The Best RB Picks For Every RB Room

Zero RB? Hero RB? Robust RB? Whatever your draft, these are the RBs you want in each

Partially due to time constraints with my real job, and partially due to a desire to do more theoretical based content for these major tournaments I did not do nearly the level of RB-specific content on the site this summer that I did last year with the Off-Season Hitchhiker’s Guide. For those wondering, yes — the hitchhiker’s guide will be back in-season in a similar format and capacity to last year’s.

As an attempt to remedy this gap in off-season coverage, I wanted to do a RB-focused piece, and with home league drafts now in full swing, I wanted to give some advice directly applicable to those formats.

As I’ve done my rankings focused content recently, a big theme has been that depending on your draft economy, you may need to focus more on the positional rankings and less on the overall ranking. Or more specifically, try to focus on the comparative advantage between positions, and target RB when it the relative opportunity cost is lowest. On underdog that often means selecting the bulk of my RBs in Rounds 7-10, when the “WR Window” is closed, but RBs with clearly projectable roles remain. That’s trickier in high stakes rooms where that tier of RBs is typically drafted concurrently with the group of young WRs I’m targeting in every seasonal draft this year: Worthy, Odunze, Thomas, JSN, McConkey.

In home leagues, especially on half-PPR sites, breakout WRs may still be available after the ‘RB window’ so to speak has closed.

To give you an idea of how your draft plan needs to evolve between sites, here is the RB being drafted directly prior to the WRs I called out above in each of those draft environments.

X. Worthy: James Cook (UD), D’Andre Swift (FFPC), Jonathon Brooks (ESPN)

R. Odunze: Ken Walker (UD), D’Andre Swift (FFPC), Tyjae Spears (ESPN)

B. Thomas: David Montgomery (UD), Javonte Williams (FFPC), Blake Corum (ESPN)

J. Smith-Njigba: Alvin Kamara (UD), Tony Pollard (FFPC), Tyjae Spears (ESPN)

L. McConkey: James Conner (UD), Jonathon Brooks (FFPC), Tyjae Spears (ESPN)

For this article, we’re going to discuss exclusively home league strategy, so I’m going to use ESPN ADP. I understand your home league may well not be on ESPN, but it should at least be directionally accurate to what you will see on Yahoo!, Sleeper or any commonly used redraft site. ESPN is also PPR-default (as is Sleeper), while Yahoo! is half-PPR default, so make sure to check your scoring settings. Since Yahoo! is the outlier in this regard, I’m going to be writing under the assumption of PRR unless otherwise noted.

Dream RB Rooms for Every Draft

I pondered starting this section with a Robust RB team, but then I decided to simply not endorse Robust RB drafting. (To me, Robust RB = drafting more than the minimum weekly starting RBs prior to filling out all WR slots)

Last year, I actually did draft teams like this — including a fairly successful main event team with Ron Stewart and Liam Murphy, in which we selected Tony Pollard, Travis Etienne, and Breece Hall. However, last year was a massive anomaly. We were being gift-wrapped the chance to draft 3 blue-chip, young RBs in the 3rd to fifth rounds for reasons I thought were extremely silly. Jahmyr Gibbs (David Montgomery) and Travis Etienne (Tank Bigsby) were being held back in projections due to workload split concerns, while Breece Hall was being senselessly faded into the mid-rounds based on injury concerns and the Jets adding a RB who clearly could not play football at anywhere close to the NFL level anymore.

This year, there are some mid-round RBs I like, but none who are the same combination of talent, pedigree, and yet-to-be-realized upside as those three. It was an incredibly unusual circumstance and one that merited utilizing draft structures I typically avoid in order to attack it.

Therefore, the heaviest RB build I would recommend in drafts this year is to start with two, and then quit the position for a good long time. The teams I will be focusing on are:

• RB-RB

• Hero-RB

• Zero-RB

I’m also going to impose another arbitrary rule on myself, which is to not pick any single RB more than once for this exercise. Naturally, a lot of the picks — especially in late rounds — could easily apply to every build. But I want to give you more analysis on more players, so I’ve chosen to try to place each back into the build that best suits them. I also know that many of these player selections and builds may be pre-determined to some degree by your draft slot, so I want to give an array of options from all ends of the board.

Team #1: RB-RB

Why to do it: RBs are generally over-drafted in home leagues, so while it may seem counter-intuitive, you’re better off drafting them early, when the gap between RBs and WRs in a vacuum is quite small. This build also sets you up to take advantage of values at WR for the rest of the draft without worrying at all about diminishing returns.

Where to do it from: I’m only looking to go RB-RB if I can lock up one of the first three backs off the board. These are the backs who I feel are truly deserving of their ADP relative to the WRs around them, where it doesn’t feel like a reach to take them, even as highly as 1.01. Additionally, they happen to line up with my other favourite RB value in the early rounds, while top WRs can fall into the 4-5 turn with regularity in home leagues, allowing for a nice set up for this build from an early draft slot.

Who I’m taking:

Breece Hall (Round 1)

Hall was the central pillar of my 2023 drafts, so it only makes sense to zero in on him again to kickstart 2024. I think the gap between him and Robinson is razor thin, but I slightly lean toward Hall. I’ve seen some argue that the Falcons situation is clearly better, and while they do have a few more skill players, I view them more similarly — though I concede that I’d take Robinson’s by a hair. Each is dependent on an older QB returning from an achilles injury, and each has a backup being talked up by the coaching staff to a mildly worrying degree. Both teams have the same win-total in Vegas (9.5). The edges on Robinson’s side would be that he plays in doors, we saw Cousins play at a high level more recently than Rodgers, and we have more confidence in Zach Robinson as a play-caller than Nathaniel Hackett. These factors are real for me and why I consider it a very close call.

However, if I’m only drafting one team I’m taking Hall and here is why:

Hall has played two NFL seasons, and in each of those he’s been top-three in YPRR among RBs at 2.00 and 1.76: legitimately impressive marks if he were a Wide Receiver. He also posted elite marks in Yards After Contact / ATT (5th) and RYOE / ATT (6th) which bested Robinson’s strong showing in both marks, while playing next to Zach Wilson one year removed from an ACL tear. The two players were nearly identical in Missed Tackles Forced / ATT (both strong).

Rookie year Bijan Robinson looked like a very talented back who was a bit unlucky that his consistently strong runs didn’t turn into massive breakaway runs at a higher rate, and who had to put up with a very disadvantageous scheme and Quarterback. When you combine that with his prospect profile, which was immaculate, I consider it his modal outcome to play like one of the five best RBs in the NFL this year. But Breece Hall profiled as plausibly the 2nd-best RB in the NFL last year when you consider the totality of his metrics and the volume he was fed. That’s without even factoring in that he played in a completely miserable offense, and was in year-one post-ACL. Barring further injury, we should expect Breece Hall to be the most talented RB in the NFL over the next few years.

I think ultimately it comes down to which assumptions you are more comfortable making. One path is assuming that Robinson is Hall’s equal in talent, allowing the (presumed) situational edge to carry the day. The other is assuming that some of the risk factors surrounding Rodgers and Hackett are either overcome or overblown, and then choosing the player we’ve seen be truly elite rather than the one we project to join him. For me, that’s the path I’m choosing — in large part because we just saw Breece Hall be a completely dominant option after ramping up his usage last year despite being in the worst environment in the league. So to me, even an average environment would be an exponential improvement.

I think based on what we saw of Hall last year, it’s not inconceivable that he could be a truly generation-defining talent in the ilk of LaDanian Tomlinson or Marshall Faulk. That’s why the argument that Robinson was a better prospect than Hall (which I agree with for what it’s worth) falls a touch short for me. Hall was in his own right an outstanding prospect — one in which you’d probably expect him to be better than Robinson somewhere between 30-40% of the time before knowing anything about their NFL sample. What we’ve seen from him in the NFL suggests that he’s hitting on the 90th+ percentile outcome of his profile. I don’t think the gap in prospect profiles was so great that Robinson has to disappoint for Hall to wind up the better player and fantasy asset. There is no transitive property at work here. Just because Robinson > Hall as prospects, doesn’t mean that when Hall hits on the elite tail of his range, that this elevates our expectations of Robinson. To do so would frankly be unfair to last year’s 8th overall selection.

Robinson can hit at or near what we’d have expected from his prospect profile, and be a perennial pro-bowl level RB over the next five years, and I’m still not sure that will mean he’s better than Hall. What I’m trying to say is that each of these RBs exist in their own range of outcomes, and do not exist only relative to each other. If Bijan Robinson is Todd Gurley and Breece Hall is LaDanian Tomlinson, then Robinson has been a major hit, and you’d still want Hall on your fantasy team first.

There are degrees of ‘eliteness’ at the very top level of this game. And in that rare air, there is opportunity for the most talented of the most talented to separate materially even from one another. When I look at what Hall has done the last two years despite so much working against him, I think it’s within his range of outcomes to be such a special talent that you simply don’t want to be caught betting against him at any cost for any reason. I don’t think it requires us to cast doubt on Robinson’s own abilities in order to make that case forcefully in favour of Hall. Additionally, when you bank on the talent side of the equation, you open yourself up to situational ambiguities resolving in your favour. If Aaron Rodgers does play a healthy season at or near the level he played at prior to his injury, we could see something truly special.

De’Von Achane (Round 2)

Achane is possibly the only RB who goes later in home league drafts than on Underdog. Part of that is the ‘better in best ball’ nature of his profile, but I think a greater part of that speaks to tournament drafters being ahead of the curve in their willingness to bet on talent over projectable volume — which is how we want to play fantasy football regardless of the format.

Achane was the most efficient RB in the NFL last year, leading virtually every advanced-rushing metric, if not breaking the metric altogether. In his first three games with significant work, Achane led the entire league in total rush yards over expected each of the three weeks. We’ve truly never seen anything quite like it.

Of course his 7.8 yards per carry is unsustainable. But the goal of fantasy football is to pick the players who are capable of spells of production that are not just unsustainable over the long term, but are simply impossible for players beneath their caliber. As I wrote about constantly last summer, Achane was an undervalued prospect who looked better the more you dug into his college numbers, and how much more efficient of a runner he was than his teammates in every aspect from success rate, to tackle avoidance, to breakaway ability. Combine that type of profile with his outlier speed and a scheme perfectly calibrated to his skillset, and you have a player who is capable of the type of spikes most just are not.

Of course there are questions here when it comes to workload. Miami employs another very talented RB, and just drafted another prospect who is well-suited to their scheme. Achane is undersized and is coming off a year with multiple injuries — though he was largely healthy in college on a big workload. But something I’ve argued for years with the RB position is that talent is a floor consideration, in fact it is the floor consideration. Achane will never simply be phased out of the offense barring health because it would be completely irrational for a coach to do so. That’s where the FUD over touch allocations is just so wrong-headed by a lot of analysts. People get completely lost in the sauce over touch projections, using that as their baseline and adding efficiency after the fact, that they miss the forest for the trees. Coaches don’t start by allocating workload: they allocate workload based on the talent of their players (or at least their perception of it). Achane may not be a 20 touch per game player, but Mike McDaniel is going to use of the best weapons available to him because he is trying to win football games and Achane will help him do it.

Achane is a great target on any team because he’s one of very few players with “best talent in the league” type upside, but he’s an especially strong target as the second RB on a RB-RB start, where you can more easily withstand potential games missed, or more volatile weekly scoring.

Jonathon Brooks (R8): Brooks is the perfect RB3 to target on a build with early-RB points if you wish to add a third plausible starter. You can put him on ice for the first month of the year while your studs go to work. By the time you have to deal with bye weeks or injuries, in comes the most complete RB in the 2024 class, fresh off the sidelines to carry you home. Brooks is the best way to play the Canales-effect possibility for the Panthers offense in redraft leagues.

Tyler Allgeier (R13): Along the same lines as the Corum pick, Allgeier gives you another high-end bet on contingent upside. The bar is likely to be very high for a RB to make your lineup with this team, so you want to be aiming for ceiling outcomes with your depth picks.

Kimani Vidal (Last Round): One more shot at pure, unadulterated upside. Vidal was a prospect I high-lighted both pre and post draft as a strong bet, given his volume earning ability in college, and impressive tape. He lands next to two eminently surmountable RBs and now appears to have locked up a roster spot after sitting the final week of the pre-season. He’s one of the few late-round picks who has contingent upside that does not necessarily require an injury.