RB2 By Committee: Updated

Photo: USA Today Sports

This is an update to the original 2019 version for the Running Back 2 by Committee article, which focuses on the following significant changes:

1. Chris Carson's ADP has moved him up well into the RB2 range (RB18), making him far less appealing as an option. He will rarely make it past Round 4 now in most drafts.

2. Lamar Miller's ACL tear has cost him his 2019 season.

3. Duke Johnson Jr is rapidly rising the ADP charts as a result of Miller's injury, making him an intriguing option for RB2BC.

4. Variation across the RB16-RB30 ADP list since the original article (things move fast in the NFL).

Over the past several seasons, there have been quite a few very popular articles that look at an interesting approach to building a fantasy team with late value picks. Based on the theory of using both Strength of Schedule ("SOS") and taking two players as a combination to build one very good starting duo, a committee can be built as a standard fantasy league strategy. In general, this is usually a wise move for some positions where depth is not as big of a concern (usually quarterbacks and defenses) because there is rarely a need to pursue an elite option at these positions early in the beginning stages of a fantasy draft.

So with this in mind, I started to think about what else can be done with the committee approach. Tight end? Perhaps. Wide receiver? A possibility, but it might be better to look at third wide receiver options than any other option. What about running back? Hmmm, that's really intriguing. What if you could grab two running backs later in the draft that could combine to perform on an RB2 - or even RB1 - level, based solely on their current projections and their schedule? Now we're talking. This really got my attention, so I went after this one first. Let's take a look at how to evaluate this concept and then we can digest and discuss the results.

THE GROUND(GAME) RULES

So how to begin? Defenses and quarterbacks are relatively easy to committee together. There's usually only one quarterback and certainly only one team defense per NFL club, so the approach is pretty simple as far as picking out which players/teams to try and pair up. When it comes to running backs, the line is not quite so easy to draw, but I needed some basis to pick which players it made sense to try and combine for a decent committee. I decided that I would use the following criteria to decide which players to start with for evaluating:

CRITERIA #1 - RB25 AND BEYOND

This seems pretty simple. If we want to have a duo that puts up RB2 numbers, that means we want RB24 or better production - else we would just draft RB24 (Mark Ingram) or higher and forget the whole idea. So here is the list of players with which I started, based on their Average Draft Position (ADP):

Table 1: Running Backs RB22-RB60 Based on PPR ADP

Late August update - The list of RB2BC candidates was opened up to include RB22-RB60. With Mark Ingram, Sony Michel and David Montgomery's ADPs all moving quite a bit. If Ingram, Michel or Montgomery are personal favorites and they fall to Round 6 in your draft, go ahead and take them and just use the following tables to find the best RB2BC complementary running back options.

Great, now we have 39 guys to pair up and see how they do. That makes 702 potential committees, so there had better be a decent one (or several, we hope) out of all of those couplets. Now, before I go over the method of how to pair them up and the results, we need one more rule:

CRITERIA #2 - NO MORE THAN ONE RB FROM ROUND 5 AND ONE FROM ROUND 6

This could get tricky here, but understand the overall goal. The point of RB2BC is to free up the first four rounds of your fantasy draft to pursue three receivers after grabbing a stud running back in Round 1. This also gives you the flexibility of grabbing two receivers and a stud quarterback or tight end, depending on your personal preference, or even to get RB2 and have the RB2BC be your RB3. Flexibility is the name of the game here. We all want value in our drafts, and having the ability to grab two running backs in Rounds 5 and 6 to act as our RB2BC gives us that ability.

Here is the good news - nearly all the running backs on the list above has an ADP that is Round 6 or higher (later), but several backs fall in the Round 5-6 range that will be of interest. As of this update, RB22 (Ingram) and RB23 (Michel) typically go late in the fourth round, while four running backs (David Montgomery, Phillip Lindsay, James White, and Tarik Cohen) have ADPs in Round 5. We will have to keep that in mind when we look at the results because it would not make sense to expect to get two Round 5 or Round 6 running backs in one of these combinations based on their ADP.

So what do we do now to figure out some running back pairs?

CRITERIA #3 - USE FOOTBALLGUYS' RB STRENGTH OF SCHEDULE

This sounds pretty simple, doesn't it? Just take the running back strength of schedule to figure out when certain players are more likely to score well. The method here is similar to what the Projections Dominator and Draft Dominator do for you - take the projected fantasy points and slice them up over 17 weeks based on the strength of schedule, which can be called the distributed fantasy points for each running back.

After the distributed fantasy points were tabulated for all 39 running backs on a weekly basis, the next step is to just compare all of the possible running back pairs to find the best duos for RB2BC. So here we are - time for some results.

Table 2: PPR Running Back #2 Committee Pairs

Apologies for the lengthy list in Table 2, but as you can imagine, we have a lot of choices this year. That's a good thing, but now we have to trim that list down to get some very good pairs to select from for RB2BC. There are some tricky situations this season such as having one back suspended for eight games to start the season (Kareem Hunt), which could impact the study. With so many options this season, there is the need to be thorough as the ADPs tend to get very fluid as preseason wears on, and we need to make certain we have the very best pairings in case our draft plans go awry. So digging in, there are 86 pairs that are worth 190 or more fantasy points (projected) for the first 16 weeks of the season, so it looks like there will be a number of options. Let's also take a look at how often some of these guys show up on the table:

Table 3: PPR Running Back #2 Committee Pair Appearances by Player

As we can see from Table 3, even though there 86 committees to consider, the list is dominated by the first 4-5 names. Duke Johnson Jr is ascending quickly with Lamar Miller lost for the year in Houston, while Melvin Gordon's holdout for the Chargers is boosting the value of Austin Ekeler. Sony Michel may not make it to Round 5, but he has good RB2BC value if he slides down the draft board. Phillip Lindsay rounds out the top options from the list, and Tevin Coleman also makes a good number of appearances. Clearly, these are the backs to target for the committee approach this season, but which ones? Some of that will come down to personal preferences of these seven running backs, but some of the math in the study can help us out. Keep in mind that these are all based on projections at this time, and a single touchdown can sway the results significantly. With so many backs on this list with such frequency, it tells us that the ADP list in the RB20-RB36 range is pretty up in the air as far as who will do the best. All the more reason to get a favorable pair when it comes to strength of schedule.

PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER

Now that we have 86 possible pairs that are better than 190 points, what exactly does that mean? Should this number be the basis of our comparison? Of course not. Remember our goal - find a pair of running backs that can combine for RB2 (or better) fantasy production. To figure that out we need a better metric, so here are the projections for RB1 through RB24 (and beyond), using PPR: