An interesting article from Pro Football Weekly this week discusses that running backs are becoming more valuable in the draft, now that teams are going younger and cheaper at the position. After all, if you want a stud running back for cheap, you can only do it in the draft: we saw Ezekiel Elliott and Leonard Fournette each go fourth overall in the past two years, and it wouldn’t be a surprise to see Penn State RB Saquon Barkley go in that same position this year.

In addition, the article correctly points out that there were 30 running backs drafted last year, the most in any season since 1996.

In my mind, there are three essential components driving this turnaround: teams want to use running backs when they’re younger and still relatively fresh, they want them when they’re cheaper, and most importantly, with more teams employing some semblance of a strategic committee approach to their backfield hierarchy, they need more players at the position to ensure very little drop-off in performance from one back to the next.

However, that’s about where the argument ends. For starters, let’s look at draft capital spent on running backs during the common draft era:

Draft capital spent on running backs has declined significantly, even over the last 25 years. Last year was definitely a bit of a rebound year, but it still is behind ’05 and ’08. And it was hardly part of a trend: 2016 was the single worst year for draft capital spent on running backs in league history.

The 30 running backs were a lot, but half were selected in the 5th, 6th, or 7th rounds, and 22 were in the 4th round or later. There were two first round running backs drafted, which was still pretty low:

There were no first round RBs taken in 2013 or 2014, which was the only time that has happened since 1967. And only three times has there been just one RB drafted: 1984 (which needs an asterisk, since Mike Rozier and Kevin Mack were top-15 picks in the Supplemental/USFL Draft), 2011, and 2016.

Yes, there have been a few RBs drafted highly over the last three years, and there were a lot of RBs drafted last year, but that doesn’t change the simple fact that teams are spending a lot less draft capital on running backs than they used to.