RB Targets and Fades — Interpreting the Tiers
Is the Dead Zone real? Is it in the room with us right now?
The best piece of content in the fantasy football landscape every year is Shawn Siegle’s Zero RB countdown, which dropped this week in three parts. I’ve not been shy about saying in the past it literally changes my opinions, and I’d strongly suggest you go through it, because he’s also just an incredibly fun read, as a writer.
I was thinking about the concept of it, and why I’m so interested in his choices. And I figured out that it’s because of RB as a position. I’ve railed against traditional rankings a bunch of times, and I don’t think the idea of ranking names is a bigger issue at any position than RB. At RB, it’s all about the Targets and the Fades.
It’s also about the type of play. Are you getting early-season projectable workload?
Those should be priced very differently across offenses and talent levels, with the legendary upside profiles obviously at the top, and some being double-digit round values but that get propped up by artificial certainty in the facade of “guaranteed touches.”
Are you playing a contingency-based upside scenario?
Those should be priced very differently across offenses and talent levels, too. What does the RB3 look like? How likely is this backup to actually hold down all the work, and how valuable is all that work? And how much efficiency can he add to that expected workload in his offense?
Are you playing a committee back with some standalone appeal?
Same deal, right? How valuable is the backfield? In Stealing Signals each week in-season, I’ll have my HVT recap at the bottom, and there’s always that note about how the backs sharing backfields in offenses with high Team HVT numbers are worth targeted, and those sharing backfield in offenses with low Team HVT numbers are just not. And then how good is the committee back? Can he provide so much efficiency that he can elevate a limited role? And is the contingent upside that he takes things over if his backfield mate gets hurt?
I can ask questions about who the RB play is for days. You really can’t just draft names off a list; you kind of gotta know what the deal is. But also, when I rank them, and assign value, I can’t just group them into what types of plays they are, because for starters many are hybrids, but more importantly for all the archetypes, there are different values, like I said. Jahmyr Gibbs and De’Von Achane are from the third group, a committee back with standalone appeal, but they are the extreme version of that. Guys like Zach Charbonnet and Ty Chandler are a much different version.
I feel like everything I write is about not “misapplying the aggregate to the specific,” and this idea that every player has his own unique profile. I’d love to simplify all this, but that’s a recipe for doing worse in your draft. You gotta understand the bets. That’s what this piece is for. I’m gonna try to give the quick-hitting info on every single RB. Your mission is to understand how these profiles fit together when you do your draft. Get just enough early-season volume, because that’s obviously one of the most overdrafted things in fantasy.
Get plenty of bites at the late-round RB apple, because points are going to come from there this year. And when you do it, hammer the rookie RBs.
I know it sounds absurd, but all I really care about is having enough starting volume for Week 1, and then I’ll go from there. And there might be early-season periods where I don’t have a great starting option, and I have to accept that. I should be strong everywhere else, because I do truly believe the difference between some of the mid-round RBs and the late-round RBs is massively overstated. Yes, one group is more likely to get the early volume, and yes, they’re more likely to then keep it through inertia. But since the advent of 17-game schedules, and with a multi-year lull in young, high-end talent, teams are more willing than ever to treat the position as if they need a lot of names involved. And that means a lot of boring, highly replaceable RB fantasy scores, that don’t kill you even if your RB2 only scored 5.
And remember what I wrote earlier about working back to front in drafts? If we’re going to get late-round RB points, we want to be taking multiple RBs in that range. This is one of my favorite parts of the Zero RB strategy, or similar strategies where you’re not building your RB room with multiple early picks — you’re going to then build your RB room with tons of late-round picks, and giving yourself those chances.
Anyway, I talked a lot more about the Dead Zone in this year’s home league strategy guide. I just frequently get asked about how the tiers fit together for me, especially with WR costs rising, and the answer is really just that it’s more about the Targets. Get exposure to the right RB plays, and things tend to work out.
This is the final of the four Targets and Fades pieces. The other three:
The WR piece includes more info on how I do tiers, but here are the Cliff’s Notes:
Bold means the player is a target, while italics means he’s a fade
The “Big Tier Break” denotes areas where there is a legit cliff
I’ll also use nomenclature like 1a and 1b to denote when there are mini-tier breaks
Let’s get to everyone’s favorite position to talk about.
Tier 1
1. Christian McCaffrey
2. Bijan Robinson
3. Breece Hall
There were points this offseason where I considered whether Christian McCaffrey should actually be the RB1, and then I regained my sanity. Yes, he’s older. But since coming over to San Francisco in the middle of 2022, and setting aside his very first game with the team where he only played a 29% snap share on short rest, he’s played 26 regular season games and six postseason games and scored fewer than 13 PPR points in one of them. He’s scored a touchdown in 27 of those 32 games. Yes, that workload may catch up to him. If it does, it’ll feel like we should have seen it coming. But your odds to win your league are 1 in 12. If he continues to be as durable as he’s been the past couple years, given how few other good RBs there are, he’s a cheat code toward turning your 8.3% win rate into something much, much higher.
Behind him, I guess I would say I actually think it’s a bit of an error to have Breece Hall ranked above Bijan Robinson. That doesn’t mean Hall can’t gap him in scoring, because he very obviously can. Hall is quite likely the best RB in the NFL right now, and if he creates points over expectation (FPOE) at a massive rate, he’ll reach his legendary ceiling.
But the situations do matter, and this is a probabilistic game. Drafting early RBs is about understanding the risks; this is the whole idea behind Pat Kerrane’s Legendary Upside concept. My application of that concept may differ from his slightly, so I don’t want to rope him into my take here, but for me it’s about hyper-focusing on those ceiling outcomes. If I take a RB this high, I’m very concerned about whether he breaks fantasy 5% of the time, or 10%.