Quality Starts: Running Backs

Photo: USA Today Sports

There are some fantasy football players that believe that the lineup you pick can lose you a game just as much as it can win a contest. Having a player give you a consistent performance week after week can be considered more valuable than a player who goes off every third week and then takes two weeks off between those fantastic performances. Consistency has a value, and it does not take much of a leap to understand that players that you can rely on for solid games when you need them (such as in your postseason) are a huge advantage.

Baseball has a term called "Quality Starts" for pitchers, which is a statistic that represents how often a starting pitcher will put up a good (not great, just good) performance in a given game. The bar is set neither high nor low (six innings pitched, three earned runs or fewer) so as to gauge a decent performance. The theory behind it is that if your pitcher gives you a Quality Start, your team has a fighting chance to win a given game.

So now we need to translate this to football. What is "quality" for each position? How do we define a "Quality Start" for quarterbacks or running backs or any other position? Looking back at the 2018 season, the first attempt was to use the #12 RB for the year (James White, 190.6 fantasy points) and take that fantasy total and divide it by 16 for a per game average. The next step, however, was to take all of the Top 50 running backs from 2018 and sort them on a per game average. That method can account for missed games or a per-start performance metric, which is how most fantasy team owners would decide their roster for the week. The RB12 on a per-game average basis last season was Marlon Mack, with 163.1 fantasy points in 13 games, or a 12.5 points-per-game average – close to White’s 11.9 average over 16 contests. Considering that fantasy lineup decisions are made weekly and not on a full season basis, the per game average makes more sense to use as a baseline. Now it is reasonable to also acknowledge that taking RB12 seems a bit arbitrary, but if you are looking for a bare minimum of quality, the 12th RB should be the "worst starter" in your fantasy league as an RB1 and a great RB2.

Next, we move on to the more meaningful question - one of quantifying the quality. At what point do we decide whether or not a running back has given us a quality performance? Here is where it gets a bit murky, but looking at the distribution of running back performances by starters over the season and it becomes evident that the using the 12th running back average and adding or subtracting a percentage gives us a good range for an RB Quality Start.

Using the RB Quality Start range, we can also define a bad performance or an excellent performance as either falling below or exceeding the Quality Start range. Table 1 gives us the fantasy points that it takes to fall in each of the three areas:

Table 1: 2018 RB Quality Start and Fantasy Point Ranges - Standard Scoring

Table 2 shows us the breakdown of all the Top 50 running backs and how many of each type of start resulted for each:

Table 2: 2018 RB Start Types Sorted By Top 50 RBs - Standard Scoring

That's a lot of info to digest, so here is some help. First, we see that there were fewer Excellent Starts (166) than there were Quality Starts (177), but it goes even further than that. Last season's 166 Excellent Starts were the most since 2015, and the Excellent Start threshold (15.7+ points) was the highest since 2010. To study it a bit further, adding both Excellent and Quality Starts together for all of the 10 seasons in the study, the combined total had been between 330 and 365 every year but 2016 (a total of 321), with the last two seasons right on pace with those numbers (342 and 343, respectively). Last season’s increase in Excellent Starts (164 vs. 152 in 2017), the total increase in Excellent + Quality Starts, and also the high Excellent Start threshold in 2018 points towards a turn back towards stud running backs. As typical, there were also a lot of Bad Starts in 2018 (359), but we are only looking for the best here, plus a "start" is not as definitive for a positional player that may just see partial playing time. Table 3 summarizes a few of these trends:

Table 3: Excellent and Quality Starts - 2009 to 2018 - Standard Scoring

Now, to dig deeper, let's look at the numbers distributed in two different ways. First, I need to define a valuable starting running back in this system. We want a running back that will win more fantasy games than lose them, so we want either "Quality" or "Excellent" starts. Using a simple formula of scoring each type of start, we can define the value of a given NFL running back. Here is the formula:

STARTING FANTASY RB VALUE = EXCELLENT STARTS - BAD STARTS

We neglect to look at Quality Starts because they neither win games nor lose them on average - they are just average RB performances. We only really care about how often he helps our team vs. how often he hurts it. Giving a "-1" value to bad starts and "+1" to excellent ones does this for us.

On with the results, sorted by value:

Table 4: 2018 RB Start Types Sorted By Value - Standard Scoring

This is a lot of information once again, but there are some important things to note here. Back in 2014, elite running backs dominated the list, while 2015 was completely scattered at the top due to injuries and surprises at the position. The 2016 version of Table 4 was dominated by Le’Veon Bell and Todd Gurley, indicating that the NFL had reverted back to a feature back league once again. Last season, according to Table 4 above, adds weight to that hypothesis with seven running backs accounting for nearly all of the Net Value at the position. Limiting the view for the Top 12 backs alone, these “RB1” category players accounted for over half of the Excellent Starts (86 of 166), which adds weight to the NFL having 8-12 elite, feature backs across the league. Doing your homework this summer to know who is the lead back (and also who is the clear backup, if there is one) for all 32 teams could mean all the difference for your team this year.

Lastly, we will sift through it for you and get right to the heart of the matter with our final table. Here we have the results sorted by value for the Top 40 RBs on the 2019 ADP list.