Jets RB Dalvin Cook motivated to help his position gain better footing in NFL
Jets running back Dalvin Cook speaks in Florham Park, New Jersey on Thursday, Aug. 17, 2023. Credit: Patrick E. McCarthy
FLORHAM PARK, N.J. — Dalvin Cook is going to be running for a lot of reasons this year.
He has his legacy that he’s interested in cementing. He has doubters he wants to prove wrong, perhaps including the Vikings, his former team, who released him after four Pro Bowl seasons. He’ll be in a division where he’ll face his hometown team, the Dolphins, twice, and his brother’s team, the Bills, twice as well. He certainly wants to win a Super Bowl and he thinks coming here to play with Aaron Rodgers and the rest of the prodigious-on-paper Jets will give him a pathway to that goal.
But he made it clear on Thursday he is also running for every other running back in the league right now.
And they’re doing the same for him.
It’s no secret that the position has been devalued by NFL front offices in recent seasons. Cook lived that these past few months, first being booted from Minnesota not because of his performance but his paychecks, then spending the ensuing months in free-agency limbo waiting for a team to sign him.
Eventually the Jets did, with a one-year, $8.6 million contract that has a base salary of $7 million, but those terms also mean that in a couple of short months Cook will be right back in the free-agency pool trying to find work once again.
The best he can do to help himself and others in the coming offseason?
Re-prove just how important he and those like him really are to their teams.
“The world is not blind to what is going on for the position,” Cook said on Thursday. “Everybody knows the position is at a standstill right now. I think the only thing we can do is keep playing good football . . . and showing the world that the running back position is a position that really matters on the field. It’s just a situation we’re in right now. I don’t have a solution for it right now so I’m just going to keep playing good football and see where it goes from there.”
This isn’t a Cook problem, of course. It’s playing out all around the NFL. Backs, generally among the most important positions on the field, are being low-balled and having to swallow contracts that pay them a fraction of what others at less grueling spots earn. It’s not about the actual money, which is astronomical compared to just about any other career. It’s about an imbalance in the way coaches and teammates see them versus the way general managers do.
“Unfortunately, running backs are not valued anywhere near where they were when I got into the league, maybe not even five years ago, which is a shame because you have to run the ball to win in this league,” Aaron Rodgers said this week. “When a team becomes one-dimensional, that’s when defenses usually have the upper hand.”
Running backs used to play for rushing titles and championships to the detriment of their own well-being and, if they did that, the unspoken promise was that the money would follow. That’s no longer the case. Teams are hesitant to invest in second contracts at the position, burned by some high-profile busts. The present feeling is it’s a better use of their resources to spend mid-round draft picks taking chances on young, cost-effective players than give a good chunk of their salary-cap space to a ball-carrier.
Even the most special running backs are not immune to the realities of such insultingly imbalanced salaries. New York football now has three of the top running backs in the NFL in Cook, his new teammate Breece Hall and the Giants’ Saquon Barkley, who is playing under the franchise tag. Barkley and Cook were first and second in the league in offensive snaps among backs while Hall, who was on his way to running away with the Offensive Rookie of the Year award, missed more than half the season with a torn ACL. Yet the combined base salary for the three of them in 2023 is roughly $18 million. That’s a lot, but it’s about what a middle-of-the-road quarterback can make these days.
And that quarterback doesn’t have to sprint into a cement wall 15-20 times a game.
Cook said he’s been part of previously reported communications among the top running backs in the NFL via Zoom and, now that the preseason is in full swing, in a text chain that began as a way to consolidate gripes and hear ideas about fixes. It has morphed into a support group.
“It’s been great to see how guys really think day-to-day,” Cook said. “I think people’s mental [health] is really important out there, seeing how people think and how they’re really feeling after what they see in the media. Derrick [Henry] started up the chat. Everybody is in it. Everybody is hands-on with it. We just want to check on guys, see how they feel every day. You go out there and work your tail off on the football field and you don’t get what you deserve a lot of times, that can mess with your mental. So it’s just checking on guys.”
As for solutions, those have been more difficult to find.
“We tried to come up with an equation this offseason, starting the running back group chat, reaching out to the [NFL Players Association], everything,” he said.
Obviously nothing’s worked.
They have no leverage.
All they are left to do is try to create some on their own with their play this season and hope that when Cook and Barkley and all the others become free agents again in March they have somehow managed to alter the fiscal perception of their position.
Tom Rock began covering sports for Newsday in 1996 and became its NFL columnist in 2022. He previously was Newsday's Giants beat writer beginning in 2008.
