Welcome to the Athletic Football Show.

I'm Robert Mays.

Bill Barnwell is joining us today for a discussion that him and I have been kicking around for the last couple weeks.

As more and more people have dug into the conversation about running back value tied to whether Jeremiah Love could go in the top five of this year's draft, I wanted to spend some time with Barnwell today just revisiting essentially all the arguments

on both sides of this debate. We have so many kind of quick can things we go to when it comes

to why you can't draft a running back in the top five. Oh, the surplus value just isn't in your

favor. The opportunity cost you get from not drafting another premium position in that spot, running backs are just so much more dependent on what's going on around them

than other positions are. And then on the other side of it, we have, well, running backs are more

important now than they were 10 years ago because of the way the league has changed. The running

game is much more central to successful offenses.

There's more light boxes. Teams are playing defense differently. So, yeah, it's possible to draft

the running back that high. Running backs are more smoothly folded into the passing game now.

So what we wanted to do today is just kind of take all of those arguments on either side of this

discussion, debate, however you want to put it, and just interrogate them a little bit is this

true like do we feel like you can get running backs later on based on the numbers and based on history

to the point that you shouldn't draft one in the top five has the has the running game changed enough

for us to value running backs in such a way that you can draft a running back forth overall and feel

good about it, especially in a draft like this.

So what we wanted to do with this is just take an open-minded approach to this topic in a way

that we don't always.

I think people are kind of entrenched in how they feel about this.

And I'll say that I've been guilty about that.

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