I was wrong about James Cook, and really, I was wrong about paying running backs in general. For years I bought into the same thing everybody else did, don’t pay running backs, you can find one in the fourth round, fifth round, sixth round, whatever. Use him for four years, move on, draft another one, because there will always be another guy. There was logic to it, obviously, because running backs take a beating and their careers are shorter than most positions. But I probably bought into that argument way too much.
When you’re building an NFL roster and paying quarterbacks, receivers, tackles, pass rushers, corners and everything else, running back became the place where everyone decided you could save money. It became almost a rule, smart teams don’t pay running backs, dumb teams do. You’d hear it over and over and eventually it just became accepted as fact.
And honestly, I repeated it plenty of times myself. Now I’m starting to think maybe we all got a little too smart about it.
Because running backs have always gotten the least amount of respect, from teams, from fans, from media, and honestly from people like me. We love them when they’re cheap, when they’re young, when they’re on rookie deals and winning fantasy leagues for everybody. We love watching a guy get handed the ball 20 times, run into linebackers, catch passes, pick up blitzes and get hit by 300-pound men all afternoon.
Then he asks to get paid and suddenly everybody becomes an accountant. Well, positional value, well, you can replace him, well, you can get 80 percent of the production for half the money.
Maybe that was true for a while, and maybe it’s still true in certain situations, but the game has changed too. Defenses have gotten smaller and faster, there’s more nickel, more light boxes, more speed on the field, and suddenly having a real running back can punish that. You’ve seen guys like Saquon Barkley, Derrick Henry and Josh Jacobs remind everybody that the position can still matter a hell of a lot even as they get older. Maybe running backs didn’t suddenly become important again, maybe we just spent a decade convincing ourselves they weren’t.
And now James Cook is part of that conversation too.
There’s another part of this that always comes up in sports, and you’ve heard it a million times, the contract-year guy. Somebody plays great and immediately you hear, well of course he’s playing hard, he wants to get paid. Then he gets paid and the conversation flips instantly to, okay, let’s see if he still cares now.
I remember being at one of Ty Dunne’s Happy Hours, Doug Whaley was there, somebody asked him about Marcell Dareus, and the first thing I remember Whaley saying was basically that he got paid and didn’t care anymore. That line always stuck with me because it’s such a common way we talk about athletes.
And look, that does happen, because it happens everywhere. It happens in sports, television, sales, construction, basically every workplace on earth. Somebody gets security, somebody gets comfortable, somebody gets promoted and maybe they don’t grind the same way anymore. That’s part of life and I’m not pretending it doesn’t exist. But the thing that bothers me is how quickly that explanation gets attached to certain players, like the contract itself becomes proof that they stopped caring.
And that’s where I think the racial part of the conversation connects, because a lot of the language we use around athletes isn’t neutral even when people think it is. We talk about who is hungry, who is disciplined, who is a grinder, who is naturally gifted, who wants it more, who got paid and became lazy.
Those labels have a long history in sports, and Black athletes have often been described through that lens in a way that can carry more baggage than people realize. I’m not saying every time someone says a player stopped caring it’s racist. I’m saying it’s worth noticing how easily the “he got his money and checked out” story gets told, and how comfortable everyone can be telling it without actually knowing the person.
That’s part of why James Cook is such an interesting example to me. If you wanted to use the lazy sports cliché, this was the moment where he was supposed to get paid, relax, protect himself a little more, maybe stop running quite as hard. Instead, he got paid and then got better, which is really the entire point of this piece. The Bills gave him the extension and instead of taking his foot off the gas, he had the best season of his career. He won the rushing title with 1,621 yards and averaged 5.2 yards per carry.
Now through three games this year, he’s at 346 yards and 6.0 yards per carry. Cook didn’t have the huge year trying to get paid. He had the huge year after he got paid.
The cynical sports-fan script says that’s supposed to be when the player gets comfortable, stops running as hard, stops taking care of himself or starts protecting the contract. Cook has done basically the opposite.
And more than the numbers, just watch him now compared to his rookie year. The speed was always there, the burst was always there, and you could see immediately why Buffalo liked him. But there’s a different confidence to him now, a patience and decisiveness that wasn’t always there early on. He waits for blocks better, hits the crease harder, gets north faster, and he looks like he knows exactly what he wants to do before the defense can react. He doesn’t look like a fast player trying to find space anymore, he looks like a complete running back.
The progression is pretty wild when you lay it out.
507 rushing yards as a rookie in 2022
1,122 yards in 2023
1,009 yards with 16 rushing touchdowns in 2024.
1,621 yards and the rushing title in 2025.
Now he’s off to another huge start in 2026.
That’s not someone who plateaued once he got his second contract. That’s someone who keeps adding to his game.
And maybe that’s where I was wrong more than anything, because I always looked at running back as a replaceable position instead of looking at the actual player. Yes, you can find running backs later in the draft, that part is still true. Yes, you can find productive players without spending a ton of money, that’s true too. But that doesn’t mean every really good running back is automatically replaceable. Those are two completely different things.
The question shouldn’t be, can I theoretically replace this position. The question should be, can I replace this player and not make my football team worse. Right now, I don’t think Buffalo can take James Cook out of this offense and pretend nothing changes.
Maybe we spend so much time talking about bad contracts that we forget there’s another version of the story. There are guys who get paid and then go out and earn every damn dollar. There are guys who get security and don’t get comfortable, they get better. So far, that’s James Cook. And I’m happy to admit I was wrong.
The money didn’t stop the progression, and if anything, he’s gotten better since it arrived. Maybe the lesson isn’t always pay running backs or never pay running backs, maybe it’s just pay great football players when you have one.
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