If there’s a bigger divide in football today than the one between people heavily involved in the design and use of advanced metrics and people who believe against all available evidence that running backs matter as they did in previous eras, you’d have a hard time finding it. And while the absolute lockdown idea that no running backs matter more than others is the same kind of blanket statement without any actual value that advanced metrics were ostensibly created to debunk in the first place, it’s where most are with the overall concept.
So, you can imagine the number of big brains that exploded on Saturday when the Vikings gave Dalvin Cook a five-year, $63 million contract extension, and the Saints then gave Alvin Kamara a five-year, $75 million extension with $34.