RB Targets and Fades — How to play the tiers
The RB Dead Zone is fascinating in 2023
I’ve written a lot about the different positions in my recent strategy articles, so the introductions to these pieces are going to be brief as I focus on the tiers themselves, and the players therein.
As with last year, I’m going to group these tiers a couple of different ways. I got great suggestions in past years to do 1a/1b type stuff for smaller tier breaks, and I liked that. But I also thought was more actionable was emphasizing the couple spots at each position where there is a big tier break. So I made a very cool banner to put in the writeups to show where those bigger breaks are. It looks like this, and you can probably tell graphic design is my passion.
As for Targets and Fades, I will bold all players I consider targets, and italicize all those I consider fades. The goal of the rankings is to have the targets ahead of ADP and fades behind, but ADP varies wildly — especially on the home league sites — so denoting players as Targets or Fades allows us to more directly talk about players that are worth a bit of a reach in some cases, and those who I’m saying you’d need a significant discount to consider
Let’s jump into it.
Tier 1
1. Christian McCaffrey
2. Austin Ekeler
I don’t have either of these guys marked as Targets, but I’ve talked through the situations where I would take them in the first round. Both have the types of HVT profiles you absolutely love, especially in this era of decreasing RB ceilings, which Shawn and I discussed on Stealing Bananas.
For McCaffrey, the shift over to the 49ers did cap his HVT ceiling a bit, though not in a way that has me overly worried. For Ekeler, the scoring ceiling was never as high as McCaffrey, but there’s potential for more team-level dependence on him with a Chargers offense that is going to run a ton of place, which elevates him into this tier for me.
In my mind, there’s not really an argument to put any other RB here, even as someone who strongly values youth and upside profiles and wants to have the RB3 below in this tier.
Tier 2
3. Bijan Robinson
4. Saquon Barkley
5. Tony Pollard
6. Nick Chubb
7. Jonathan Taylor
8. Rhamondre Stevenson
9. Jahmyr Gibbs
10. Travis Etienne
11. Breece Hall
12. Josh Jacobs
13. Derrick Henry
I’ve really struggled with this tier, going back and forth on a number of guys, especially as off-field stuff has impacted so many of them. One guy to spotlight is Nick Chubb, who I’ve recently come around on in part due to a good argument from my Ship Chasing cohost Pat Kerrane, who recently agreed with my concern about Chubb’s receiving role expanding at this point of his long un-workhorse-like career, but also basically asked, “What if it did?” And the implication there is right — I feel strongly about Chubb’s rushing efficiency and TD potential, and again the lack of truly elite recent RB ceilings comes into play, to where I’d have to be really content with Chubb’s scoring range if he actually did add some receptions.
Josh Jacobs is a guy I’ve gone back and forth on as well, but I keep landing in the “concerned” bucket. But I could pretty easily see wishing I had him ranked higher, looking back at this after the season.
Tony Pollard dodged the Ezekiel Elliott concern I wrote about in Offseason Signals, and it’s kind of wheels up for him. My projection on him does not do him service from an upside perspective, because I was projecting Elliott back in Dallas.
The cases for most of the other players are unchanged from the Offseason Signals posts, although I’m getting increasingly worried about Bijan Robinson when I hear crap like Arthur Smith referencing Tyler Allgeier and “hot hand.”