Running back SWOT analysis

Thinking about Rhamondre Stevenson this morning

Short post today (by my standards) but I’m backlogged with ideas and wanted to write this up before heading out for a golf tournament this morning. As a brief programming note for those of you following the YouTube shows, I’m tentatively planning to go live tomorrow, Sunday, probably in the morning my time so around Noon ET.

I’ve mentioned before I have a business degree, and based on how often it’s come up in my life, it seems everyone who is roughly my age and took any business class knows what a SWOT analysis is. If you’re unfamiliar, first of all congratulations for not having a corporate worldview, but also know it’s merely a way to discuss how an entity — commonly a business — exists within a market. SWOT is just an analytical framework; it stands for Strengths and Weaknesses, which are “internal” factors about the entity itself, and then Opportunities and Threats, which are outside forces.

So I could do a SWOT analysis on my business, this newsletter. I could identify the strengths and also the weaknesses of the content I provide based on feedback I’ve received and my perception of the product. I could also identify outside opportunities for growth or partnerships, as well as potential threats to my business, like better content people might be more interested in, or perhaps larger trends like if fantasy football got less popular and my audience stopped caring about this topic. Breaking all that down would give me some ideas of what types of things I should be doing to keep my business healthy in both the short and probably more notably long term.

As a quick aside, we talk about football players as stocks and there are those that argue it’s dehumanizing, which is probably fair on some level. But I would point out that power dynamics are important considerations in these types of conversations about abuse. Fantasy football players hold no actual ownership or power over players; what we’re “buying” and “selling” is a digital copy of the player, and really it’s the player’s statistics we’re buying, and there are millions of these copies and they are worthless. They give us no privilege or ownership in relation to the actual human on the other end who compiles these statistics. 

I realize fantasy football as a hobby leads to harassing on social media and similar shitty actions, but my view of that is largely that bad apples are dumbasses because they are misguided, and they would likely act similarly in some other context if fantasy football didn’t exist. I find it silly to blame a hobby for individuals lacking empathy.

Anyway, I’m going to take that potential dehumanization a step further and talk about players as businesses, essentially, so I can apply this SWOT analysis to them. And really this is most pertinent to running backs, because for pass-catchers, I wouldn’t want to imply the internal and external factors are remotely comparable. In those cases, the decisions I’ll make around whether to draft the player are far more heavily influenced by the strengths (and weaknesses) of the individual’s profile. Of course I still consider team context and scheme — the Arthur Smiths of the world do exist — but the point stands that applying the SWOT framework to a WR risks overemphasizing his unpredictable surroundings at the expense of what he can control. If you’ve been around these parts for any length of time, you know I very much want to be betting on what the WRs can control, and not placing too much emphasis on those unpredictable surroundings.

But it’s a better fit at RB, where we know the situational elements have a larger impact on success and failure. The way I’d think through this is that for WRs, the situation can elevate or pull away from what they inherently are, but I’ll still believe a player with target-earning limitations won’t be a superstar just because of a target void. He will still have his limitations, and the surroundings won’t ever be the most important element. For RBs, though, I’d argue the external stuff can in some cases actually outweigh the internal, and it becomes the focus. It makes more sense then to be considering all four SWOT elements — in conjunction with price — when trying to figure out whether to bet on a player.

I started thinking about this idea as it related to Rhamondre Stevenson, who is a tough analysis for me. Rhamondre has his strengths and also some weaknesses to his profile. His receiving was a strength from his prospect days, and he was efficient as a pass-catcher as a rookie. He’s a bigger back who can then play on all downs and potentially rack up HVTs, something we love to see. He was also an efficient runner each of his first two seasons, though his receiving efficiency dipped in Year 2. Because of his longer track record and the overall volume — 88 targets in Year 2 — I was willing to write that off. Volume absolutely matters to the efficiency discussion.

But efficiency became a bit of a weakness last year, both as a runner and for the second consecutive season as a receiver (and this time on only 51 targets, so the volume caveat was harder to apply, especially when viewing 2022 and 2023 together). And since he’s not super athletic, and was also an older prospect and is now 26, there start to be concerns. He also only got Day 3 draft capital once upon a time, and while that may feel like a nonissue now, studies show draft capital tends to follow players their whole careers. Last year, we saw a new coaching staff surprisingly phase out Dameon Pierce in Houston, viewing him as a formerly productive player who didn’t fit what they wanted to do, and I’d argue this type of surprise usage shift doesn’t seem to happen as frequently with formerly top prospects as it might for a later-round guy. Chalk up his Round 4 draft capital as another weakness.

As far as opportunities and threats, you have a whole new offense, a rookie (or veteran) QB, new young WRs, a new scheme, and all sorts of upheaval. This could be seen either way, but considering how bad the Patriots were offensively last year, the uncertainty is mostly an opportunity by my estimation. The biggest threat then is Antonio Gibson, not because Gibson is necessarily a star, but because his specific skill set — passing downs and receiving value — could really cut into one of Stevenson’s biggest strengths (the potential to consolidate receiving and HVTs as a three-down back). This is the part of the analysis I’ve been getting hung up on — I’ve not taken much Stevenson largely because of Gibson, and this belief that even if he isn’t super involved, anything he does will be pulling from some of the most valuable stuff we want Stevenson to have.

But this is where the SWOT idea is a valuable framework. The Gibson threat is not the whole story, even if I’ve been getting hung up there. We could also do a SWOT analysis for Gibson, and one of his weaknesses would have to be some form of rushing production, and how Washington essentially refused to use him as a ball-carrier late in his time there. Of course, him signing for a new team then becomes an opportunity to maybe regain some of that. 

But by comparison, Stevenson has been more relied upon, averaging over 12 rush attempts per game each of the past two seasons while Gibson was down at 4.1 last year. In fairness, Gibson’s first three seasons don’t look too dissimilar from Stevenson’s first three in terms of overall workload (Gibson actually had a few more rushing attempts and then just three fewer targets, although he played four more games).

This is the point where I’m moving beyond the SWOT analysis, but it’s a fun proof of concept of its usefulness. Using the SWOT framework gave me the foundational elements to consider — the positives and negatives, both internally and externally — which then led to me adding specific context and talking myself into a position. In this case, that position is that Gibson probably is a better play at a cheaper cost given similar skill sets and much of the same “opportunity” upside to benefit from a potentially surprisingly productive offense, should Drake Maye be a smash hit. Even if I think Stevenson has a clear lead on the early-down work, I’m not so confident the Patriots wouldn’t consider Gibson — another bigger back, and one with more athleticism than Stevenson as a strength in his SWOT ledger — as a three-down back to justify the huge gap in ADP.

The truth is I don’t love either of these bets, and this is just an example I thought was instructive enough to write up. But I do think I’ll take a little more Gibson in the future, and I’m in a slow draft right now where Stevenson is an ADP value — which got these wheels turning this morning, as I tried to force myself to formulate a firmer opinion on him — and the end result is I’m going to bypass him here to address another need in my build.

Until next time!