Reconsidering the RB Dead Zone, Zero RB, and draft strategy in 2021

A guide on how to draft your team

I’m going to try to hammer this out fairly quick, assuming some level of understanding of the concepts, because there are a ton of FAQs that come from it that relate to various league types that I also want to try to get to. More than anything, I’m going to try to explain the thought process behind draft strategy and structural drafting, such that you should be able to think through these questions on your own. I’ve done my best to get to the specific questions I’ve gotten — and everyone is on a different level of understanding from pure skepticism in Zero RB and the related concepts to having a really good grasp but needing to understand some specific applications in 2021 — but the truth is trying to get to the sheer volume of questions coming in isn’t practical. So instead I’m going to try to do the exact opposite of the first and still best piece of fantasy advice I may have ever gotten, which was when Fantasy Douche first told me not to “try to answer every question about fantasy in one post” the very first time I reached out to him and ultimately started writing for RotoViz. Instead, I’m going to try to answer everything, all at once. Wish me luck.

For more on these topics, I highly recommend the Zero RB week Shawn Siegele and I did on our Stealing Bananas podcast, including the July 31 bonus episode dealing with whether Zero RB works in different formats like half-PPR, standard, different league sizes, and different starting requirements. These pods are about Zero RB, but so much of what we talk about is the tenets of and theory behind Zero RB — including RB fragility, how to win the Flex spots, and a lot more — which should be the basis for your entire draft strategy regardless of format.

What Is Zero RB and Why Does It Have So Much Upside?
The Must-Own Zero RB Candidates from Multiple Areas of Your Draft
Is Modified Zero RB Part of the Zero RB Universe?
The Zero RB Bonus Episode: How to Play Zero RB in Auction, Superflex, and More

Revisiting the RB Dead Zone

This entire idea, which has blown up this offseason, is built off the work Shawn did with Zero RB and then the ascension of the elite RBs we’ve seen over the past five years or so that have the ability to put up ridiculous receiving lines in the modern NFL. I initially talked about the concept at CBS in 2019, but the gist of it was that on a 10-year analysis, there weren’t a lot of league-winning RB seasons outside the first three rounds of drafts. In fact, RBs from Round 4 through Round 9 hit league-winning upside at about the same rate as RBs from Round 10 through Round 16. There’s a little more floor in the earlier rounds, but we almost don’t care about floor, because in PPR leagues RB picks score fewer points than WR picks at basically any ADP in the draft. If you get a floor RB outcome, you’re filling an RB spot in your lineup, but you’re sacrificing points overall.

On top of that, I argued in the podcasts above we shouldn’t necessarily worry about finding a specific RB whose floor can consistently fill a spot in our lineup, because for as much as people love to argue you can’t find waiver wire studs at RB as easily as they believe Zero RB drafters think you can, the answer to the two RB spots in your lineup doesn’t have to be two players. It can very much be a revolving door throughout a season, where yes there will be some thin weeks, but you can also find points in spurts among players who are making spot starts. On a weekly level, we can project volume at the RB position pretty well, and if you play DFS you know there used to be cheap RB volume most every week, to the point the sites made it a focus to price up backups in some instances just in case a starter gets ruled out later in the week. Even ensuring you’ll acquire those one-week options can be a challenge, but it’s one forgotten path to getting back some of the RB production you lose when you don’t buy into the early-RB trap. Obviously there are other paths, like what happened with Darrell Henderson when Cam Akers got hurt, or just using your late-round RBs when you construct your roster intelligently. There are a ton of affordable RBs who will have at least solid roles every season, with this year including my favorite pick A.J. Dillon, guys like Gus Edwards if you want to do that (I like to be even riskier and prioritize more upside than Edwards typically), both Bills’ RBs, all the pass-catching specialists, etc.

Of course when you take zero or only one RB in the first nine or so rounds, you’re not likely to find the next Christian McCaffrey in Round 15. The point of Zero RB is to win through your dominance at WR and also potentially TE and QB, to the extent you can get by while only being solid at RB. The upside is still there if you have a Henderson type outcome or really hit on several smart waiver plays throughout the year such that your RB spots as a whole are scoring solid points and keeping up, especially, with the no-upside picks in the middle rounds like Josh Jacobs (and I have to note here, Jacobs or guys like him aren’t the point specifically, because guys like David Montgomery last year do find some upside from these ranges, but that the point is broadly this entire range of RBs is a bad investment where the probabilities aren’t in your favor).

But then we have ADP adjusting to some of these trends, and that’s important in 2021. And there are running backs we can target. In my original RB Dead Zone research, I used three cutoffs — one that measured full-season PPR points, one that measured PPR points per game with an 8-game minimum that had a higher cutoff than the average points per game of the full-season cutoff (to grab players who definitely looked like full-season league-winners but got hurt at an unfortunate time, because I believe those are instructive profiles to analyze), and one that had a very high cutoff and only focused on the fantasy playoff weeks (which pulled in some potentially questionable options, but I think it’s also instructive to look at where late-season smashes came from — and by smashes, I mean these players averaged 23 PPR points per game over Weeks 14-16 which is truly phenomenal production at the right time of year).

Real quick I want to mention Pat Kerrane has done amazing work over at NBC this offseason looking at how RBs need “legendary upside” to justify early picks, and then talking through the things we should be looking for to identify those RBs.

My cutoffs from 2019 are a little lower than Pat’s, which pulled in more RBs that had great but maybe not legendary upside. I also looked at a different time period — I initially used 10 years, but I’ve since updated to include 2019 and 2020 so I have 12 years to look at. It’s a wider data set than I typically would look at given how much changes in the NFL, but I think it makes sense in this case because we’re basically looking at the Wisdom of the Crowds element of RB expected production as defined by ADP and then comparing that to how good those RBs were. The question we’re trying to answer is really whether we are drafting RBs in the right places (and targeting the right RBs) and those things I think can be viewed over a longer time period — I’d argue ADP has gotten sharper over the years, but we’re testing against drafters’ opinions and those things are going to adjust to the changing landscape to a certain degree from one year to the next.

I mentioned above that my initial findings were that the middle rounds didn’t contain as much upside. The vast majority of the upside scenarios came out of Rounds 1 and 2, and then there was still a pretty good upside hit rate into Round 3 ADPs, but by a certain point there’s just not much left. Jack Miller has also done great work on the RB Dead Zone at RotoViz and Establish the Run, and I believe he’s found Rounds 3-6 to be particularly bad, using another method still, that I believe looked at fewer seasons. The point isn’t the specific rounds or whether Pat, Jack, or I have the exact specifications dialed in — the point is that at a certain point of the draft, the RBs people tend to select wind up being killers for those rosters. That’s for two reasons — the first is that basically all the other picks you could make in those ranges are going to be better picks at those positions, most notably WR, and the second is that those RBs just aren’t very good. My explanation of this phenomenon is that once we get past the first 15 or so RBs, the next dozen or two are often ranked by projected role. I’ve harped on the issues with projected touches for RBs over the past few weeks, but because we don’t have a great way of identifying RB upside, we sort of just start throwing guys in there that look like the lead backs on their rosters. The problem is that their probabilistic ranges include what I would describe as very small percentage chances that they are actually a full-season workhorse in those offenses. It’s a much better bet that those guys won’t be that lead back over the course of the full season.

All of this is build-up to the point I want to make — the only viable picks in the RB Dead Zone are young players. If the ones that fail in that range are propped up by projected volume relative to what we think they are as talents, the young players that tend to fall in the dead zone are players that we think are great talents but don’t feel comfortable pushing into the first few rounds because of a lack of foreseeable opportunity or things like the upside of their offense. There’s also an element of uncertainty to what they will actually be at the NFL level. The example I’ve made a bunch this offseason is Najee Harris versus Travis Etienne. Etienne was in my opinion the better fantasy prospect, and he went one pick after Harris in the real NFL Draft in April, so draft capital is nearly identical. But where drafters are very confident in Harris’s workload, and likely for good reason, there are concerns about Etienne’s fit in Jacksonville. The way I would frame this is Etienne goes in the dead zone almost purely because of factors that don’t relate to him — if he landed with the Steelers, I honestly think he’d go even higher than Harris.

To a certain extent, this makes sense, because we know RB skill is difficult to project. But as Pat details in his piece looking at RB legendary upside, that upside comes from receiving work and touchdown-scoring ability. Etienne has an expected receiving role in Jacksonville, and we don’t really know much about his touchdown upside, but we do know the new coaching staff took him in the first round when they knew they had James Robinson on the roster so it’s not like they plan to not use Etienne. It feels like a very thin play right now in August — I feel that way just trying to describe what Etienne’s upside might look like — but the point stands that past dead zone stars typically looked exactly like Etienne.

Over the 12 years in my database, the 13 upside RBs out of Rounds 4-9 include seven first- or second-year players, as well as two more third-year players (meaning all we knew about them when drafting was two years of play). That means there are only four guys in all those rounds who showed legitimate upside in their fourth or later NFL season. The guy just inside the third-round cutoff by my ADP is LeSean McCoy in his second season, and the two just outside it were Devonta Freeman and Bilal Powell in their second and third seasons.

I’d argue that’s because by the end of their third seasons and probably by the end of their second, we tend to know whether RBs have true upside and are thus taking them in the earlier rounds (the early-round hits do include a lot more fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-round RBs, most of whom were repeat high-end performers). If we’re taking a veteran in those middle rounds — if the WOTC element of ADP isn’t buying into the player by that point of their career — they are almost certainly a bad pick. It gets trickier with first- and second-year players, though, where the sample is either small or nonexistent, and there’s that element of uncertainty where they may just be undervalued on their merits.

What’s really interesting about those young players who broke out is most went on to have another season on this list (almost exclusively as high draft picks, for obvious reasons). It’s guys like Arian Foster, and Ray Rice, and Kareem Hunt, and Derrick Henry. In fact, of the 39 different RBs who appear on my list, 22 reached one of the thresholds I mentioned at some other point in their careers (there are a few who did it up to four times, and several who did it three, such that 53 of the 70 total seasons were from a repeat guy). Of the 17 who didn’t repeat, several are still in the league and being drafted reasonably high like Jonathan Taylor, Aaron Jones, Austin Ekeler, Miles Sanders, and Montgomery (James Conner, David Johnson, Damien Williams, and Kenyan Drake are also on that list and could feasibly repeat, though it’s unlikely).

Another note on these single-year hits is seven were only playoff stars, meaning they only qualified through the list from the most dubious cutoff I mentioned. It pulled in guys like Jerome Harrison back in 2009 and Bilal Powell in 2016, as well as all of Taylor, Sanders, Montgomery, Williams, and Drake from the lists in the previous paragraph. Only six of the 53 seasons from repeat performers were on the list solely due to the playoff cutoff.

In simpler terms:

• The full-season and high PPG seasons we’re chasing on draft day are heavily skewed toward repeat performers, and heavily skewed toward the types of players that drafters recognize as being potentially great and are willing to draft in the first two rounds (with a few more landing in Round 3).

• Of the RBs that don’t go very high in drafts, into the RB Dead Zone it’s typically young breakouts showing first-time ceilings that have true upside, and those players tend to go on to be repeat performers themselves.

So my mentality when it comes to willingness to take RB shots outside the very top rounds centers on guys who are young, could be first-time breakouts with HVT upside (like Pat detailed), and have the types of pedigrees to potentially be repeat performers in those ranges. That’s why, if you’ve listened to the podcast, I wind up on guys like:

• Clyde Edwards-Helaire: Not really a true dead zone guy, but a young player who could be a first-time breakout and have staying power as a former first-round pick. Caught 36 balls as a rookie in 13 games, but scored just five times.

• D’Andre Swift: He also creeps up into ranges that might not be considered the dead zone, but another young player who could be a first-time breakout and was a former early second-round pick after being many people’s pre-draft RB1. Also showed HVT upside with 43 catches and 10 TDs in his rookie season.

• Travis Etienne: Potential perennial top fantasy producer as a first-round pick with a long collegiate track record that is expected to get receptions early in his career and could progress to more early-down work if injuries were to strike backfield teammates or he is just that good.

• Javonte Williams: Potential perennial top fantasy producer as a second-round pick who was widely thought of as closer to Etienne and Harris as part of a top-three RBs in this class than the other backs who went behind him. Didn’t catch a ton of passes in college but shared the backfield with Michael Carter of the Jets, and Williams has some other positive notes like being a 21-year-old rookie which is historically a good barometer of success.

J.K. Dobbins fits on this list as well, but I’m not really buying him on HVT concerns. Guys like Darrell Henderson and Myles Gaskin (especially if he starts to fall after Malcolm Brown’s preseason start) are interesting considerations, but I would argue both have plenty of opportunity in front of them and are seemingly pushed down by a lack of belief in their ability to get and produce in those roles. That’s tended to be more of a red flag. Henderson is particularly interesting in that he’s sort of borderline as a prospect — he had some strong efficiency in college but went in Round 3 of the draft, so not as high of a pick as the guys bulleted above, and then we’ve seen two years already where he hasn’t gotten there. But he’s still one I’m considering strongly.

Guys like Montgomery and Sanders, meanwhile, have already shown the upside we tend to look for — at least in spurts — but drafters aren’t buying into them. That feels like a red flag, especially for Montgomery who is coming off that season. For Sanders, he did get the draft position helium going into last year, but then struggled, so the lack of buy-in is a little more understandable and there’s maybe a buy low case to be made as he enters Year 3. I’m not really taking him, nor am I taking the older guys like Chris Carson, Mike Davis, or Jacobs.

How this all plays into draft strategy

The most important part of everything I said above was that RBs in the dead zone, over a long timeline, tend to be poor selections. And as Pat showed, even in the first couple of rounds, where we see more upside from the RBs there, the bust rates are still very high. As he put it:

The RB dead zone doesn't start in round three--it starts the instant your fantasy draft begins. We only start noticing the dead zone in round three because the running backs who deliver legendary seasons have already been selected by that point.

Pat backs this up a variety of very good ways, but this is, of course, where Zero RB came from in the first place. Shawn wrote an unassailable and perfect article introducing the strategy in 2013, which people (who presumably haven’t read it) are still trying to assail eight years later.

The most common takedown is evidence that valuable running backs are valuable, which is to say that the top scorers at that position provide a greater edge than at other positions. No one denies this. It’s a straw man. We all know the best running backs score a ton of points. The important questions are how good are we at drafting those specific running backs, what’s the hit rate, what rounds do those players come from, and how do we use the answers to all those questions to build the best roster from start to finish.

And the answer is pretty simple — you don’t take a ton of RBs early because the hit rates suck and even though the best RBs are the best fantasy assets in the game (and can be huge trade chips in leagues with trades, and all of that stuff), if you just chase that one breakout RB by drafting four or so of them early, you’re very likely to bake in multiple early bust picks and probably still lose even when you find that player.

In this regard, while most drafters who stack early RBs tend to believe they are playing it safe, they are sorely mistaken. They are stacking early-round risk. It is a very high risk strategy.

By comparison, stacking early wide receivers is the safe strategy. The questions I get asked about Zero RB over and over are all about what will happen at RB. When do I take them? Who should I target? What’s going to happen there? Those are important questions but they speak to this whole skewed mindset where drafters think RBs are just the only thing that matters. I don’t even want to convince you to do Zero RB if you’re thinking like that. Just take your RBs and sleep well at night, until the day you have the necessary paradigm shift and see that’s actually a horror story of a roster and the thing that should help you sleep soundly is more reliable WR depth.

But one of the things Shawn and I talked about on our recent podcast week related to Zero RB is people get way too tied up in the name. The strategy is about these trends, but philosophically, it doesn’t mean you can’t draft RBs.

Actual strategy tips

The way I look at fantasy drafts in 2021 is that I want to have enough WRs in the earlier part of the draft to cover my starting lineup, Flex spots, and two bench spots. That, for me, needs to happen before wide receiver starts to dry up, which depends a little bit on the depth of the room you’re in — home leagues often have some values later, 10-team leagues obviously mean better WRs available later, etc. — but it’s somewhere around where guys like Michael Gallup and Laviska Shenault go and then within a round or two you’re in this Brandin Cooks or Curtis Samuel range.

If you look at my tiered rankings from this weekend, the tier from Robby Anderson to Courtland Sutton is before the cutoff, there’s sort of a transition tier where I included a lot of younger targets, and then after that you’re in a tough spot at WR. I could write 1,000 more words about that, but the short version is I don’t really mind Cooks or Samuel or any of those dudes, but in terms of upside profiles, there’s a huge cutoff around this area.

So the goal is to get plenty of WRs before that dropoff. In most drafts, this is relatively easy, as long as you’re willing to not take multiple RBs early. In a typical draft for a team that can start three WRs and a Flex, I want at least six WRs before this group dries up, which might be around Round 9. That gives me a few luxury picks, or what we sometimes might call “detours” to this idea of WR depth.

Those luxury picks can be a first-round RB if you want. They can also be a dead zone RB if you want to take a shot on a guy like Etienne as your only early RB. More appropriately, those luxury picks can be targeting an elite TE that is almost certain to give you a substantial positional advantage if healthy. At RB, you need both health and effectiveness. Tight ends do get hurt at a reasonably high rate, but the top three are virtual locks to be positive assets when healthy.

And then there’s still some room for a potentially elite QB detour if the value is right. You can play that by ear.

The question I get asked perhaps the most is how long do you go Zero RB? And the reality is you might not need to avoid a RB in the very first round to still build a team that takes advantage of the antifragility and core tenets of what Zero RB is arguing to be successful. In fact, I’d argue you almost never need to pass on one early RB if you really think you need that. It just means you’re probably bypassing an elite TE unless you’re sure your league is going to let you get adequate WR depth into Round 10 or Round 11.

And this is of course simplified because I also absolutely love the top tier of WRs, so there are various ways to be flexible within the constructs of this general idea, including starting something like RB-TE (probably going to have to go WR for about six rounds in a row) or starting WR-WR to really hammer the high ceilings of Davante Adams, Stefon Diggs, Tyreek Hill, or perhaps a few others your really like that high and then making a detour for like D’Andre Swift or T.J. Hockenson or a QB or Etienne or whoever. Or you can just do a very pure Zero RB build with WRs for the first several rounds and shift your focus then. As far as RB, you can still start with those guys like Dillon, Edwards, Moss, and more, plus you can grab a Bernard late as an easy startable option nearly any week in PPR.

So there’s not some magic formula necessarily for how long you need to wait at RB. You just should understand that stacking RBs early is going to reduce your chances of winning, and getting adequate depth at WR is the inverse strategy that ensures even if one of your WRs busts or gets hurt you’re going to have firepower through your starting lineup into your flex.

And because of that, if I’m in a three-WR plus flex league, I’m actually more likely to have seven WRs before that cutoff than five. Once you have that mindset, it’s just working back from there. As I approach that cutoff, if I think I can push things a bit, I might take an RB in Round 6 or 7 or 8, depending on the room and which WRs might come back. Certainly if I need six WRs by Round 8, I can make a detour for an elite TE or an anchor RB or whatever, but I can’t take 3-4 RBs or even two RBs *plus* a TE *plus* a high-end QB because then I’m chasing WR and just won’t catch up.

So then as you approach the Round 10-12 range, you’re very lopsided to WR depth versus RB depth. That’s necessarily where I start to build out some RB depth, but honestly I’m probably making sure to have at least one QB and one TE before I really start going after RB. By that point I might already have two backs — let’s say I took one in Round 2 and maybe had the ability to snag a Dillon in Round 8 — or I might have zero, but one of the biggest things I’ve learned is as uncomfortable as that is you can’t panic and start taking RBs because you think you need them. That type of mentality pulls you out of acquiring enough firepower for the rest of your lineup to only marginally improve on the bet you already made when you didn’t take a RB at the very beginning. Jumping back into the position in the dead zone in a way that doesn’t allow you to be strong enough everywhere else is the worst-case scenario.

The key is those detours need to be smart upside bets at whatever other position you’re making them at. So that’s why I emphasize the top-three elite TEs, or sometimes Hockenson or Kyle Pitts who could be stars. That’s why I spent so much time profiling the types of RBs that are better bets to be stars. And as for QBs, we know what rushing does and these elite dual-threat options can be legitimate game-changers in the modern fantasy landscape.

But there is a range of 50 or more picks around that RB Dead Zone where WR is the best bet structurally. It’s arguably the case that WR is the best bet structurally in every round, but obviously you can’t draft a team that way. You especially want to be hammering WRs after the elite TEs are gone, if the elite QBs aren’t good values, and you don’t like what you’re looking at among the RBs.

As for what you do at RB, I definitely agree with the general idea a lot of RBs are drafted and it’s not easy to grab guys off the wire — they do exist, every year, but it’s no lock you’ll get Gaskin or whoever — but the broader point is you can still build an effective RB group without the massive capital most drafters sink into it. Grab a couple guys with roles that will keep you from zeroes, and then do make upside swings on the Tony Pollard types as well. I like Dillon so much because I’m confident he’s going to have a role plus he’s the injury upside swing. Both profiles in one.

As I mentioned before, you have multiple paths to making up that ground at RB. What’s more important is smart building and understanding how RB value can drastically change, e.g. Darrell Henderson after the Cam Akers injury — that type of rise in value (in this case represented by ADP since it’s preseason but the same concept applies in-season) doesn’t happen at any other position. And it’s weird how these guys always pop up — Malcolm Brown got the preseason start for the Dolphins and now I’m hearing he should be a 10th-12th round pick. I don’t like that play, but the point is he was undrafted three days ago.

Those early double-digit round RBs aren’t terrible bets, and you’re not going to get completely boxed out of early-season points. They probably won’t have true upside from Week 1, but you can survive with by dominating WR, flex, and hopefully also TE and QB. You can stay afloat with a strong Zero RB team with almost literally no RB points. I know that sounds nuts but it’s really not. Shawn had a team last year we discussed on one of those podcast episodes that had J.D. McKissic and Nyheim Hines as the only real RBs they could field, and I’m definitely of the mind that the pass-catchers are valuable and it’s OK to take one or two, but they are also sucker bets for Zero RB teams in some regards. There’s more upside than people recognize — there’s been at least one RB with fewer than 100 rush attempts in the top 20 every season since 2016, and even that year there were five between RB20 and RB30, all of whom got there as pass catchers — but they don’t tend to have true elite weekly potential and drafting a bunch of them on the same roster can keep you from scouring the waiver wire and trying to find a potential star. Anyway, Shawn’s team with the great Blair Andrews of RotoViz made the overall finals in the FFPC Main Event and finished top 40. Obviously McKissic and Hines were very good last year, but the obvious subtext is they smashed at every other lineup spot. That’s the whole goal, and it’s easy to focus so much on the RBs you’re missing what you’re gaining by going heavy at WR. If Shawn and Blair can finish that high in the Main Event with those RBs, you can win your 12-team league by being so far ahead at WR, flex, QB, and TE that you may only need 10 points from each RB you start.

Other formats

Hopefully that higher-level look helps understand how to adjust in all these other formats that get mentioned.

• In smaller league sizes, WR is a bit deeper, so you have some more room for detours. In deeper leagues like 14 teams, you have less room.

• In smaller starting lineups like when you can only start two WRs plus a flex or three WRs with no flex, you have more room for detours but still want adequate early WR depth.

• In SuperFlex or formats where you start more players, the advantage you can build at the other positions is greater because there are more starting lineup spots you can dominate. Zero RB works better in deeper formats. In SuperFlex, I’m far more likely to go full Zero RB and hammer QB earlier. In leagues where I can start up to 5 WRs or more, I’m also more likely to really hammer that early WR depth, and I probably try to get eight good WRs in that format because it gets trickier to rely on that fifth option so the alternatives are even more important.

• In 0.5 PPR or especially in standard, scoring starts to tilt further toward RBs, and some of the non-pass-catchers become a lot more viable, such that I’m willing to take more gambles on RB earlier. But I’m still not going to just hammer the position with massive bust rates. If I ever play standard, I tend to be more likely to start RB-RB with a couple shots at that legendary upside and just take the WR value in the dead zone area. If I don’t start RB-RB, I’m more likely to detour to those dead zone types that have upside profiles.

• In (PPR) auctions, I don’t allocate a lot of budget to RBs. Maybe once in awhile I’ll shoot for a Christian McCaffrey and try to build around that, but typically I’m shooting to get even stronger WR depth and an even stronger TE and/or QB advantage than I can in a snake draft. You can really hammer those other positions, and you can still find pretty good values at RB if you play your cards right where you might get like a Trey Sermon upside bet as your RB1, something you can’t typically do when you need to build adequate WR depth in those rounds in a snake draft.

I have no idea if I wrote everything I meant to about draft strategy and structure and I also think if you’ve read this far you’ve probably had the same points repeated over and over, but I hope this was helpful for like five of you. Hit me up in the comments with any additional questions; that’ll be a great way for me to realize what I missed.