643: Beating the Running Back Dead Zone

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Speaker 1: This is the labor of podcast with your host JJ zacher Retha j J. Zacher reson. What's up everyone, It's JJ zacharyesen in. This is episode six hundred and forty three of the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast sponsored by FanDuel. Thanks for tuning. In. A few weeks ago, I put an old episode of the show in the podcast feed on the running back dead Zone. Last week I talked about ambiguous backfields. There was one specific thing that those two episodes told us about the running back position in fantasy football, and it was that you generally want to avoid running backs with average draft positions in the fourth, fifth, and maybe sixth round of your fantasy drafts. But I think fantasy managers sometimes take advice like this way too far. When I say to avoid running backs in those rounds, I just mean generally. Fantasy football is a probability driven game. My analysis, the things that I say, none of it's for certain. Nothing I say when I'm predicting things is one hundred percent right. But the studies that I do can help us increase our probability of being right more than our league mates. The truth is, I actually don't think that the running back dead zone is an area of your fantasy draft that you need to avoid at all costs. I do think that you should avoid being overweight with running backs from that area of the draft. But if you're playing in multiple leagues, or if you're doing best Ball drafts, or if you're just stuck in your draft and don't know what to do, you can draft a running back from the dead zone. It's going to be okay because at the end of the day, not all running backs in the dead zone end up busting. There have been plenty of them who have succeeded through the years, and there may be ways to spot the ones that you should be drafting now. Before getting any further, remember that with the NBA Finals here, you can make every game feel like Game seven. On Fandable Sportsbook, an official partner of the NBA, throughout the playoffs, all customers can place a no sweat, same game parlay each week. You'll get up to twenty dollars in free bets if you don't win. Fandle has so many ways to play, and best of all, when you do win, you'll get paid faster than a fast break. Either way, you'll get up to twenty dollars in free bets. If your same game parlay during the playoffs doesn't win, so go place a nose sweat same game parlay today with FanDuel sportsbook. Let's first establish why the running back dead zone is a thing and why fantasy analysts like myself love to talk about it. If you look at historical hit rates by average draft position or ADP, it's not pretty for running backs in that area of fantasy drafts, in that round four ish through round five ish and maybe round six ish range. To help you understand this, let me walk through a quick math exercise. I looked at my fantasy league's redraft average draft position data since twenty eleven, and I split running backs up into six pick groups, the first group being running backs with ADPs between one and six, the second being a group with running backs draft between picks six and twelve, and so on. Really, what these little groups represent is front half and back half running BAX in each round. So front half round one running BAX and back half Round one running backs, front half Round two running backs, and back half round two running backs. That's all based on a twelve team league. I created these groups all the way through round nine and my goal was to see what percentage of the running backs in each group ended up hitting different points per game thresholds. And the running backs and I'm analyzing today for the record, played at least eight games. So for instance, let's just look at that first group or running backs who were drafted between picks one and six on average, So the first six picks in a draft. Overall, these are the elite of the elites. These are the Christian mccaffreys and Jonathan Taylor's of the world. All but one of them hit twelve PPR points per game, eighty six percent of them hit fourteen PPR points per game, seventy one percent of them hit sixteen points per game, and forty six percent of them hit eighteen points per game. I did that same exact exercise for every group in every round through round nine. What becomes clear when you chart this out is that hit rates start to decline a bit when you enter the back half of round three. Back half of round three running backs, just thirty two percent of them historically have hit fourteen or more PPR points per game in a given season. For some context, back half Round two running backs hit that at a seventy percent rate. Not only that, but ceilings start to evaporate around that point in drafts as well. Back half of round three running backs hit sixteen or more PPR points per game at a sixteen percent rate. That was far lower than the subsets that came before them, and as you moved into round four and round five, those hit rates were still pretty low the sixteen or more PPR points per game threshold. None of those groups had more than twenty one percent of running backs hitting that mark. They were usually hovering in the mid teens. Now, maybe you can't totally visualize. I wouldn't blame you. It's hard to follow this kind of stuff on a podcast, so let me just give it to you straight. What this data really shows is that running backs drafted at the end of round three are not a whole lot different than running backs who are drafted in round seven. Yes, round seven. When paying attention only to ceiling. For example, a front half round seven running back has hit sixteen or more PPR points per game at about a seventeen percent clip. That number is eighteen percent when look at the back half of round seven. Those numbers are higher than back half round four running backs back half round five running backs and all of round six, and they're comparable to the other sections of the dead zone. Round three and four running backs in particular, though, have provided better floors. They're better at hitting twelve or fourteen PPR points per game. But that's part of the problem with the running backs who get selected in the dead zone. They're typically elevated based on need not ability. Managers panic when they don't have an early round running back or two, and they reach for these players who don't have complete profiles. Instead, they really should just be opting for wide receivers who hit at a much better rate in those rounds. The running backs that they're reaching for they don't have high enough ceilings. These running backs can give you a floor, but they often aren't giving you great league winning upside. They're not outperforming Round seven players at a super high rate. When you focus on ceiling, that flat scoring distribution then devalues the position. You already knew all of this, though you knew that the running back dead zone existed. This is just another way of showing it. But here's the thing. Good running backs still come from the dead zone. Those percentages that I threw out there, yes, they're low, yes, round seven running backs have shown similar ceilings, but there have been hits. Good productive running backs have still emerged from the dead zone. So I decide to see if there were any traits that those successful dead zon running backs shared, and naturally, since I'm doing this episode, there were Going back to the ADP data, since twenty eleven, one hundred and twenty seven running backs have played eight or more games and have been drafted between the back half of round three and through round six. So pick thirty to pick seventy two in a twelve team league. We'll call this the dead zone, since that's where hit rates seem to really flatten. Of those one hundred and twenty seven running backs, eighteen of them were able to hit sixteen or more PPR points per game in a season. Sixteen is arbitrary. It's an arbitrary number, but sixteen does represent a running back who would have been right there at RB ten last year, and over the last couple of seasons, I've found that top ten running backs were generally the ones that you should care about in fantasy football because they were the ones who were giving you a more dramatic edge. They were your league winners. But yeah, it's arbitrary. With something like this, you've got to be a little subjective, though. So eighteen running backs have truly emerged from the dead zone over the last eleven years. What do we know about these running backs. Let's start with the thing that I always start with, and that's receiving as a lot of you know, I've done studies on spotting breakout running backs in the past, and one of the things that's obvious is that breakout running backs tend to be good receivers. They tend to see a disproportionate amount of targets compared to rushes. That's no different with these dead zone running backs. Of the eighteen successful dead zone running backs, their average rush attempts to target's rate was about four point seven. So I'm just looking at total rush attempts divided by total targets, and that's your rate. It was four point seven. When looking at the one hundred and nine running backs who did not emerge from the dead zone, that number was five point seven. In other words, these successful running backs are seeing targets at a higher rate than the unsuccessful ones. Not only that, but that four point seven number it's being skewed by Derrick Henry's twenty nineteen campaign. When you remove him from the sample, that four point seven actually falls to four point two, significantly lower than the players who have failed to emerge out of the dead zone. Successful dead zone running backs had a target share average of ten point two percent. That was over three percentage points higher than the other group. I don't think this is all that surprising, given number one, we know receiving matters for running backs. Number two, i'm analyzing PPR scoring, and number three, this exact same trend popped up in other studies that I've done. It doesn't do you much good to draft running backs who won't catch passes. Another thing that I wanted to check and see was the offenses that these running backs played in. Of the successful running backs out of the dead zone, their offenses averaged two point seven touchdowns per game. Of the unsuccessful ones, that number was two point three. So you could maybe make the argument that offensive performance helps. We also have hindsight to help us see something like this, so it may not be as actionable, but sure, all things being equal, pick a running back who's in an offense that's likely going to score. And then there's one other piece of information I think is useful when trying to find running backs in the dead zone who could be successful. Age of these running backs who have been drafted in the dead zone since twenty eleven, we've seen a wide variety of ages. We've had twenty one rookies, sixteen second year players, twenty four to thirty year players. We've even had an eleventh year player in Frank Gore. But there's a definite separation when looking at age the successful dead zone running backs, they were in on average their three point second year in the league. In other words, the average successful dead zone running back was basically in year three. That number was almost a year and a half older for the unsuccessful group. And now, get this, the absolute best running back subset, the one that's hit at the highest rate through the years, out of the running back dead zone, it's rookies. Almost twenty nine percent of rookie running backs drafted in the dead zone ended up emerging or scoring sixteen or more PPR points per game. That's about ten percentage points higher than any other age group. And the second best age group is year two players who hit at about a nineteen percent rate. Rookies made up one third of the running back dead zone hits since twenty eleven, rookies in year two players made up half of the hits. So quite simply, you want young running backs who can catch passes and who are ideally in good offenses, and I think this makes plenty of sense. Intuitively, those types of running backs are likely getting drafted in the dead zone not because of a fantasy manager's need and a demand for the position, but because fantasy managers are concerned about the ambiguity that they bring. Because they're not experienced players, we don't know how good they are, but they're likely talented. Rather than boosting an untalented, one dimensional running back into the dead zone, you should be striving for players who offer a sincere sealing with their talent. You should buy into that variance. You should buy into that ambiguity. It's not a guarantee that the player will hit. In fact, you should still do your best to stay away from the dead zone, but it's definitely a way to get some exposure to that area of the draft, and it's a way to navigate out of that area if you're really stuck in a draft. That's gonna do it. For today's show, though, Thanks to all of you for listening. If you get subscribed to the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast, make sure you are by searching for it pretty much anywhere podcast can be found, and know it to follow me on Twitter at Late Round QB. Thanks for listening. Everyone really appreciate it. I'll talk to you later in the week with the Mailbag Show.