Scouting Fantasy Running Backs
by Hoai of RotoPicks.com
Even to the untrained eye, scouting RBs seems to be pretty simple. Either a guy can get to the hole, explode through it, keep his balance, break tackles and consistently produce big plays or he can't. This isn't rocket science. An explosive RB running behind a good offensive line against a favorable matchup will score the most points, and those are the most important factors when drafting a ball carrier. So if the "eye test" tells us one thing, the stats should confirm that big play backs are the most productive fantasy options. Right? Not necessarily. When looking at the stats from the 2012 NFL season, the numbers showed that the best predictor of fantasy production was not big play ability (defined here production per carry or touch) but rather the opportunity (total amount of touches per game).
It may be a chicken versus the egg argument, but do RBs get more opportunities because they are productive or are they more productive simply because they get more opportunities? Intuitively, one would think that the former would be true, but the stats seem to indicate the latter is more valid. To prove my argument, I decided to look at two stats (yards per rush and yards per touch) that gauge ability per play and compared them to two stats (rushes per game and touches per game) that count opportunity.
Using final season stats from the 2012 NFL season and looking at the 30 top fantasy producing RBs, I looked at the distribution of per play stats versus opportunity stats to see which metric correlated best with fantasy points per game. To account for missed time due to injury, I used per game statistics after subtracting out whole games missed. (Note that if a player produces any stats for a game, he is credited for playing the entire game.) Using per game stats is also more accurate because we are projecting for a weekly game and not trying to predict season totals.
My method of analysis was pretty simple. Without boring you with too many details, I sorted the 30 runners by each of the four above stats and grouped them into thirds (top 10, middle 10 and bottom 10 for each category). Then I resorted the players by points per game and looked how the thirds for each category matched up with actual production. A match would be if a player was in the same third in one of the four categories as his point production, and conversely, a player who was in a higher or lower third than his category production would suggest was considered an outlier.
When looking for elite fantasy production, yards per rush seemed to have questionable predictive value. The top ten fantasy producers contained five outliers including the 2nd and 3rd best RBs for the year. In fact, the 2nd best fantasy producer for the year actually finished in the bottom third in yards per rush. If you went strictly by that metric, you would have excluded two of the top three fantasy RBs.
Factoring in the passing game by incorporating yards per touch produced about the same predictive value as there were still five outliers in the top 10 and three of them were bottom third in the category. These numbers suggest that big play ability can be used to access RB ability, but a requisite amount of touches is needed to consistently score in fantasy.
Shifting over to the opportunity stats, rushes per game included two outliers with one bottom third. The top five RBs were all top third in rushes per game. Touches per game had the most predictive value as there were two outliers, but one of them was the 10th best fantasy producer. The top 7 fantasy producers were in the top third in total touches. It just makes sense that a RB needs the ball in his hands to produce and that the more times he touches the ball, the more chances he has to accumulate points. So if you know a RB is the primary RB and have a high level of confidence that he will receive a high volume of touches, there is a very good probability that the RB will be a top fantasy scorer.
Obviously, it would be foolish to ignore big play ability when selecting a fantasy RB. Ball carriers who get a lot of touches and are productive with them are usually elite or close to it. But when comparing RBs by a single stat, total touches seems to be the best predictor of fantasy production while big play ability is only a secondary factor. As backwards as it may sound, the talent you see with your eyes is not as important as the amount of carries you count with your fingers.
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