Seth Keysor highlights one of the great debates of football twitter in 2019 with four words, and then a bit wordier summary:

Running backs don’t matter.

Everyone who follows football closely has heard that statement or some version of it over the past few years. It’s an exaggerated claim that actually means something closer to this: Not only is running the ball much less important than passing the ball, but running back production is also so dependent on the blocking and offensive scheme that the ability of an individual running back doesn’t move the needle as much as other skill positions like quarterback, wide receiver and tight end. That’s a lot wordier than “running backs don’t matter,” though.

Whether running backs matter much is a difficult question to answer, but I think there’s one thing we can all agree on: they are much more important in fantasy football than real football. On the other hand, we should be careful not to go too far in the other direction and say that running backs don’t matter at all.

Let’s suppose that we think offense, defense, and special teams are worth 4 parts, 3 parts, and 1 part of a team. This makes the 11 starting players on offense worth 50% of the team. We don’t quite know how valuable a quarterback is, but let’s conservatively suggest that they’re worth double the average offensive player. That would make the quarterback position worth 8.3% of the team, leaving 41.7% for the other 10 offensive players (and they’re backups). If you think the quarterback is worth more than that, than there would be an even smaller pie for the rest of the offense.

If the running back position was worth exactly as much as the average of the other 10 offensive players, that would make the running back (together with his backups) worth about 4% to the team. For most teams, then, their starting running back would be worth 2-3% to the team.

Now, when people say running backs don’t matter, I think they might be saying that a running back is only responsible for about 2-3% of his team’s success, and they are therefore not important. But that’s pretty misleading, because nobody on offense is important besides the quarterback if that’s your standard of measure. It is a bad faith argument to suggest that the offensive line is more important than the running back: there are five times as many offensive linemen as running backs! Of course “the offensive line” is more important than the running back.

But is one individual offensive lineman? That is a much harder question to answer, and frankly, I don’t know if there is a good way to answer that. If we assumed that all positions on offense were equally responsible to the team’s success outside of the quarterback — an untenable position, but a decent starting place for these assumptions — that still makes one offensive lineman responsible for about 4% of the team’s success. So how do we measure the impact of one offensive lineman? That’s really hard, and it becomes even more difficult to compare the value of a running back to the value of a linebacker.

Given the small impact one player can have on a game that features 22 players on the field at the same time, how would you go about determining whether running backs matter — and by that, I mean, do running backs matter more or less than the left guard, the tight end, and the team’s right?