Some Reflections on the 2024 Running Back Market and Applications to Fantasy Generally

Teams are telling different stories about the RB position, and analytics in sports: it's up to us to determine how to listen

NFL free agency has (mostly) come and gone, with the top available players at each fantasy-eligible position now off the board. Earlier this week I wrote up my thoughts on the five biggest moves on day 1 (Cousins, Barkley, Jacobs, Swift, Pollard). If you missed that post, check it out below.

Since then, there have been an incredibly high volume of signings and trades. I definitely won’t have as in depth of a reaction to each move as I did in the Monday column mostly because there are 24 hours in a day. But I will make a post within a week or so to give a brief take on each, and will update the dynasty rankings to reflect these changes. I’ll also have a podcast with Pat Kerrane and Davis Mattek about the impact of Free Agency on the Dyansty Market this week for those who want my takes in audio form.

Prior to that, I wanted to talk a bit about my thoughts on the RB market in terms of what teams are telling us, and how that effects us as fantasy players.

To that point - I will echo some points (and would disagree with some others!) - raised by Ben Gretch and Shawn Siegele on their show about this topic that I’d encourage everyone to check out. My favourite part of their podcast is when they look to connect the real-life motivations of teams to our approach in a fantasy context.

Making Sense of Today’s Running Back Economy

I hesitate to make over-generalized statements like I’m about to do right now, because they’re never precisely true, but I think it’s *true enough* that it’s a worthy conversation to have.

Generally speaking, I see three different approaches to the running back position across the league right now:

• Teams who prioritize the position, and are building through one special back

• Teams who prioritize the position with multiple dynamic play-makers

• Teams who de-prioritize the position

Maybe this the hotter take - especially as a member of the “analytics community” but I don’t think there is a right or wrong approach among these paths - at least generally speaking. Once upon a time when Ezekiel Elliott was being drafted 4th overall and being signed to a six-year, $90 million contract it was a reasonable position to say the best approach to running back is to not invest. I’m not sure it’s that simple anymore.

Diminishing Returns of Analytical Edges

This is not too different to fantasy football. Let’s imagine a world (not unlike our own several years ago) in which the community is largely hostile to zero-RB, and the RB-dead zone has been discovered but hasn’t become part of the ‘meta’ to the extent people are making active choices to avoid it. In that world, RBs were being over-drafted so systemically (outside of a few truly elite exceptions), that choosing to allocate your capital toward other positions and simply aiming to get by at the RB position was more often than not your best bet.

This is not our world today either in fantasy or reality football. As I write about all the time, a player or class of players is only “over-valued” or “under-valued” based on the current market at the time, and the current game environment. As the game changes, or the market changes, a player or class of players which was once under-valued can become over-valued and vice-versa. It’s better to be attached to your internal value on an asset, and be cognizant of the reasons why you’re assigning that value to said asset, than to attach yourself to being “in” or “out” on someone or something no matter what.

More broadly, the NFL - like fantasy - is a league that depends on dynamism. Compilers at every position are freely available, but to build a truly elite team you need difference-makers, you need ceiling-raisers. You need players who can overcome their environment, who can reliably provide efficiency that goes beyond the expected result of the play. You need outliers.

Preferably, these players also happen to primarily impact the passing game, which - on net - is the more effective way to move the football: Quarterback, wide receiver, edge rusher, corner. But as with fantasy there is a scarcity issue and a point of diminishing returns.

We don’t live in a world with 32 equally talented players at the “most impactful” positions. Spending a massive proportion of your cap space on QB and WR, and aiming for competence across the rest of your offense makes a lot of sense if you have Joe Burrow, Ja’Marr Chase, (and Tee Higgins?). But attempting to mimic the Bengals’ structure with inferior talent is unlikely to replicate their success.

A couple weeks ago I read a great piece by John Hollinger of the Athletic discussing his takeaways from the Sloan Analytics Conference and the state of the three-point revolution in basketball. I’d encourage any NBA fan to give it a read.

The TLDR of the piece is that years ago, the league was so in-efficient with respect to the three-point shooting, that even poor three-point shooting teams should be taking more threes, AND since three-point shooting wasn’t properly valued yet, teams should just allocate more of their resources into superior three-point shooters.

At this point, the secret is out. Three points is more than two and everyone knows it - including opposing defenses who have reacted rationally to the new NBA and play lineups and schemes better positioned to defend it. Unsurprisingly, as NBA teams stopped trotting out Enes Kanters and Greg Monroes, and coaches encouraged more non-elite shooters to take more threes, the average expected value of a three-point shot has now evened out to the value of a two point shot.

The interesting wrinkle to this of course is that the team with the best record, best offense, and best net rating in the NBA right now is the Boston Celtics; who take and make an absolutely absurd amount of threes. They don’t suffer from the diminishing returns other teams do because they’ve built an entire rotation out of strong-to-elite shooters, for whom a three point shot remains more efficient than a two.

If the Celtics don’t win the title this year, the other most likely candidate is the Denver Nuggets, last year’s champions, who don’t rely on a high volume of threes, and whose best player is a big man who neither takes, makes or defends threes at a high-rate. (though few if anyone are better at distributing the ball out to the three-point line)

All this is to say that the “edges” we’re taught exist at one point are only relative, and are context specific. Relying on one edge only works for as long as you’re competing against a market which is either unaware that edge exists or un-willing to implement it. The fun part about edges being identified and acted upon is that it typically creates a more dynamic game environment. Rather than being able to rely on a few simple heuristics to race ahead of your competition, we have to work to find new macro-edges, and in the mean time be more comfortable living in the micro.

What the Eagles’ Barkley Signing may Signal

Perhaps the poster boy for “this is not your father’s analytics movement” was Howie Roseman signing Saquon Barkley to a top-of-market RB contract. The General Managers most universally associated with the analytics movement in football going all in on Barkley caused quite a stir on twitter. Did Howie become a “football guy?” Was he on to something? Was he being held hostage? There are several plausible theories.

My personal take is that Roseman looked at his team during the Jalen Hurts era and - correctly - came to the conclusion that an elite running game is vital to the success of their offense. Hurts’s strengths translate excellently to a zone-read, play-action based offense (deep passing, rushing, ‘see it and throw it’ type concepts), but as we saw last year, when the run-game disappears his weaknesses become far more present. He doesn’t handle the blitz well at all, and the fact he’s been placed in largely vanilla passing games across several different play-callers going back to college through the NFL leads me to believe he is still limited as a processor. If you want the best out of Hurts, it’s not going to come in an offense centred around a comprehensive drop-back game.

The Eagles have not spent up on running backs during Hurts’ tenure, but I loved the choices they made for who to bring in. Both Miles Sanders and D’Andre Swift (and Rahsaad Penny for that matter had he worked out) are “win more" backs: players whose short-comings are largely contained to the line of scrimmage, but whom are capable of maximizing successful plays in the open field. When your offensive line is what the Eagles has been the last half-decade, that’s the exact profile you want if you’re restricting your budget to incomplete players.

This year, Jason Kelce retired, and Lane Johnson is liable for decline or further injury at any point (He will be 34 by Week 1 of 2024). The Eagles offensive line still features some studs, but it’s no longer assured to be a dominant unit moving forward.

Couple this potential offensive-line decline with a market that saw interior-offensive linemen getting absolutely PAID, and elite tackles - as usual - never making it to free agency. Roseman came to the conclusion that the best way to maximize their run-game was by allocating those resources into a RB instead, opting for Saquon Barkley. As discussed in the last piece, Barkley fits into this “win more” class of backs himself, but is in a different stratosphere of talent than his predecessors; having put up a positive statistical profile (if not elite) in every year of his career save for his injury-riddled 2021, despite a completely anemic supporting cast in New York. Even if the Eagles rushing environment is no longer league-best, it will be an infinite improvement from anything Barkley has experienced on the Giants and I expect him to light it up as a result.

The reality is that paying a RB a top of the market contract is a vastly different proposition to five years ago. Barkley’s deal is effectively a two-year commitment for little more than $12M AAV. Comparable contracts handed out years ago ranged in the $12-16M range, often with more money backloaded into years 3-4, and that’s without accounting for the cap moving up: compared to the rest of the league, relative stasis in RB salaries is actually a major downgrade in terms of cap-percentage. More importantly, running backs like Barkley used to never make it to free agency. Just look at the top backs from the 2016-2017 RB classes:

• Ezekiel Elliott extended with DAL

• Derrick Henry extended with TEN

• Leonard Fournette released by JAX

• Christian McCaffrey extended by CAR (and later traded)

• Dalvin Cook extended by MIN

• Alvin Kamara extended by NO

• Joe Mixon extended by CIN

• Aaron Jones extended by GB

• Austin Ekeler extended by LAC (though at a mid-market contract)

By the time each of these backs made it to the open market (some still haven’t), none were viewed as truly elite options. Saquon Barkley is an exception to this. And in terms of percentage of cap, he’s making less than every single back listed above made on their extension with the exception of Ekeler - who only had one-year as a lead back prior to his extension - and Fournette - who never proved to be an elite talent in the NFL.

I think given the context of the market that Roseman and co. made a sharp bet, and we’ll see how it works out for them.

How Teams are Building RB Rooms