If you’re new around here, you’ll see a stat called High-Value Touches or HVT quite a bit during the season in reference to RBs. Betsperts’ Sam Hoppen does some fantastic visuals for the newsletter during the season that help us visualize and quantify HVT numbers, and we’ll continue to look at the HVT leaderboards at the end of Part 2 of Stealing Signals every Tuesday to try to identify the backup RBs worth adding.
This process is a major reason I discussed Justin Jackson several times last season as the player to stash behind Austin Ekeler. Jackson was widely available even late into the season as Joshua Kelley and Larry Rountree were at various times viewed as the handcuff there, but it was pretty clear that was a separate role and that a couple times early in the season when Ekeler had injury scares, Jackson took over the passing and route-running role that makes Ekeler so valuable. When Austin Ekeler missed Week 16, that thesis came to fruition as Jackson put up 36.2 PPR points against Houston at a crucial time during the fantasy playoffs. Nailing that type of RB spot start is massively valuable.
For anyone unaware of what HVT measures, it’s fairly simple — green zone touches plus receptions. Green zone touches refers to touches from the 10-yard line and in (whereas the red zone is the 20-yard line and in, but the value of the touches gets weaker the further away from the goal-line we move). As I wrote in the Week 1 breakdown of terms last year, “touchdown potential and pass-catching upside are the keys to RB upside in PPR, while rush attempts outside scoring range are far lower in fantasy value.” When we focus on HVT, we’re just counting the subset of touches that come in the passing game and near the end zone, leaving all carries outside the 10-yard line as the “low-value touches.” It’s long been common to refer to backs who don’t catch a lot of passes and get subbed out near the end zone as “between the 20s” rushers — that’s what we’re talking about here. The initial stat I researched was actually to identify the backs with these profiles to avoid, and it looked at the percentage of touches a back had that were these low-value touches. That stat was referred to as TRAP (Trivial Rush Attempt Percentage), which serves to argue that not all 20-touch backs are created equal, depending on what percentage of those 20 touches are HVTs — receptions and touches close to the goal-line.
Got it? For fantasy, HVTs good. TRAP backs not good.
My favorite way to break this down since the initial work in 2019 has pretty clearly become to look at it from the team perspective. The market tends to recognize and identify the upside of HVTs these days, at least so far as the market believes what it sees, and these are the backs that score a ton of points. But the edge that remains is in those Justin Jackson scenarios — identifying the backs that could step into highly-valuable HVT-rich situations if a starter were to go down.
I don’t mean to beat my chest even more, but the market was wrong, all season long, prioritizing Kelley and Rountree as the backups to roster for the Chargers (or at times thinking there was no backup worth rostering, since Kelley and Rountree were playing solid snaps but also not performing particularly well). Kelley and Rountree did not have the requisite upside to matter all that much even if they wound up in a lead role. I wrote about Jackson several times, even as he suffered his own injury issues midseason and didn’t play much through the middle part of the season. After he came back for his first game with more than five touches since Week 4, I wrote in the Team HVT section of Stealing Signals Week 13, “Jackson I think has the best HVT opportunity ceiling if the thesis is right on him that he’d more or less get Ekeler’s role,” in relation to Jackson and a handful of other players I’d listed as possible cheap stashes through this type of analysis.
That probably doesn’t seem like I was pounding the table for Jackson, but it’s hard to overstate how little buzz there was for Jackson at that time. These are the outcomes we’re seeking, and they can be massively valuable for Zero RB/Anchor RB and heavier-RB builds alike, because it’s simply tougher than people realize for the RB who gets you to the dance to keep performing as a star right through it. Literally any roster can use a ceiling game from an RB in fantasy playoff time.
To identify those, the key is not trying to predict injuries or the likelihood that some player might get work, which was the mistake the Kelley and Rountree fans were making. The key is a greater focus on the other side of the Expected Value equation, which is to say what the payoff could be. (EV is defined as probability of occurrence multiplied by magnitude of payoff i.e. what you get when you’re right. The market overemphasizes the probability of occurrence side of that equation in fantasy football, and especially in looking at RB stashes, by a wide margin.)
There’s a reason Jackson was widely unrostered even in deeper, high-stakes formats, because he hadn’t played much and Ekeler was performing well. The odds Ekeler would get injured and then Jackson would be healthy enough to really step into that role seemed slim. But there’s also a reason he was the back I continued to prioritize as a stash; the Team HVT elements and the routes Jackson had run early in the season when Ekeler had a few injury scares indicated there was a real possibility that if Ekeler missed a game or two, Jackson could step into a role with the requisite HVT focus of Ekeler’s role and in an offense that produced Team HVT at a high rate, creating a massive payoff if that scenario did occur. That’s the upside Jackson showed in Week 16.
More about how to apply Team HVT
Here are those points written more cleanly, pulled from last year’s preseason piece on HVT:
I’ve written about this concept in both 2019 and 2020, but the Cliff’s Notes are this:
Team HVT is not very sticky, but many of the biggest changes year over year were fairly predictable based on personnel changes. What it’s measuring is which teams threw to their backs and used their backs near the goal line.
Team HVT is a very good indicator of high-upside RB seasons. That is obviously a self-fulfilling statement because high-upside RB seasons have a lot of HVT, and they are high-volume pieces of those offenses. But particularly when we think about backups — think Mike Davis [behind CMC in 2020], or DeAngelo Williams and James Conner behind Le’Veon Bell years ago — the offensive system can be very beneficial.
One big part of Team HVT is the quarterback. Rushing QBs tend to throw to their RBs less frequently. Some QBs have always been gold mines for RB value (we’ll miss you Drew Brees and Philip Rivers).
From 2019, a section titled “Rethinking the word committee”: “I would argue a committee — as it pertains to fantasy — shouldn't be defined by how the overall touches are split up, but how the HVT are. That means that if a back is getting plenty of touches but giving up a few key goal-line touches, he may be in more of a Fantasy committee than his touch count indicates. More specifically, if an early-down back is only conceding five or six touches a game but those are all coming on passing downs, he's in a committee. He's losing high-value touches, and that's what matters.”
Later in that section: “But we also have more of a tolerance for some players in committees than others. Alvin Kamara is a top-three pick despite not projecting to be a workhorse. Why is that? Because his offense generates an absurd amount of HVT.”
Third time’s a charm: “It's the HVT that's the key. If you are looking to draft a running back who may cede high-value touches, his offense better at least be able to generate a lot of them overall. Teams that finish high on this list can support multiple backs; teams near the bottom that may have a committee should be avoided.”
And then I dropped a link to HVT numbers for the previous five seasons, by offense, which I’ve updated to include 2021 so it now has six seasons of data. I put it in the worse format for you guys to play around with last year; this year, you should be able to go to File > Make a Copy and then sort and filter to your heart’s content.
How I’m using this in 2022 rankings
Here are the actual player takeaways: