1108: The RB2 Rebirth

**JJ Zachariason** (0:11)
What's up, everyone, it's JJ Zachariason in this episode 1108 of The Late-Round Fantasy Football Podcast. Thanks for tuning in. This time last week, I had a conversation with Late-Round Fantasy Football's own Brandon Gdula about catchable targets. He had done a study for one of our newsletters on the topic, and there were some really interesting takeaways for 2026 Drafts. Well, this week, we're running it back. But instead of catchable targets, I had a conversation with Brandon about an even more important fantasy football topic, the RB2 Rebirth. The NFL is slowly morphed into a slightly different game than what we saw six, seven, or eight years ago. We've got heavy personnel all over the place. We have a run heavier league in general and that's made an impact on fantasy football. When I talked about the death of the fantasy football wide receiver too back in January, one of the things I dug into was positional target share data. Quite simply, how targets were distributed across wide receiver running back in tight end. With more tight end usage came lower wide receiver target shares. But things have been changing at running back too.
That's what Brandon really investigated in a newsletter that he had sent out last week. Which just a reminder guys, that newsletter is totally free. There's no reason to not be signed up.
But that research last week was so good that I wanted to do another episode of the show with Brandon. Not only does it allow you guys to get to know him and his approach a little bit better, but man, it's just really good and thoughtful research that's going to make all of us better players. At the very least, it'll probably make you feel a little bit differently about this game.
Brandon found some very interesting pass catching trends at running back. We'll get into that in just a second. First, this is one of your final reminders to get The Late-Round Draft Guide at its pre-order price. That guide is going to launch Friday this week, and with it pretty much completed, I can confidently tell you guys that it's the most comprehensive piece of fantasy football content that I've ever put together. There's almost 300 pages of content. There's strategy talk, ways to find breakouts, players to target, players to avoid, rankings and tiers, and more. You can check it out and learn more over on lateround.com. Now, let's get to this discussion with Brandon Gdula.
All right, Brandon, back to back weeks with The Late-Round Podcast. You sent a newsletter out last week on this sort of changing and receiving landscape at Running Back. What made you dig into the topic?

**Brandon Gdula** (2:31)
Well, I was writing up some market score sections for something called The Late-Round Draft Guide, which releases July 10th this week. It's going to be updated weekly, new market score information. I'm excited, so make sure you head over to lateround.com to preorder that. But yes, I'm digging through market score sections, kind of intro-ing each position, going through, and naturally, as you do content, you flow through position by position, quarterback, running back, receiver, tight end. So I'm rolling right out of quarterback, and I'm going into running back, and it just kind of emerged in the market score analysis that the quarterback has this sort of underlying value through rushing, and what you kind of dig into with quarterback, also, it's a very similar sort of process at running back. I mean, Rich Rebar, of course, coined the Konami Code as in Russian quarterbacks, being cheat codes for fantasy football. But now we get into a scenario in the NFL where we have Russian quarterbacks who can actually rival some of the top pocket passers with their arms as well. So that's what separates these guys, like a Josh Allen, a Peek Lamar. It makes them so impactful. And then as you're digging through market score, as you'll learn, and I mean, if you've listened to JJ for a while, you realize it's the sort of secondary lever of production at running back, but pass catching matters a lot. And so it was just such a clear parallel of how two of the most important factors in fantasy football are secondary components of two of the four fantasy positions. So quarterback rushing and running back receiving. So I'm looking at this and I'm like, okay, there's got to be a simple way to draw this together.
And this year we've got really a big two, but you probably throw Christian McCaffrey in there as a pure big three, because we have running backs who have elite rushing volume, have elite receiving volume, and good goal line rolls, if not great goal line rolls. So I was like, okay, it's very similar at the top. And then it kind of hit me though, because we have a Malik Willis this year, a quarterback. Could be a cheat code, could just rush his way. But we also have got Jackson Dart, Bo Nix, Kyler Murray types, these guys who aren't just all legs. And then it kind of was like, well, who are the names at Running Back who fit that sort of Malik Willis mold?