Running backs are generally considered the Kings of Fantasy Football, which is nice for them, since with the pounding they take, your average fruit fly has a longer career. But there's a flip side: With the emphasis on acquiring RBs, their draft price stays extremely high in most leagues. Which means you'll be tempted to over-pay for them, and a flop can be extremely costly.
Maurice Jones-Drew should be the poster-child for why we love fantasy football. There's always some undrafted (in fantasy drafts, anyway) player who explodes on the scene, upending all sorts of calculations. Fifteen touchdowns and about 1,400 combined yards later, it's up to us to classify his 2006 season and project him into his second year, and his standard deviation in mock drafts suggests that's not an easy task.
The basics: Jones-Drew is a short (under 5-7), thick running back with enormously powerful thighs and 4.4 pop. After starring at UCLA, he was drafted in the second round by the Jacksonville Jaguars as the heir apparent to Fred Taylor in 2006. Though he excelled as a kickoff returner and the oft-injured Taylor stayed healthy, Jones-Drew was too good to keep on the bench. He finished the year with 116 rushing attempts and put up his excellent stats despite having only six games in which he received more than 15 combined rushing/receiving touches.
While I've tended to focus on writing analysis of players with jittery standard deviation numbers in mock drafts, I want to step off that train for a moment and talk about Travis Henry, because he's another player with the potential to make or break your 2007 season.
The basics: Henry was a 2nd round pick by Buffalo in 2001 who broke out in his second campaign to the tune of 1,400 yards and 14 touchdowns. His third season was marred by injury and the rapid decline of Drew Bledsoe, and in Year 4 Henry was basically benched in favor of Willis McGahee. For two seasons this tough-running little warrior was an NFL outcast, a sign of just how quickly fortunes can change for a running back. But in 2006, Henry revived his career with a 1,200-yard season in Tennessee and got an invitation to play for Mike Shanahan in Denver. He's falling into the early second round in this year's drafts.
Cedric Benson was the second of three running backs draft in the top five picks of the 2005 draft (Ronnie Brown, No. 2; Benson, No. 4; and Carnell Williams, No. 5). All three have flashed potential while posting disappointing performances, and Benson is the least productive of the trio. This year he's finally the clear No. 1 in Chicago, but his questionable pro resume makes him one of the key decisions for fantasy owners in this year's fantasy offseason.
The basics: Benson is a powerful, explosive runner with a better-than-adequate running skills and speed. His between-the-tackles style attracted Bears' scouts because it matched the new offense they were installing for 2005, but Benson missed training camp in a contract holdout, worked his way into the rotation late, brooded, got hurt, spouted off to the press and flirted with the ghost of Curtis Enis. He entered the 2006 season as 1A in the Bears RBBC, but injured his shoulder in training camp and fell back to the second option behind Thomas Jones. In two years he has rushed for 919 yards, though he finished the 2006 season on something of a roll. It ended with his early exit from the Super Bowl due to injury.
I'm from that generation of pre-Internet fantasy players who had to puzzle out the Stud Running Back Theory on our own. People tried all sorts of wild ideas at the top of drafts in the early 1990s, but ever since the rise of the Web and the explosion of professional fantasy pubs and sites, EVERYBODY knows that the key to success is acquiring two stud running backs ASAP.
I see two immediate problems with this development:
First, if everyone has the same strategy, that isn't a strategy anymore -- it's background music. It's the status quo against which you have to develop a new winning strategy.
And second: The Stud RB drafting theory would make a lot more sense if fantasy owners were better at telling the studs from the duds. Consider this "expert" mock draft from a year ago ("these are all fantasy football experts who have played in several leagues per year for at least a decade, so study the picks closely because there is a lot of knowledge here"). Check out how many of the RBs taken in the first and second rounds were either flat-out busts or season-killing under-performers...
It may actually be easier to spot which players are headed for a bad season than the guys who are about to break out. Here's my list of guys to treat skeptically in 2007...
Thomas Jones was a former first-round bust until he showed up in Chicago three years ago. Today, 4,212 combined yards later, Jones is a Super Bowl veteran with a revived career. The trade that brought him to the Jets could make him the focal point of the New York offense and the immediate heir-apparent to the Curtis Martin era... but the questions that surround him give Jones only scatter-shot value in the early rounds of fantasy drafts.
The basics: Jones is a tough, veteran runner with decent speed, good work ethic and impressive clubhouse presence. Despite his age (29 when the season starts), Jones has had relatively few NFL carries and should have plenty left in the tank for 2007-08. In 2006, Jones rushed for 1,200 yards despite sharing the position with former No. 4 pick overall Cedric Benson.
How I figured this list: A lot of analysts confuse undervalued players with sleepers, so let's clear that up first. A sleeper is a player who:
(Players like San Diego's Vincent Jackson don't appear on this list because they've already been identified by most analysts as legitimate 2007 fantasy starters, thereby raising their draft status.)
On to the list...
With an ADP near the bottom of the first round and a late-June Standard Deviation above 5.0, Willis McGahee represents one of the first big variables in most 2007 drafts. He's clearly a strong No. 2 RB prospect with No. 1 RB potential, but he enters the year as the highest rated enigma among running backs.
The basics: McGahee enters his fifth NFL season (he spent his rookie season rehabbing a horrific knee injury) as a talented but disappointing fantasy player in what most analysts consider to be a vastly improved team situation. McGahee has size (6 feet, 230 pounds) to go with good (but not great) speed. He has averaged just over 1,100 yard for the past three years, but has a ypc average below 4.0. McGahee has scored more than six touchdowns in a season only once (13 in 2004).
Ask anybody who has ever played fantasy football and they'll tell you that running backs are the kings of the game. This is practically an article of faith, based on decades of statistics and some simple but reliable observations about strategy. It's the reason that most owners will draft two running backs before they address any other position. It's why an excellent wide reciever can often be had for a mediocre RB in trade.
It's also why your fantasy league has been generating some unexpected winners in 2006. Rushing touchdown production among the league's top ground-gainers is down -- way down -- over the first three weeks of the season. Compared to full-year statistics from 2005, per-game rushing touchdown production among the top 12 NFL rushers (the group fantasy players generally refer to as "No. 1 RBs") is down an eye-popping 36 percent this season.
The top 12 rushers of 2005 generated .69 rushing touchdowns per game. In 2006, that group is producing just .44 touchdowns per game. The rate drops only slightly why we look at the top 24 rushers, who are scoring .41 touchdown per game, adjusted for byes.
The downward trend is less pronounced when the comparison is applied across the league's top 24 rushers, but it doesn't go away. Among these likely starters, rushing TD production is down about 21 percent.
I don't have time to do a full analysis this morning, but look at some quick indicators and you'll spot the outline of a larger trend: After three weeks of play, NFL defenses are stuffing the run in ways that could change fantasy strategy.
The big question: Why? Has the current arms race between offensive and defensive strategy made running the ball less effective? Has the evolution of offensive line philosophy emphasized pass protection over run production? Is there less talent? Or was 2005 the anomaly?
In the meantime, fantasy football players should be prepared to adjust their roster philosophy. If the era of the dominant Franchise RB is in decline, then the position might become more like WR, where situational matchups and waiver-wire scouting make up a big part of the game.
Originally posted on Xark! on Sept. 26, 2006.
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