966: The Running Back Renaissance

JJ Zachariason (0:02)

This is The Late-Round Podcast with your host, JJ Zachariason.

What's up, everyone? It's JJ Zachariason. In this episode 966 of The Late-Round Fantasy Football Podcast, sponsored by Underdog. Thanks for tuning in. It's been a minute since I did one of these episodes. You may have heard Rich Ryan and me talk best ball with our Becoming a Best Ball Bro recap about a week and a half ago, but this, the Late-Round Podcast, it's been a minute. I've missed you guys. Now, over the last few weeks, I've been getting Late-Round Fantasy Football's new COO David Kitchen up to speed. And I've also been in my prospecting cave. The ZAP model, it's updated, it's better than ever. And I can't wait to get to all that prospecting work over the next couple of months. Now, usually my first episode after a long season is all about the things that I got wrong. It's about me refining my process to make sure that I don't make the same mistakes year after year. And trust me, I'll get to that episode. In fact, there won't be a mailbag episode or a late-round perspectives episode on Friday this week. Instead, you're going to get that episode. And I'll follow it up with an episode of the things that went right. And that's for early next week. Remember, during the offseason, you get two episodes of the show each week. One kind of a fresh episode each Tuesday, and then one mailbag or perspectives episode on Friday. Except for this week. Now, regardless of all that admin stuff today, today I want to talk about something that I brought up a ton of times in the show throughout the season. I thought to myself, you know what? The people need a research study after my brief hiatus. Actually, that's not even true. I'm kind of creating this episode for selfish reasons. A lot of my work is driven by just pure curiosity. When something strange is happening in fantasy football, I want to dig into that something and learn more about it. And that brings me to the topic today, running backs. Specifically, running backs during the 2024 fantasy season. Because there's some weird stuff that went on with the position this year, and I want to get to the bottom of it. Now, before getting to the research, I want to remind you to check out Underdog. Underdog is the easiest and best place to play fantasy sports. And with the conference championships happening this weekend, there are plenty of contests to choose from to get in on the action. You can do snake drafts and there's always pick-em selections out there too. Check it all out at underdogfantasy.com and if you're new to the site, sign up with promo code LATEROUND. That will get you a nice deposit offer. I also want to let you know that the Late-Round Prospect Guide is officially available for pre-order. This is year number four for the Prospect Guide, and it's back and better than ever. Like I said earlier, over the last couple of weeks, I've been fine-tuning the ZAP models and I've made a couple of enhancements that makes the models more predictive. But in the guide, you'll see what those enhancements are. You'll get a rundown of what's in the models. You get profiles of every running back and wide receiver who will be at the NFL Combine. You get tight end ZAP scores after the draft. You get profiles for the year two model and more. Right now, you can pre-order it for $14.99 by heading to lateraound.com and clicking guides. Once the guide launches in March, that price is going to go up to $19.99. So, you can save money by ordering right now. Check it all out, lateround.com.

Now, I'm assuming all of you played fantasy football in 2024 And if you did, you may have noticed that things were a little bit different at running back. Running backs just seemed to be better. Saquon Barkley was a monster. Derrick Henry did his thing. Bijon Robinson was a beast. Josh Jacobs seemed to never not score a touchdown. And honestly, the same goes for James Cook. Throughout the year, I kept thinking to myself, man, this is a bizarre year for running backs. In my gut, it was an outlier season. They were performing abnormally well. So it's finally time to dig into the data. My goal here was to simply ask the following question. Was the 2024 season different at running back than previous seasons that we've seen? Now, there are plenty of ways to dissect that question. And I plan on looking at a few angles on today's show. First, let's just look at the results. One way to see if the running back position scored more or scored better is by looking at how many fantasy points the position actually scored, like in total. And at that super, super high level, nothing was really funky with running backs this year. When compared to the last five seasons, running backs across the league scored their second lowest overall total of PPR points. The 2023 season was the only one that was worse. But that doesn't really tell us that much, because that includes every running back across the league. What I'm more concerned about is the top running backs, the ones who impact fantasy football. So let's look at this in a different way. I looked at every year since 2014 And 2014 seems arbitrary, but it represents how far back the average draft position data goes from fantasydata.com. And I'll be digging into ADP in a little bit. But I looked at every season since 2014 And I charted the top running backs by PPR point per game finish. So the RB won in 2014, for example, he scored 23.2 PPR points per game. In 2015, it was 21.1 points per game. This past year, 2024, it was 22.2 PPR points per game. That was Saquon Barkley. Now I did this all the way until RB20. That's also an arbitrary stopping point. I stopped there because I'm just doing a quick check to see if top running backs this year scored more or less points compared to previous seasons. I then took the average for each positional slot from 2014 to 2023 So RB won the top running backs from 2014 to 2023, they averaged 24.7 PPR points per game. Saquon Barkley this season, as I said, scored 22.2 PPR points per game. So we played 2.5 points below the average. And that was actually kind of a common theme among our top 6, top 7 running backs this year. Compared to recent history, 5 of the top 7 running backs actually played below the typical running back in that positional slot. For example, RB3 since 2014 averaged 20.5 PPR points per game. That was 0.4 points per game higher than this year's RB3, who was Bijon Robinson. And for the record, I'm using a minimum threshold of 8 games played to allow a player to be ranked here. So top 7 running backs this year kind of played below what we normally see. It wasn't far below, but it was below. But then something happens. When you get to the RB8 this season, who was Josh Jacobs, you see that he scored 17.2 PPR points per game. That was above the average from 2014 to 2023 for RB8s. And guess what? It's that way for literally every single running back up through RB20. Every single one of them outperformed what we've seen historically from their running back slot. And it wasn't by some small margin. We're talking one and a half to two and sometimes more than three PPR points per game in a single running back slot. The results this season showed us that running backs were indeed generally better, at least the ones that we care about in fantasy football. Things started to normalize after RB20, after the 20th ranked running back and PPR points per game. But that's 20 running backs. In a 10-team league, that represents every running back starter. So if you played fantasy football this year and running backs just felt better, maybe a little bit deeper, it's because the ones that we cared about in fantasy football for the most part were better. The higher end guys weren't giving you quite the same edge as we've seen before. But we had this huge boost in production when we entered lower end RB1 range. Wide receivers were weaker, and I can get to that on a different episode this off season. But running backs were definitely better. Of course, that's not where we should stop with this analysis. I mean, we could. We could just say, hey, running backs perform better this year, especially after the top three or so. But what does that mean for future seasons? Does that actually teach us anything?