Free Agent Emergency Hitchhiker's Guide!!

Dalvin Cook and Ezekiel Elliott have new homes, and what the fantasy industry gets wrong about 'stolen volume'

I am fully aware that any time the “stealing touches” conversation comes up on twitter, I can become off-puttingly combative with my retorts. At some point in my life, I will posess the will power to simply not engage with the endless stream of narrative-baiting, median-cleaving, nuance-free analysis we see every time a team adds a material running back in free agency.

Yesterday wasn’t that day.

The conversation is stale, and at this point there is little chance myself and others who see the game similarly will ever convince those who do not about how to interpret these situations, and vice versa. This isn’t to say anyone who reacts strongly to this week’s signings is a bad analyst. There will always be different paths to play this game, and every ‘correct’ take is more than likely a 60/40 to hit anyhow. But if your process leads you to tanking Breece Hall outside your top 20 RBs, or moving Dalvin Cook up your rankings after he signed in a fairly sub-optimal landing spot (Miami seemed fairly plausible), our processes are diverging from step 1.

The fun part of writing this substack is that rather than needing to spend every article trying to convince every reader to join my way of thinking from step 1 all over again, I have the chance here to lay out a framework of analyzing and thinking about the game — in particular the RB position — and merely invite you to join along this path as we build upon it in each subsequent piece. My assumption if you are reading this article is you either already see the game in line with how I do, have been convinced to see it somewhat similarly, or at least see value in the way I approach things that you can add to the rest of your process.

However, I have been fortunate enough to get a lot of subs in the past few weeks, and with major news affecting your drafts, I want to lay out from A to Z how I’m viewing these backfields conceptually and why I will always see these types of signings differently than most of the industry.

And this one is free!

To start, if you have yet to already, I strongly encourage you to read what I consider the most important column I’ve written on this site. The piece — Running Backs and Balloons: Thinking About Running Back Volume Dynamically — underscores at a conceptual and practical level how I think the RB position should be analyzed in fantasy football.

Summarizing that piece, Key tenets to how I view RBs and ranges of outcomes within their backfields are:

1. All analysis starts at the individual player level.

   Each player has a range of outcomes for their fantasy production inherent to the degree of their talent, and the aggregate of their skillsets. We can apply thorough, evidence-based analysis to outline what we know each player can do well, what they can’t, and what may be unknown.

2. The “Pie” available to any Running Back is based on the maximum amount of volume and number of game situations they can play in over a full season: not the maximum amount of touches available in an offense.

   Running Backs are not “gasses” who fill to the space provided. Most have systemic limits which apply irrespective of their teammates or coaching staff

3. We ought to tailor our draft selections based on ceiling outcomes relative to the player and the format of the tournament / league.

   We care about ceilings a lot more than medians because ceilings win leagues, and we don’t draft RB — a highly fragile position — for floor. The higher the replacement level in your format, the lower draft capital expended on the player, and the more top-heavy your league/tournament, the more we want to focus almost exclusively on ceiling scenarios.

4. NFL Backfields and Fantasy championships are both built on contingency scenarios.

   Running Back analysis from the fantasy community is far too binary and focused on an imaginary zero-sum game: If you like one man in the backfield, he’s taking from the other member of the backfield. If a team signs one player, it speaks negative of the other player. This just isn’t how real-life NFL teams construct their teams and it’s now how fantasy analysts should think of the position.

   As discussed in our pre-season usage article this week, teams simply don’t know the answer to the test more often than we feel comfortable admitting.

   I frankly don’t understand why this perturbs us rather than exciting us! Take the Jaguars for example: you can — if you like both players as I do — concoct a defensible upside path for Travis Etienne and Tank Bigsby that each involve some level of disappointment by the other. But you don’t have to carry over the assumptions you make when evaluating one player’s upside case when you flip to the other’s.

   This is the major issue with projections-centric analysis. When you do projections in your spreadsheet you do literally have to take work from one player to give it to another. But this is not how you have to draft. Several players have concurrently accessible ceilings that may not include one another in the same iteration of the universe, but can absolutely co-exist as plausible scenarios in your August draft room. I often reference Gretch-isms in this column but his description of all these possible iterations of a given season as branches of a timeline creating alternative universes has stuck with me.

   NFL teams understand this idea better than we think. In a recent twitter debate regarding the Jaguars backfield last week, I pushed back on the deterministic nature of viewing Tank Bigsby’s addition as a death knell to Travis Etienne’s short yardage role. I think each of the following can be true:

   1. The Jaguars have concerns about Travis Etienne’s capabilities as a short yardage back

   2. Tank Bigsby was viewed as a possible solution to those concerns

   3. These concerns may be unfounded and a result of small sample variance on a years worth of goal-line carries behind a bottom-ranked run blocking unit

   4. Travis Etienne could assuage any concerns the Jaguars may have with improved performance this year

When teams make moves they do send us certain signals. But those signals don’t necessarily lead to the result which most intuitively flows from that signal, and the team may not making a declaration with each move so much as it is protecting against contingency scenarios in its own backfield: what if X gets hurt? What if X does not improve at Y?

The season is very long, and the ultimate effect of most off-season moves is determined on the field not when the contract is signed.

To hit ceiling outcomes in fantasy football we have to ask ourselves: IF we’re “right,” how right can we be? Often NFL teams are saying the opposite in their depth moves: IF we’re “wrong,” how can we minimize the damage?

We have the opportunity to leverage rather than mirror the risk aversion of NFL teams who are playing a completely different game with different stakes and different incentives. We get to buy into the uncertainty their backfield additions create to draft a higher class of talent at depressed prices. That brings us — at last — to this week’s signings.

The Latest Free Agent Signings

The Dalvin Cook signing is the main event, and the one I think should cause legitimate movement in the ranks (even if it’s less in mine than most).

I will dive far more into the micro-details of Cook and Hall’s profiles in the official Hitchhiker’s Guide article on the Jets (coming in the very near future), so I want to keep this one more conceptual.

The TLDR on Dalvin Cook is that his statistical profile has — on aggregate — declined sharply from his peak in 2020 over the past two seasons. People simply pointing to his box scores or saying “he’s still Dalvin Cook” are unserious analysts you should simply ignore. On a more serious note, I’ve seen people point to his breakaway speed on NFL NextGen Stats and his YAC/A (3.18) to question whether he is washed. The best case to this extent I’ve heard is that most of his poor statistical profile comes when facing contact, and that after successful shoulder surgery, this issue could be rectified.

I’ll freely admit he’s much *less* washed than the other three big name Free Agent RBs this cycle. He’s still an NFL running back. But I assert that squinting through the stats to pick out his outlier marks and pair that with assumed improved health for a 28 year-old RB is more likely to lead you astray than to glory. In any case, I don’t think anyone reasonable would argue that Dalvin Cook at this stage of his career is a better or even comparable RB to the Breece Hall we saw in the first half of 2022.

The Jets would seem to agree with this assertion if you believe the reporting. Connor Hughes tweeted today that the Jets are “still Breece Hall’s team.” and that “he’s the Jets bell cow the moment he's back. Cook isn't stealing touches from him — he's spelling and helping him. This also isn't an indictment on Hall's health, I'm told. He's still on schedule.”

It’s imperative to keep in mind the primary components of what a bet was in the first place when the parameters change. The bet on Breece Hall this year has always included the following components:

1. Hall is returning from ACL and may start slowly

2. Hall may be well below peak form this entire year and bust at his ADP

3. ****IF**** Hall works up to full physical health at any point this year, he is by far the most talented RB with a workhorse profile available outside the top two rounds of drafts.

This bet has not changed. If Hall hits peak form, he’s the best RB on the team by a wide margin. If Hall remains addled by his injury deep into the season, he will be a bust. Neither of these two scenarios are affected by Dalvin Cook’s presence.

Where Cook factors in is primarily around the 25-75th percentile outcomes. If Hall plays the full season but plays below his level, the Jets now (likely) have a better option to share the workload with rather than potentially supplying Hall with copious inefficient volume. As well, I expect Hall to get treated more patiently in the early-season regardless of his level of play. There could be a couple frustrating weeks with a 50-50 time share before Hall begins to dominate the backfield even if he shows his ceiling relatively early. But all these scenarios are at the margins, and will assuredly be (more than) priced into his depressed ADP. The question of “will Breece Hall be a league winner?” is a question for Hall, not Cook.

Analysts who proclaim this move to hurt Hall’s ceiling either don’t understand how ceilings work or don’t understand how running backs work. This sounds glib, but it’s an utterly ridiculous position to hold and I’ve seen it all over my feed. You don’t start to project one player’s ceiling by locking their backfield mate into 12 touches per game. You don’t ever start outlining scenarios for a backfield by locking in a floor of touches for its second most talented player. This process indicates an analyst who takes a static rather than dynamic approach to viewing the game, and this is an extremely dynamic game.

The driver of the direction of a backfield for better or worse is the status of its most talented player. The second we start discussing Hall’s “ceiling,” we have declared that player to be Hall in this iteration of the universe, and can freely assume rational coaching from there. This may not be the only outcome, or the most likely one. But it is the ceiling one, and it’s entirely plausible.

I’ll talk more about Cook in his own right in the next article, but all these negative scenarios for Hall can definitely make up part of the range of outcomes to consider when pressing his name, as should the more optimistic theories of the former Viking’s talent. But Hall’s and Cook’s ceiling scenarios can be seen as concurrently plausible even if they cannot hit together.

As a transition to the Ezekiel Elliott signing, I want to touch on the money aspect because I’ve seen this as an argument for why both will maintain locked-in roles, and the argument is deeply flawed.

Both these contracts are one-year deals, so the cost is quite literally sunk. As well, both deals came in August where alternatives to spend cap space are minimal. These were essentially the $2 players available at the end of your auction when you have $8 left and only two roster spots. Four Dollar Bid it is!!!

Both teams felt they had a need at the position, and had the money to spend to fill it. At this juncture, there was little upside to penny-pinching to get that need filled most efficiently.

Most importantly, the total investment in the player has already been paid. There is no lingering incentive to play them if they perform poorly. Is it possible these teams fall victim to the sunk cost fallacy for 17 weeks? Sure. I don’t think it’s likely. And it’s certainly not an assumption we are required to make when charting out their backfield mate’s ceiling scenario.

Fantasy analysts are still way too focused on solving for week 1, despite tournaments that are back-weighted to Weeks 13-17 becoming increasingly popular formats. A one-year contract at the money Elliott and Cook signed for tells us the team certainly values their services at this moment in time. But the lack of future investment signals they are on a play well to keep playing basis. Especially in the case of Elliott, a player we can be much more confident is a sub-par running back at this point of his career, whatever role he has in Week 1 will likely evaporate by the latter half of the season if he cannot fulfill it.

We cannot allow each new piece of information to substitute for our talent evaluations as the answer to the test.

More damningly, we cannot trapeze ourselves from a plausible reason why a player was signed to a determinative statement on how they will be used. In the case of Ezekiel Elliott, I’ve seen several analysts state they expect him to be the PRIMARY goal line back. This requires a massive leap in logic.

I have a lot more to come in the micro-focused HHG articles on these newly-shaped backfields, but this is a classic narrative trap. Just because short yardage work is the one remaining area Elliott is viable, does not necessarily mean he will be subbed in above Rhamondre Stevenson to play a specific goal-line back role the team never even had last season. (Stevenson and Harris rotated by drive, and whomever started the drive generally saw the goal-line series. The only consistent situational substitution was Stevenson playing third down and long on both players’ drives)

We talked about the Patriots backfield and Stevenson plenty in the RBs and Balloons article posted while Leonard Fournette was visiting town. But the takeaway at the time was that Stevenson could max out his workload with plenty of running back touches available outside of his role. Elliott walks into the role I had split between Kevin Harris, Pierre Strong and “other” in my projections without encroaching much on Stevenson. If anything, perhaps Elliott takes a few extra carries off Stevenson’s plate, allowing him to completely monopolize passing downs, while Ty Montgomery is banished to the shadow realm. This has been the expectation of beat reporter Evan Lazar.

At the median, Elliott is more likely to finish his drives than the other Patriots backs, lowering Stevenson’s touchdown equity a tad. At Stevenson’s floor, Elliott’s addition causes the Patriots to dedicate a goal-line back role to him, and they interchange them on passing downs due to the former Cowboy’s pass protection reputation. But we don’t draft for either of those. We draft for ceilings.

The ceiling of Stevenson’s role being largely unchanged relies on the median outcome to mostly play out, with some small addition of Stevenson — a very large back who excels in nearly all aspects of through-contact rushing — converting more often at the goal-line, or Elliott — one of the least efficient RBs in the NFL two years running — to cease demanding any role beyond that of a replacement level breather back. The reality is, if we labl every back with the talent upside of Stevenson who has a backup with the talent level of Ezekiel Elliott as a low ceiling option, there wouldn’t be a ceiling option across the Running Back position. The late-season nature of the add compels concern among the masses, but there are plenty of touches here waiting for Elliott that need not be stolen.

That’s all for today — I will be writing again tomorrow with a premium post. I had planned to do a piece on the Cardinals and Bucs backfields but I think I’ll instead run the Jets and Patriots through the Hitchhiker’s Guide formula as a logical Part 2 of this column, before getting back to the regularly scheduled programming this weekend.

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P.S. — Tony Pollard RB1 SZN.