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Anatomy Of A Top 10 Running Back - Part 2By Brandon Anderson In the first half of this piece, we’ve looked at five facts and slowly whittled last year’s field of top 10 runners down to four repeaters. Out are Edgerrin James, Willis McGahee, Jamal Lewis, Clinton Portis, Marion Barber, and even Adrian Peterson. Only LaDainian Tomlinson, Brian Westbrook, Joseph Addai, and Frank Gore are set to repeat. So what other six running backs will join them in the set of 2008 top 10 fantasy backs? Fact #6a – In the past 7 seasons, there have been 12 instances where a running back made the leap into the top 10 after having been there some other time previously – about 2 per year. Candidates for that leap back into the top 10 this season include: Steven Jackson, Maurice-Jones Drew, Larry Johnson, Willie Parker, Rudi Johnson, Thomas Jones, Fred Taylor, Lamont Jordan, and for comedy sake, Shaun Alexander. Fact #6b – Eight times in the past 7 years, a RB that made the leap would’ve been in the top 10 the previous year (by ppg) if he had not been injured for a few games – about 1 per year. The candidates here are fewer: Steven Jackson, Marshawn Lynch, and Brandon Jacobs. Jacobs is in a better spot with health but looks to be sharing touches with Ahmad Bradshaw this year. Marshawn Lynch is having all sorts of problems staying out of legal trouble, let alone staying healthy. In case you’re wondering, Ronnie Brown’s knee injury was no ordeal injury and left him too far to really count here. Larry Johnson’s health is even worse, and he was not a top 10 ppg last season either way. The winner here is clearly Steven Jackson, an easy pick. He played hurt all last season and with an awful offensive line and was still only another two starts away from playing 14 games and still making the top 10. He excels in every area necessary to be a top fantasy RB. He is an easy pick to fit these two criteria and leap back into the top 10. Fact #7 – Eleven times in the past 7 seasons, a back has jumped from #11-#25 into the top 10 despite having started all 16 games for the same team the previous season – about 1 or 2 per year. Five of the 11 were returners from previous top 10 spots, and most of them returned because of a big spike in TD production and/or YPC due to blocking improvement. The candidates here are Lendale White, Thomas Jones, Maurice Jones-Drew, and Fred Taylor. Fast Willie Parker misses by a hair because he was injured for a game. White is a bad choice as a top back. He is not a good pass catcher, he doesn’t score a ton of TDs, and he has a very bad YPC. That leaves Thomas Jones and two Jaguar RBs, and only one of these three fit the normal profile. Fred Taylor does not have the health or TD numbers to challenge the top 10 at this point of his career. MJD should be close again but already has a high YPC and great TD numbers, so until he gets a big boost in carries once Taylor is hurt or leaves, he doesn’t have a lot of room to jump either. Thomas Jones is the name that fits the profile by far the best. Jones is not usually a huge TD guy, but he does generally have more than the flukeishly low 1 rushing TD he scored last season. In the meantime, the Jets went out and signed All Pro guard Alan Faneca and stud lead blocker Tony Richardson. Count on Jones’ YPC to rise and his TD opportunities to follow. Thomas Jones is the winner here, and he is our second of two runners to fit Fact #6a. Fact #8 – A rookie runner has finished among the top 10 RBs in 8 of the past 10 years. Now there’s a fact that’s bound to excite you. The only two years that missed were 2003 and 2005. In ’03, Domanick Davis (Williams?) was the highest rookie finisher at #14 but would’ve made the top 10 if he hadn’t’ missed two games to injury. 2005 was the worst year with Cadillac Williams coming in at #19, but he played just 10 healthy games and led one of the all time RB bust classes. Before you get too excited about guys like Kevin Smith and Matt Forte, the rookie RB phenom is almost always a first or second round pick, with the only exception really being Mike Anderson in Denver. That probably leaves your 1st round RBs as the best bets – Darren McFadden, Jonathan Stewart, Rashard Mendenhall, or Chris Johnson. It’s pretty difficult to see Mendenhall or Johnson getting even close to the number of touches they’d need without pretty significant injuries. The pick here is Darren McFadden. No, he may not be the lead runner all year, but neither were Adrian Peterson and Maurice Jones-Drew, the last two rookies to grace the top 10. In fact, 11 times in the last two seasons, a RB has finished in the top 15 despite logging 250 carries or less, or around 15 or less rushes per game. These lower-carry RBs make up ground elsewhere, averaging double digit TDs and over 50 catches a season. Like Peterson and Jones-Drew, McFadden has a great nose for the endzone, gamebreaking play ability, and makes the most of his touches. He’ll also be running behind a line that saw Justin Fargas break out for over 4.5 YPC last season. And he’s versatile – at Arkansas when he wasn’t running his way into Heisman contention, he was split out wide at receiver, returning kicks, or taking snaps at quarterback. So hop on the bandwagon now – DMac in this year’s top 10! Fact #9 – In the past 7 years, an amazing 16 veteran (not rookie) RBs have leapt into the top 10 in their first full year starting at RB on their team – 2 or 3 every single season! This may be the biggest surprise of all. New fulltime starters can make a pretty big impact on your fantasy team. Only 3 of the 16 RBs were longtime veteran starters who moved elsewhere in free agency and then jumped into the top 10. To be fair, two of them were last season, McGahee and Lewis. The only other instance was Corey Dillon in New England. It was a fairly quiet offseason, but this is bad news for someone like Julius Jones or Lamont Jordan. Don’t count on Marshawn Lynch fitting this criterion either. He was the starter last season from the get-go, he just missed some injury time. This section is for brand new starters. So who are our options here? There aren’t many. Kenny Watson could be a long shot here, but he doesn’t look like a starter by any stretch in Cincinnati. DeAngelo Williams could have been a leading candidate here, but he doesn’t look like he’ll even be getting starter carries behind rookie Jonathan Stewart. How about Selvin Young in Denver? Denver RBs are not what they used to be. No Bronco has led the team in rushing back to back seasons since Clinton Portis in 2002 and 2003. Mike Shanahan just has some deal that doesn’t stick with one RB anymore these days, and he’s always moving down the line to the next option. You can roll the dice on Young if you’d like, but I won’t be touching him. He won’t be the team’s starter by the end of October. An obvious pick here is Michael Turner in Atlanta, and he’s a good one. Turner has been putting up great numbers in limited time in San Diego, and now he’s signed a big four year contract in Atlanta. With the new coaching staff in town and a cushy schedule to start the year, Turner the Burner will get plenty of touches early and often, all the looks he could ever need to turn into a great fantasy RB. This is his year at last. That’s actually not all that common of a scenario though, where a young RB finally gets his chance through free agency. Lamont Jordan hit big a few years back, and Priest Holmes of course was fantasy gold in Kansas City. But it is far more regular to see a young RB simply getting his turn to start for his team, 8 of those 16 runners in fact. And so we come to the final two backs in this year’s top 10, Ryan Grant and Earnest Graham. That’s right, last year’s sleepers are sleeping again. They are not flashy, they don’t show up on ESPN’s top 10 plays on Sunday night, and they were not high NFL draft picks. Everyone seems to just feel comfortable writing both of these guys right off. Don’t make that mistake – take advantage of your naïve league mates and snag one or both of these guys to anchor your RB squad. For the sake of brevity, we refer you back to the RB Sleepers piece for why Grant and Graham work as fantasy studs. If you want a crib notes version, how about this? Both of them play on teams that will lean heavily on the run this season. Both run behind good or great lines. Both scored a lot of touchdowns last year (top 10 rushing TDs, both of them) even without playing all year. Both of them catch the ball out of the backfield, and both of them average high YPC. And both of them play for good playoff-contending teams that should run the ball early and often. What’s not to like? Fact #10 – This year’s top 10 fantasy RBs, in alphabetical order, will be: Joseph Addai, Frank Gore, Earnest Graham, Ryan Grant, Steven Jackson, Thomas Jones, Darren McFadden, LaDainian Tomlinson, Michael Turner, and Brian Westbrook. You heard it here first! | |
