What Does Josh Jacobs Bring to the Packers?

Even though Xavier McKinney is the more expensive, important, and perhaps impactful signing, I can’t help but be fascinated by the Packers’ move to acquire Josh Jacobs, recently of the Las Vegas Vikings.

Jacobs, who briefly made up the league’s most dynamic running back duo with Aaron Jones, comes to the Packers under unique circumstances. While McKinney enters a safety room that was essentially empty, Jacobs will be a virtual one-to-one replacement for both the now-departed Jones and AJ Dillon. And with the Packers’ long-running investment in Jones via his contract extension and subsequent restructures and the price of the 2020 second-round pick that Dillon represented, Jacobs amounts to an enormous sea change of resource expenditures at the position.

So who is he as a player, and why would the Packers be interested in his services?

Josh Jacobs is close to the ideal image of a classic running back

A 2019 first-round pick by the Raiders (via one of the selections they acquired in the Khalil Mack trade), Jacobs profiles as essentially the platonic ideal of an old-school running back. He lines up in the backfield, takes handoffs, and runs with the ball.

Just look at his alignment data: when he’s on the field, he’s in the backfield the vast, vast majority of the time.

And when he’s carrying the ball, as he has done frequently and effectively in his career, the bulk of his carries have gone between the tackles. Pro Football Focus charts runs in eight different directions as follows(not including jet sweeps, which are in a different category): left end, left tackle, left guard, middle left, middle right, right guard, right tackle, and right end. Grouping those a little less precisely is more useful, in my opinion, so for the below chart I’ve grouped them by runs that go wide (runs to end), runs that go off tackle (runs to left ahd right tackle tackle), runs that go over guard (both guard spots) and runs that go up the middle (middle left and middle right). Here’s how Jacobs’ carries break down in those directions.

And to get even simpler, here’s runs that go inside (guard and middle runs) and outside (end and tackle runs).

Clearly, Jacobs profiles as an inside runner, and his 5-10, 223-pound frame coupled with his 5.72 Relative Athletic Score make him a fairly ideal prototype for the big-bodied back that Brian Gutekunst has openly pined after this offseason.

But in addition to his physical fit, Jacobs also profiles as someone who thrives in the type of run game the Packers have recently begun to use more. Matt LaFleur has his roots in the Shanahan tree wide zone system, but has trended more toward gap and power schemes the last couple of seasons. That’s good news for Jacobs, who has mirrored that trend. In 2022, when he led the NFL in rushing yards, nearly 70% of his carries came in gap runs, and more than 50% of his carries came in those types of runs in 2023. He previously has extensive experience in zone schemes, too; prior to 2022, the majority of his runs came in those sorts of plays.

As a receiver, Jacobs has also been quite good, but he’ll be a different kind of receiver than Aaron Jones was. As you can see from his alignment data above, Jacobs has lined up almost exclusively in the backfield in his career. He has little experience splitting out wide or even motioning to the slot as a part of his on-field usage. But that’s actually a benefit to his receiving; when he catches the ball, most of the time it’s past the line of scrimmage. His average depth of target in 2023 was 0.9 yards, a contrast to Jones, who has had a negative ADOT each of the last two seasons. That’s a small but significant difference, one that should give us confidence in Jacobs’ ability to be an effective receiver even if he’s not motioning around the formation a lot.

How does Josh Jacobs compare to Aaron Jones?

Just to further illustrate the difference between Jacobs and Jones, here’s Aaron Jones’ alignment data. 

The Packers have been willing to move him all over the formation in ways that Jacobs’ coaches have not been. That’s not to say Jacobs can’t do that, but Jones has done it.

Jones, further, has traditionally been much more outside oriented than Jacobs. For the entirety of the LaFleur era in Green Bay, Jones has been mostly an outside runner, as we can see by his inside/outside splits here.

We saw in 2023 that Jones can clearly be effective running inside, but that’s probably not the ideal use case for an aging 5-foot-9, 200-ish pound (if you believe that, and I don’t) running back with a history of knee injuries. If gap and inside runs are what the Packers want to do, it’s possible Jones just didn’t align with their goals anymore.

[As a short digression, in my opinion, that would be a very bad reason to move on. If you have a player who is effective, you fit your scheme to the player. No scheme is good enough to justify getting rid of good players. But we also shouldn’t assume that the Packers or anyone else will always make decisions from a wise, rational perspective. For instance: the Packers reported contract negotiations with Aaron Jones put them only about $3 million apart as far as his 2024 salary, virtually the exact same number it will cost the Packers to keep Royce Newman. Not to pick on Newman, but I think it is a virtual certainty that Jones will be a useful player for more games in 2024 than Newman is, regardless of the team for which they play.]

But what about Jacobs age and wear-and-tear?

If there’s a significant concern to the Jacobs signing, it’s the economics of signing a running back of his age and previous workload. Conventional wisdom suggests that you can nearly always replace running back production with a few low-cost backs rather than swinging big on one big-name back, especially one who has as much wear and tear as Jacobs does.

And there is some merit to that idea here. Jacobs is entering his age 26 season and, counting playoffs, has 1,519 career touches. Jones, though four years older than Jacobs, isn’t that far ahead of him in the touch category. Including playoffs, Jones has touched the ball 1,577 times in his career. Does that mean that Jacobs is about to break down, as we saw with Jones last year?

Possibly, but not necessarily. Though most studies of this phenomenon suggest that a back’s peak years of productivity are ages 21-25 (like this one and this one), the same studies also suggest that backs can be quite productive, on average, through ages 26, 27, and 28. I couldn’t find much data about the point at which total touches begin to take a toll, but this study suggests it’s usually at about 1,750, though that’s strongly influenced by some survivor bias. 

In any case, the shape of Jacobs’ contract puts the Packers in a good spot here. Though he signed a four-year, $48 million contract, both the reported years and money are essentially fake. This is really a two-year deal after which the Packers have year-to-year decisions to make on Jacobs’ services.

If you’re going to spend on running backs in free agency, that’s the way to do it. The Packers got themselves a back who has been very productive doing the things they increasingly are interested in doing in the ground game, they’re paying primarily for what should still be some of his best remaining years, and they’re leaving themselves options for his future beyond that. Even if you don’t love the idea of spending on a running back, that seems like pretty good process to me.