Apologies for the delay, meant to get these Tiers pieces out in quick succession, but I got sidetracked yesterday when I got to the RB Dead Zone in the below tiers. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said in his phenomenal oration, American Scholar, while discussing reading:
“Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments. Books are for the scholar’s idle times. When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men’s transcripts of their readings.”
I’m not particularly religious, but I’ll be damned if this passage doesn’t get me. In this case, I decided the hour was too precious to not get to work on a massive RB post, which I subsequently also didn’t finish, but I’ll get out in the coming days. I pivoted back to Tiers to finish this up today.
I talked in Friday’s TE Targets and Fades about how I’ll group these tiers a couple of different ways.
If I think a tier break is pretty minor, I’ll use a 1a/1b type of nomenclature.
The bigger element is when there is a cliff at the position. There’s perhaps no more important position to discuss this element than at RB, as we look to where the potentially elite names run out and the Dead Zone begins. In those instances, I’ll use this:
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 ADP, but ADP varies wildly — especially on some of the sites where home leagues are often played — so know that in a lot of cases I would probably adjust the fades down if their ADPs are lower on your site and the targets up if they are higher. In other words, it’s OK to be higher on the targets than my rankings, and it’s perfectly fine to pass on a fade if he’s the best available in my rankings at a point in your draft.
If you’re looking for more reasoning on a player, I likely discussed them in the Offseason Stealing Signals pieces you can find in the full archive at bengretch.substack.com. I also want to real quick note I’m sorry if I’ve missed your comment lately; I’m getting a ton of them and trying to get a ton of work out as well. But in a lot of cases they are either keeper questions (often take a bit more time to digest than I have time for), something else that’s pretty long, or something I wrote about recently, which I’d love to be able to point everyone in the right direction, but again, time constraints.
But I wanted to note that for at least the Substack questions, any of you guys who are very engaged with a lot of what I’m writing, I’d absolutely encourage and appreciate if you don’t mind pointing people in the right direction if you see comments that have already been discussed somewhere else. I’ve seen that a few times where a commenter points someone asking a question to a post where I’ve written about it, and it’s always so awesome to see, and I’m sure really appreciated on their end as well as on mine.
Tier 1
1. Christian McCaffrey
2. Jonathan Taylor
I’ve written a ton about these guys. They are in their own tier, I have them very close relative to one another, but I believe the idea McCaffrey is unique and a Marshall Faulk type we should just not question where his whole range is higher than any other player’s. There’s also more risk with him, and Taylor is the younger, safer elite talent, though the discussions of Taylor getting less work are very mildly concerning (only mildly, because teams can talk that talk but it’s hard to walk the walk when the player is as good as Taylor).
Tier 2
3. Austin Ekeler
4. Saquon Barkley
5. D’Andre Swift
6. Dalvin Cook
7. Derrick Henry
Ekeler, Cook, and Henry are fine to get some exposure to, but they are among a big group of over-26 RBs that dot the first two rounds, and it’s been a while since we’ve seen higher rates of elite 27- or 28-year-old RBs. Some of that is just generational stuff, where it will likely ebb and flow a bit as there are only a few possibilities each season to be the next great older RB. These guys have profiles that make them worth mixing in, in my estimation, but I’m not thrilled about it.
Barkley and Swift are far more exciting. Barkley just turned 25, but has limited wear and tear at the NFL level, while Swift is obviously a youngster. Both have the types of profiles — most notably strong receiving production and explosiveness, with a reason to believe they’ll get goal-line work — that make them solid bets for elite RB scoring.