’s just obvious [what the reasoning is]. I don’t understand why the questions are even there.”

For the moment, Boston’s wait is over. He’ll play for the Cardinals this season while trying to build up his value for another run at free agency next spring. When he hits the market again, he believes his experience will be drastically different. “Can’t come around twice,” Boston says. “Somebody’s not going to play football this year, and then he won’t be a free agent next year. Everyone knows what’s going on.”

Reed and Polamalu’s dominance a decade ago was a triumphant, if temporary, stretch of supremacy for the safety position. Come next March, Boston, Mathieu, and Vaccaro will be available again, and their collective hope is that the sentiment and climate currently surrounding safeties will seem like another fleeting moment in the lifespan of the position.