381: Finding Breakout Running Backs

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Speaker 1: This is the lad Podcast with your host JJ Zackertha J J zacher reson what's up everyone. It's JJ Zachariason, the editor in chief at fandel and at number five dot com. In This is episode three hundred and eighty one of the Late Round Podcast, one of the many shows that are part of the FanDuel podcast network. Thanks for tuning in. Last week, I talked to you guys about a study that I did on finding league winners in fantasy football. The results told us that generally speaking, difference makers in fantasy are coming from the early rounds of drafts. It's really hard to find late round gems, especially a wide receiver. Now, like I mentioned on the show, you could define league winner in two main ways. League winners could be considered players who just far outperformed every other player at their position. That's how I defined it. But you could also see which players exceeded expectation most essentially the most valuable players. Today's episode focuses more on that, but with a twist. A couple of years ago, I did a study on how to spot breakout running backs and fantasy football. Last year, I gave picks on my favorite late round running backs. Based on that study, but this past week I revised the study a little bit. I wanted to update things to see if anything changed. I'll talk through all of that on today's show. We're gonna find how you spot breakout running backs and fantasy football, and I'll reveal some of my favorite breakout running backs this season. Now, before getting into all of that, I want to remind you guys to check out the Football Multiverse. Each week, my colleague jim Sonis and I were streaming Madden simulations over on Fandel's YouTube page, and you can build FanDuel lineups based on what happens in those simulations. But what's really fun about it is that each game has a what if scenario. Upcoming this week is what if Michael Vick faced Lamar Jackson. So we've got Michael Vick on the Falcons going up against Jackson's Ravens. We've also got a scenario where Aaron Rodgers finally gets a new pass catching piece with Odell Beckham going to the Packers. But you can make a lineup and play in a free DFS tournament for three thousand dollars in real prizes. Just go to Fandel dot com slash Multiverse to enter, and don't forget to watch the live stream on Fandal's YouTube page starting at eight pm Eastern on Wednesday. Okay, so again I'm looking at valuable seasons today, not just players who far outperform the rest of their position. It's less about top ten running backs, which is how league winners were defined on last week's show. Instead, it's about the running backs who exceeded their average draft position the most. That's the process I took when doing this revised study on spotting breakout running backs. I wouldn't to find who the breakout running backs have been over the last decade or so, and then I wanted to see if there were any shared traits among those running backs. So what I did was I plotted every running back draft selection since twenty eleven using my Fantasy League dot COM's average draft position data. Picture on the X axis a player's overall ADP. On the y axis, it shows how many points that player actually scored. What this helps us do is find a trend line that shows expectation. So when I plotted those points and made a pretty graft for the article, the trend line showed that a running back who was drafted around pick fifty has generally scored one hundred and fifty PPR points over the last nine seasons, a running back drafted one hundredth overall has scored closer to one hundred. Now, using that trend line, I was then able to find which players outperformed expectation the most. The top player the best value at the running back position over the last nine years was Alvin Kamara in twenty seventeen, his rookie season. He was drafted on average at pick one hundred and forty one. Historically, running backs at that selection scored just under ninety points, but he scored three hundred and fifteen. That's a difference of over two hundred and twenty five, making him the best value running back that a lot of you have ever seen since a lot of you may not have played fantasy football before twenty eleven. So I did this with all running backs. Devonte Freeman's twenty fifteen season was the second most valuable according to this method. No, Sean Moreno's twenty thirteen was third best, and so on. And get this, guys, Christian McCaffrey, who was drafted with an ADP of two point six y three last year, he had the tenth most valuable season at the position. He outperformed his ADP at the tenth best rate last year despite having such a high ADP, despite his expectation being insanely high. That's how bonkers his season was. So anyway, we've got this list of players who really outperformed expectation. But like I said in the article, if we're talking about breakout players, we're generally not talking about players with early round ADPs. We're talking later round guys. And since we found last week that the opportunity cost in finding a league winner becomes a lot less significant after round five or so, I use that as baseline. So I looked at all running backs who were drafted since twenty eleven. I found which ones after round five or pick sixty in a twelve team league outperform their ADP the most, and by most? I decided on making it one hundred points. So all backs after pick sixty who outperformed their ADP by one hundred or more points, that's our sample of breakout running backs. There were thirty nine of them. So the question to ask now is what types of trace did those players share? Were there any trends in this data, well, clearly because I'm doing this episode. There were some pretty clear trends. Many of them are the same from the study that I did a couple of years ago, but they're even stronger. There's even more evidence for them. Trend one for these breakout running backs is that the vast majority of them were not running back handcuffs. Now, the term handcuff is kind of subjective. You may view someone like Tevin Coleman as a handcuff this year, but I'd say he's not a handcuff since he has standalone value. To me, handcuffs are play without much worth unless an injury happens. They're an insurance policy for the higher end running backs in fantasy football. Now, regardless of how I feel about handcuffs, among our thirty nine breakout running backs, it's pretty clear that the vast majority of them were not handcuffs. How do I know that, Well, only six of the thirty nine fifteen percent of them had a running back teammate drafted in the top twenty four of fantasy drafts during their breakout year, and only three of them had a running back teammate selected in the first round, and one of those first round running backs was Le'Veon Bell when he held out for the entire year, so that number realistically could have been smaller. It wasn't a totally traditional handcuff situation when James Connor became a breakout running back. If these running backs were truly handcuffs, we'd see the running back on their team that's drafted before them drafted way higher than we see them. But in truth, of these thirty nine running backs, the average pick for the top running back in those players' backfields was pick fifty nine. That's the tail end the fifth round. So the top running back in a breakout running backs backfield is generally selected pretty late. And that brings me to the second trend. Breakout running backs come from ambiguous backfields. The top running backs in a breakout running back backfield is usually selected at pick fifty nine, like I just said, But on top of that, thirty of the thirty nine running backs analyzed in our sample were the second running back taken from their own team. So you're looking at a situation where these breakout players and again they were all drafted after round five, but seventy seven percent of the breakout running backs were not the first running back taken from their own team. In other words, their players coming from depth charts that are kind of up in the air where the running back in front of them probably isn't very good. The third trend from the study is that breakout running backs are typically pass catchers. This is a really important one. We know that for a running back to be successful in fantasy football, he generally needs to catch passes. Targets are more valuable than rush attempts in every single format. But what I found is, but at the sample of breakout running backs, he's a larger proportion of their touches coming via the air. For example, among our sample, the average running back rush share, or the percentage of running back rushes that these breakout running backs had in their backfield, it was fifty one percent during their breakout season. Their average target share was a little over eleven percent. If you take all of the top ten running backs and group them together over the last nine years, while also removing the players from our breakout group because some of them were top ten running backs, we see a running back rush share of seventy percent and a target share of thirteen percent. So the breakout group is much more receiving heavy. When you look at running backs ranked eleven through twentieth, it's fifty eight percent versus nine point one percent. So again, the breakout group is more pass heavy. And you can look at this from a raw number standpoint two, and this will probably be more digestible in podcast format and easier to understand. The breakout running back sample had a rush attempt to target ratio of three. The thirty nine running backs saw seven four hundred and twenty seven rush attempts and two four hundred and seventy two targets during their breakout season. They had three times the amount of rush attempts as targets. For all running backs ranked first through tenth that don't include those breakout running backs, the ratio was three point five to seven. For the next tier of running backs, the RB eleven to twenty, it's four point zho five. All I'm getting at and showing is that running backs who are breaking out in the later rounds are doing so with an atypical amount of receiving work. They're largely pass catchers. Now, the fourth and final trend is different than it was in the study that I did a couple of years ago. Before The final trend was that you should be targeting running backs and good offenses. Well, I do think that's still important because there is a correlation between players and good offenses and fantasy success. I think it's less actionable than what this new trend is. The new fourth trend is that breakout running backs are of all ages. A lot of people would probably expect breakout running backs to be young, but that's not totally the case. Among the thirty nine running backs in our sample, seven of them were rookies, six of them were in year two of their career, seven of them in year three, three of them in year four, and six of them in year five. Meanwhile, ten of them were in year six or above. I think aiming for youth is fine as a tiebreaker. I don't want this to be twisted to me telling you to just ignore age while you're drafting, but I do think it tells us that we shouldn't just continuously draft rookie running backs or second or third year players just because they're young. And we associate the term breakout with someone who's young. Don't ignore the old guys. So to recap, before trends are that running backs are barely handcuffs, they come from ambiguous backfields, they're generally pass catchers, and they're of all ages. Those are the things to look for in a running back drafted after round five. Now, in the article that I wrote, I mentioned that I'd be giving specific examples on running backs that I'd be targeting this year on Today Show. So that's what I'm gonna do, and I won't lie. There are a ton of running backs this season who fit the mold of being breakouts. I think it does play well into the idea that going with a more wide receiver heavy approach, depending on the format, of course, but going with a more wide receiver heavy approach to zig while other people are zagging does make some sense. But again, it depends on your league. I know I just talked about the age thing as something to keep in mind when spotting these breakout running backs, But I also think that we don't always see draft classes like the one we currently have, not just because they're talented, but because so many Day two picks ended up going to teams with established running backs in their backfield. What that's done is it's pushed down the adp for those players a little bit. Those rookies because they're in a committee entering the season. I'm a fan of targeting those running backs even though they're young. And again, the trend isn't to avoid young players and to avoid rookies. It's just that age doesn't really matter. So I'm cool with you guys going with any of the rookie running backs this year, as long as you feel good about their pass catching, whether it's Keyshan Vaughn or Cam Akers, who I probably like most from a value standpoint of the group, or DeAndre Swift or even Anthony McFarlane or Antonio Gibson. Targeting the rookie running backs who can catch passes or could walk into a roll where they're catching passes. It's a pretty good idea this season because most of the rookie backs ended up falling into ambiguous backfields. But let's move past the rookies, what about some of the veterans. One of the guys who I think fits all of the criteria pretty well is Tevin Coleman. His backfield is ambiguous. That forty nine ers backfield will likely see somewhat of a committee, and Raheem Moster at the top back in that backfield. By ADP isn't being selected super high. The situation is really similar to what we've seen from other breakout running backs because last year in the regular season, the highest single game running back rush are for San Francisco was under eighty percent. It was seventy nine point two percent. The only team with a lower single game max was Baltimore. In other words, one running back wasn't consistently seeing the running back touches in that backfield very often. Now maybe that's a knock on Coleman. Maybe the ceiling is capped. Then maybe that's true. But at least compared to Raheem Mostert, Coleman had a target share per game average last year that was almost three percentage points higher than Mostart. Now, without Matt Brida, it's a little bit easier to see a path to upside for Coleman. I really like him at his cost. I found myself drafting Tarik Cohen this year too. I was off of him in twenty nineteen. But he's being selected at RB forty one now, and to me, he has a chance to really exceed that cost. You could think of it this way. His overall ADP is one hundred and forty according to Best Ball Ten's ADP at one hundred and fortieth overall, we'd expect him to score about ninety Fantasy points this year. In order for him to be a breakout. According to the criteria that we're using, he'd had to score one hundred and ninety points in what many would consider to be a pretty down year for the Bears offense and potentially Cohen in general. Last year he scored a hundred sixty three points. He posted two hundred and twenty three just two years ago. He's in somewhat of an ambiguous backfield given where David Montgomery often gets drafted, and he's most definitely a pass catcher. Do I think Cohen will end up being a league winning running back, a top ten running back? Probably not. I'm not sure we'll see another twenty eighteen type season, but I do think we'll see him far out perform as ADP, making him a nice value and one that deserves to be called out on today's show. And the last veteran I want to bring up today is the guy who's loved by the fantasy community way more than he is by the teams that he plays for. But that's Duke Johnson. Similar to Tevin Coleman. Johnson's in an ambiguous backfield with a running back ahead of him who's being drafted in the same range as raheem mostered, so that side of the criteria fits for him. He's also a pass catcher, and a good one too. Despite not really living up to expectation last year, Duke still had a twelve percent target share in the Texans offense. Maybe this is the year he puts it together like his twenty seventeen season in Cleveland. Maybe Houston, with a lot of question marks at pass catcher throughout the offense, utilizes him more heavily than we expect as a pass catcher. I think he's a good veteran to target late. Like I said, though, there are a lot of players you can look at late with this criteria, and I'd love to hear some of your favorites. I don't think the reason you listen to this episode should be for me to just hand you answers. Not only am I likely to be wrong with some of them, but that's not the point. The reason I wanted to use examples is so you could see how to apply some of the things that I talked through on today's show. In the end, we're trying to define our process. We're trying to win at fantasy football in a sustainable way. The only way for that to work is if we have a process that can work year in and year out. We shouldn't be relying on just straight up luck with our late Round picks. We should be relying on probability and using methods to increase our chances of hitting. That's going to do it for today's show, though, thanks to all of you for listening. If you've got to subscribe to the Late Round podcast, make sure you are by searching for it pretty much anywhere podcasts can be found, and don't forget to follow me on Twitter at Late Round QB. Thanks everyone. I'll be back in your ears later in the week with this week's Mailbag show.