Quality Starts: Running Backs (PPR)

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 2019 season, the first attempt was to use the #12 RB for the year (Chris Carson, 240.8 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 2019 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 in 2019 was also Chris Carson, which is rather unusual - but easily explained. The top-12 running backs from last season played 181 combined games out of a possible 192 - meaning that the fantasy RB1s averaged fewer than one game missed. The only top-12 running backs to miss more than one game were Saquan Barkley (13 games played), Dalvin Cook (14), and Alvin Kamara (14). As the saying goes, the best ability is often availability, and these elite backs not only performed well but also stayed healthy. So for 2019, Chris Carson - the RB12 by either his season-long numbers or his per-game average (16.05 points), will be the baseline for evaluating quality running back performances for last season. 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 RB performances by starters over the season and it becomes evident that the using the 12th RB 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: 2019 RB Quality Start and Fantasy Point Ranges - PPR Scoring

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

Table 2: 2019 RB Start Types Sorted By Top 50 RBs - PPR Scoring

That's a lot of info to digest, so here is some help. First, we see that there were fewer Excellent Starts (134) than there were Quality Starts (209), but it goes even further than that. Last season's 134 Excellent Starts were the fewest in the 11 years since this metric has been studied, which can be explained by the Excellent Start threshold (20.1+ points) being the highest level across those same 11 seasons. To study it a bit further, adding both Excellent and Quality Starts together for all of the 11 seasons in the study, the combined total had been between 364 and 389 every season between 2010 and 2015 but the next four seasons saw a drop to 339-345 in all but 2018. That means the lower seasons (2016, 2018 and 2019) started to reflect the downward trend from Excellence to Quality and also screams towards the general committee approach to NFL backfields. The lower totals despite a record number of points required to achieve an Excellent Start last season points towards an elite tier of feature running backs at the top of the fantasy food chain. As typical, there were also a lot of Bad Starts in 2019 (343), 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. The interesting part in 2019 was the sharp dip in Excellent Starts with only 134 total, or less than 10 per week. That seems to be related to the higher threshold for excellence in 2019 (and similar to 2010), as it took over 21 points last year to qualify while it has been between 16 and 18 points every season but 2010. Once again, the belief is that we are seeing bigger performances at running back when it comes to PPR due to their larger involvement in the passing game. Table 3 summarizes a few of these trends:

Table 3: Excellent and Quality Starts - 2009 to 2019 - PPR Scoring

Now, to dig deeper, let's look at the numbers distributed in two different ways. First, we need to define a valuable starting running back in this system. We want an RB 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: 2019 RB Start Types Sorted By Value - PPR Scoring

This is a lot of information once again, but there are some important things to note here. Table 4 reflects the trend of elite running backs dominating the Net Value for top fantasy options, which has been consistent over the past four seasons. Christian McCaffrey, Dalvin Cook and Ezekiel Elliott represented more than two-thirds of the total positive Net Value, indicating that the NFL has reverted back to a feature back league. Last season, according to Table 4 above, adds weight to that hypothesis by the fact that every tailback with five or more Excellent Starts all appear at the top of the chart: 10 of 12 running backs have at least five excellent performances. Limiting the view to the Top 12 backs alone, these “RB1” category players accounted for 56% of the Excellent Starts (75 of 143), which emphasizes that the current state of the NFL has 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 2020 ADP list.