Rewind: A New Way to Spot Middle-Round Running Back Breakouts

**JJ** (0:12)
Hey guys, no, this is not your typical Late-Round Podcast. Every once in a while during the offseason, I'll bring back an Evergreen episode from the past that's still relevant today. I'm doing that here because it's a holiday weekend, it's May, and there's a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes that I need to put some energy into. More on that coming very, very soon. But today, I'm going to throw some research at you that I did last year on middle-round running backs and their pass catching ability. Specifically, spotting middle-round running back value by simply looking at previous season yards per outrun. You'll hear the study on today's Rewind episode, and you'll also hear some names from last year who fit the criteria of being red flags within that statistic. Not all of them completely flamed out, like Ramondre Stevenson, who had a resurgence at the end of the season after kind of a mediocre start. But there were a lot of hits with this method. Chuba Hubbard, Jordan Mason, Tony Paulder, Tyrone Tracy. They all weren't that special. In my opinion, it's a really interesting way to look at these middle-round running backs. And since I know I'm going to get questions about it, I'll talk very briefly about running backs who fit this criteria at the end of the show. But first, give the episode a new way to spot middle-round running back breakouts, a quick listen.
I've always been fascinated with average draft position data. Like, we can always do analysis and see the types of traits that certain league-winning wide receivers or running backs share, and sort of do our analysis from there. Like, if we know league-winning running backs always come from good offenses, then we should probably focus on running backs and good offenses. If we knew that league-winning wide receivers never had a teammate draft in the top 24 of the position, then we'd probably focus on winouts who had a lot of projected target share for themselves. That kind of stuff. But not all of that is always actionable. If the market is factoring in a lot of the discoveries that we make from that type of analysis, it's not bad to have that information in mind, but it's not as useful as we think, because a player's cost will already reflect all of those things. Like, if we went to a farmer's market, you might find a fruit vendor that does a ton of business each week. They've got really good fruit, objectively. But it also costs a lot to get that fruit, so the cost benefit actually might not be there. Wouldn't you want to find the smaller fruit vendor who has better prices and may be able to offer up similar tasting fruit?
That's why I look so much through the lens of ADP, because it's one way to ensure that we're finding value throughout our draft. Now, through the years, something that's always been obvious in doing my ADP analysis is that pass-catching running backs will outperform expectation at a severely higher rate than the alternative. Like, somehow the market still doesn't factor in pass-catching enough at running back. But it's one thing to say, hey, draft running backs who catch passes. It's another to actually tell you what to look for when you're doing that. And I realized that mistake when writing this year's Late-Round Draft Guide, which, by the way, the guide will be out on July 1st. Make sure you're pre-ordering right now. But I'm bringing up the draft guide because a big focus of that guide for me this year has centered around making things even more actionable for the reader. Like, I can say, hey, running backs who are league winners, they usually look like X, when that X is some piece of information that we learn after the season.
Going back to the quick example I shared earlier, running backs are league winners when they're in offenses that scored three or more touchdowns per game. Okay, let's say that's true. Let's say that's factual. Now, tell me which offenses will score three more touchdowns per game. When it comes to receiving work, tell me which running backs are going to catch a lot of passes this year. Now, we can have a general idea of who will and who won't catch passes. Rashad, remember his second year in the league? That was a big draft guide hit that year, largely because his receiving upside was there. We knew that he had a shot to play that kind of pass catching role, and we knew that he had a collegiate profile that really dictated that. But it was still a more subjective take. Now, rather than looking at that through some semi-subjective lens, I took things a step further this year to show you that one metric might be more predictive versus the market than you probably think at running back. And that metric is yards per route run. We've been working with yards per route run at wide receiver for years now. And while myself and other analysts will say yards per route run at running back, I'm not sure we're citing it enough. Though to be fair, I'm not really listening to other fantasy podcasts, so maybe I'm wrong. In the draft guide this year, I break the running back position down into three buckets. Early round players, middle round running backs, and then late round running backs. I split things up because each part of your draft actually dictates that you think about the position a little bit differently versus how the market has historically behaved. There's some interesting pass catching trends with early round running backs, but I'll save that for another day. What I really want to get to today is the middle round area, which is defined as running backs ranked as RB19 to RB42. Now there are reasons for those boundaries that I discussed in the guide, but that's also not that important of a topic for today's show. Just know that I've defined middle round running backs as the ones who are ranked 19th to 42nd by average draft position.