Rewind: Handcuffing Running Backs

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Speaker 1: Hey guys, it's JJ. I know that things are crazy right now. A lot of you are practicing social distancing, and you're probably already going a little bit crazy. I'm trying to do my best to help you out during this time. I really want to help you guys get your mind off of things. So over the next handful of weeks and over the next couple of months, I'm planning on re releasing some of the old Evergreen episodes that I produced way back when the show first started. Some of them can't even be found on the Late Round podcast feed anymore, but a lot of them are still very relevant. A lot of them can still help change the way that you think about fantasy football. So my goal is to publish one or two of them each week while you're all hanging out and staying inside. Today's archived episode is one on handcuffing. All the information in the episode pretty much still applies. Handcuffing for the sake of handcuffing is generally a bad idea. You're gonna hear names in this episode that you haven't heard in a while, and that's because the episode is old. It was episode twenty of the Late Round podcast. I talk about James Connor backing up Le'Veon Bell for example, And by the way, this was before Le'Veon Bell ended up holding out for an entire season, so his handcuffing example wasn't exactly a normal one. But anyway, I hope you like these older episodes, and hopefully the audio isn't any worse than it typically would be. I'll be back later this week with a Mailbag episode, but until then, enjoy. I've always had to help my mom with technology since I was a teenager. I've taught her how to access email, how to save pictures, how to store pictures, how to make folders, literally every small function that computers do and that we all do with computers, I've had to teach my mom how to do. Sometimes though, she picks up on things and she's able to learn a process on how to do whatever she's trying to do on a computer, like copying and pasting. She learned that you can write, click some text after highlighting it, click copy, and then click paste to paste that text. But when I talk to her about Command or Control CNV, it blew her mind. It was game changing, and it was because I took an ex existing process that she assumed was the best process and made it into something faster and more efficient. For I opened her eyes to something that she didn't even know existed. That's the goal here today. I'm going to talk about handcuffing your running backs and fantasy football, and the goal of this show is to have you walk away saying, man, why did I never question this process in the first place? Because people don't question the process of handcuffing enough. Handcuffing has been around forever. And for those of you who don't know what it is, which I'm sure there are a zero of you, but I'll still say this, it's the art of drafting a backup player for a player who's usually a stud you already selected to essentially have insurance if that stud player goes down with an injury. It works best with running backs because when a running back goes down, the chance that a backup running back sees a lot of work is a lot greater than a wide receiver stepping up and seeing a lot of work. Wide receiver targets usually get distributed amongst pass catchers, whereas a running back's touches will often just fall to the guy that's next in line on the depth chart. So handcuffing Ezekiel Elliott with Darren McFadden might make sense. James Connor, the now back up in Pittsburgh, to Le'Veon Bell, that's a handcuff. Jonathan Williams to Lashawn McCoy. Maybe Damian Williams for Jaya Jaii. You get the idea. A couple of years ago, handcuffing Le'Veon Bell with D'Angelo Williams really worked out. Bell tore his acl D'Angelo Williams stepped in and scored eight touchdowns over the final seven fantasy relevant games of the season. D'Angelo Williams was a successful handcuff who won fantasy leagues. But those instances really don't happen that often at all. And I did a study on Number Fire a couple of weeks ago to show that, and I figured this could be a good forum to go over it and maybe elaborate on some of the ideas that I wrote about. So the reason people handcuff, as I said, is to sort of ensure their high running back selections. But let's just call it like it is. It's a floor play. It's not a high variance play. People are handcuffing for safety. But there are four main reasons why handcuffing doesn't work, so let's walk through them. The first one is that we don't always know who the handcuffs will be. Remember we're drafting in July, August, in early September, things will change. The guys we think will be the handcuff aren't always the handcuff. No Sean Moreno comes to mind. He was a league winner back in twenty thirteen, but Ronnie Hillman was Monty Ball's main handcuff. And yes, Monte Ball had a handcuff that's real life. But Hillman had a higher average draft position than Moreno did. We all thought that Hillman would be the guy, but he was not the guy. The same thing happened with Nile Davis when Jamal Charles went down a couple of years ago. It wasn't Davis who stepped up. It was Chark, Kantrick West, and Spencer Ware. So this is just a friendly reminder that we're not just wrong about player projections in which players will break out and bust, but we're wrong about depth charts that includes the players that we would one hundred percent assume would be the backup. Nile Davis used to be that guy. Everyone every year drafted Nile Davis, Kristen Mike. So another example. I mean, the list goes on and on. People were drafting these handcuffs each and every year, and when the time came for these handcuffs to step up because an injury happened to their starter, nothing happened. Now we'll get into some numbers. The second reason handcuffing is a bad idea is that the chance of having the running back handcuff of the running back who goes down is low. In the article I wrote, I walked through how I defined a handcuff, because defining a handcuff in and of itself is somewhat subjective. Any study like this has its subjectivity, but I try to be logical with it. I looked at the top twelve running backs pre draft over the last six years. Is being handcuffable. No, handcuffable is not a word, But what I'm basically looking at is all of the RB ones and twelve team leagues that have been drafted over the last six years. That gives us a sample of seventy two total running backs that could possibly be handcuffed. Among those backs, I found that there were fifty four potential handcuffs. Now how did I get that number. Well, the last hypothetical starter in a twelve team league gets drafted in round six, generally speaking, meaning a player drafted there would definitely not be a handcuff. So I looked at any back drafted from round seven onward as a handcuff. That allowed me to be as open ended as possible, despite the fact that most handcuffs are taken in the double digit rounds. So we're looking at fifty four total handcuffs over the last six years. So within this study, I didn't want to just look at how these fifty four running backs scored at year's end, because that's not how handcuffs are going to accumulate points. That wouldn't be fair. They're obviously not starters, so their season long numbers won't look very great. So I looked at top twenty four weeks excluding Week seventeen, because Week seventeen to fantasy football is as worthless as the dpad is to a Nintendo sixty four controller. Basically, what I'm looking at is RB one or RB two performances in a given week by these fifty four handcuffs. Just to give you all some context for how many top twenty four performances is considered good. In twenty sixteen, ten running backs hit the ten top twenty four performances mark. There were twenty three running backs with seven or more, and thirty six of them had at least five. What that means is an RB three in fantasy football had five plus top twenty four weeks. RB three being RB thirty six are better. So looking back at those fifty four running backs, roughly twenty two percent of them had five or more top twenty four weeks, meaning about twenty two percent of handcuffs drafted over the last six years gave you week to week production that equated to an RB three. Moreover twelve percent finished as RB two types, and three point seven percent of them. Two running backs gave you RB one production. Those two running backs were the aforementioned D'angela Williams and then Michael Bush when he came in for Darren McFadden in twenty eleven. That's it. Here's the thing, though, and I'm gonna read directly from my article here so I don't miss the point, because this is an important point to make in today's NFL. This is from the article among the twelve running backs who pushed forth at least five top twenty four performances during their handcuff year. Again, this is where the twenty two percent number came from. Five of them produced because of an injury to the top back. The other seven did work because they were well, because they were good. An example of this is Fred Jackson in twenty thirteen. That season, his teammate CJ. Spiller was a top five running back pick in fantasy drafts. Jackson, meanwhile, was being selected in the twelfth round as the forty third running back off the board. Spiller only missed one game that year, though he still carried the ball two hundred and two times, only five fewer carries than his breakout twenty twelve campaign, which catapulted his cost to the top of twenty thirteen drafts. In the first place, Fred Jackson was able to produce because Fred Jackson was good. The same goes for players like Ryan Matthews and Giovanni Bernard in twenty fifteen and Tevin Coleman in twenty sixteen. Did they serve as handcuffs. Sure Matthews was behind DeMarco Murray on the Eagles depth chart, Bernard was sitting behind Jeremy Hill on Theirs, and last season, Coleman was technically playing behind Devonte Freeman. But guess what, Murray, Hill and Freeman missed a combined one game in their respective seasons. Bernard, Matthews, and Coleman were all relatively decent fantasy assets despite the fact that the running backs they were handcuffing didn't even miss time. That's all from the article. This is so incredibly important in today's league. It's conceivable for a running back handcuff a team's backup running back to produce more and be a better fantasy asset than a team's actual starter. When I published this article, I was shocked to see how many people responded and would say, well, Dereck Henry's the perfect handcuff because if DeMarco Murray goes down, we definitely know that Henry would be the guy. There's no doubt that that's correct. But Dereck Henry is also being drafted in the sixth round ahead of Legarrett Blunt and Ballalpowe according to Fantasyfootball Calculator dot com. I'm not telling you whether or not that's a smart selection. I'm telling you that he's a clear backup for Tennessee, being selected before actual team starters. I didn't write this in the article, but generally speaking, what this notion tells us is that handcuffing shouldn't be looked at as the sole reason you select a running back. It should be an added dimension that a certain running back gives you. Tevin Coleman is a decent enough example of this. I'm not necessarily one to take number two backs on their teams, but if I was, Coleman's that guy, because you know that he'll see some volume in that offense. He'll give you something each week in fantasy football. But he also becomes an RB one if DeVonta Freeman gets hurt. But people aren't drafting Tevin Coleman as insurance for Devonte Freeman. That's not how this works. Remember point number two here and why drafting handcuffs is bad, is that drafting the running back handcuff to the running back who gets hurt is not an easy task. And as the number show, the majority of quote handcuffs that do well really aren't handcuffs. They do well because they're good football players, and that brings me to our number three reason, and probably the most important one. The chance of these handcuffs producing even with an injury is incredibly low. So get this. Of those fifty four running back handcuffs in this study, seventeen of them actually saw their starter teammate get hurt and missed significant time, which I deemed as three or more games. Again, that's somewhat subjective, but we have to set these borderline arbitrary parameters somewhere in studies like this. These seventeen running backs gave us one hundred and five total weeks where the player was injured. I call them injury weeks because I'm really creative. Among these injury weeks, there were thirty six top twenty four performances by the handcuffed back. So we're saying, given a starting running back is hurt, a handcuff produces a top twenty four performance at a thirty four point twenty nine percent rate. For some context, that's barely a better rate than Jalen Rishard had last season. What this is basically telling you is that even if a running back gets hurt, if we assume the running back is hurt, the chance that your handcuff gives you a top twenty four performance, is the same chance twenty sixteen Jalen Richard gives you a top twenty four performance. Guys, think about this for a second. A handcuff who becomes a starter is basically Jalen Richard. And it stems back to what I said earlier. We think we know more than we actually do when we're drafting these backs. It wasn't Kristen Michael that took over from Marshawn Lynch in twenty fifteen. It was Thomas Rawls. Nil Davis didn't take over for Jamal Charles two years ago. Mike Goodson didn't step in for Darren McFadden a handful of years back. We think we know more than we actually do. Now, it's true that you can play the educated guessing game and reduce the number of busts within this group to a degree. What I mean by this is that you can select handcuffs only in super high leverage situations. James Connor and Pittsburgh, Darren McFadden in Dallas, Jonathan william in Buffalo, and there's a chance that Connor would be a beast if Le'Veon went down, or that Jonathan Williams takes over as an every down back for Buffalo if Leshawn McCoy were to get hurt. But who knows. What I do know is that we've felt that same way about other running backs in the past, and they haven't panned out. It's no guarantee. It's never a guarantee in football and in fantasy football. And that leads me to point number four as the why drafting handcuffs isn't efficient. The cost of holding onto an asset is just too great. While you wait for a running back injury to occur, your running back handcuff is sitting on your bench collecting dust. Fantasy football owners don't usually look at something like this as costly, but it is. It's no different than your company holding inventory. It's costly. Having a player on your bench doesn't allow you to be flexible with waiver wire moves. Either that or the handcuff is going to be the first one on the waiver wire, in which case, what's the point in drafting the handcuff in the first place. And that reminds me, by the way, D'Angelo Williams, the best handfuf cuff of this decade wasn't even owned in the majority of leagues when Le'Veon Bell tore his ACL in twenty fifteen, because the injury had happened halfway through the season and the folks who drafted Williams had eventually dropped him. Brandon Godola, one of our writers at number five, highlighted this in his yearly Waiver Wire running Backs piece that he does for Number fire. The other point to make here about holding onto running backs. You know how seventeen of those handcuffs had injuries occur to their starters. Well, the average injury to a starter occurred in week seven point four to seven, meaning between week seven and eight on average is when one of those big injuries occurred. Meaning you've got to hold on to those freaking handcuffs for seven or eight weeks before they even have a chance to be Jalen Richard. So those are the four reasons you don't want to draft a handcuff. Number one, to recap, We don't always know who the handcuffs will be. Number two, the chance of getting the handcuff whose starter gets hurt is pretty low. Number three, the chance of the handcuff being productive when the starter gets hurt is also low, probably because backup running backs are bad in the first place, and lastly, number four, holding on to that spot on your bench is costly. So which players should you draft? Then? Literally, any player who's unknown, That's my answer. A lot of times, the guys who jump up and become something are either rookies like OBJ or unknown entities like Josh Gordon. They're surrounded by ambiguity. Those are the players who give you true upside, not handcuffs, at least not handcuffs who you are actually drafting. And that's the thing. I'm actually all four handcuffing as your season goes on. If it's week nine or ten and you've got Leshaw McCoy, get Jonathan Williams off the waiver wire, man, You're not burning through opportunity cost in week nine or ten when the majority of breakout waiver wire players have already been claimed. Weeks one through four are a lot different than weeks nine through twelve in a fantasy football league. So I'm not against handcuffing, per se. I'm totally againsting handcuffs because there are plenty of more ways to capture true upside. Not a floor during fantasy football drafts that'll do it. For me. Guys, appreciate you listening. Hopefully I was able to convince handcuffing truthers a bit that the strategy is a little bit outdated. As always, please subscribe to this podcast pretty much anywhere podcasts could be subscribed to Follow me on Twitter at late Round QB and send me some questions for Friday's Mailbag episode, either through Twitter or by email at jj at number five dot com. Talk to you then,