I’m going to be that guy today that uses an intro from last year:
If you’re new around here, you’ll see a stat called High-Value Touches or HVT quite a bit during the season in reference to RBs. Sam Hoppen does some fantastic visuals for the newsletter during the season that help us visualize and quantify HVT numbers, and we’ll continue to look at the HVT leaderboards at the end of Part 2 of Stealing Signals every Tuesday to try to identify the backup RBs worth adding.
I went on to reference a situation from 2021 where we used Team HVT in-season to repeatedly advocate stashing an RB that went on to score 36.2 PPR points in a spot start in Week 16 (Justin Jackson, who I also note — and now remember — wasn’t a popular stash that year, and I felt like I was taking crazy pills for weeks because it seemed no one else was advocating stashing him).
I emphasize that hit in 2021 because I don’t believe there was a great 2022 example, in part because the league moved away from HVTs as a whole a little bit. Shawn and I discussed this on a recent Stealing Bananas, but this trend has negatively impacted the elite scoring ranges at the RB position. And it has hit both sides of the HVT equation. Moving on with copying last year’s intro:
For anyone unaware of what HVT measures, it’s fairly simple — green zone touches plus receptions. Green zone touches refers to touches from the 10-yard line and in (whereas the red zone is the 20-yard line and in, but the value of the touches gets weaker the further away from the goal-line we move). As I wrote in the Week 1 [2021] breakdown of terms, “touchdown potential and pass-catching upside are the keys to RB upside in PPR, while rush attempts outside scoring range are far lower in fantasy value.” When we focus on HVT, we’re just counting the subset of touches that come in the passing game and near the end zone, leaving all carries outside the 10-yard line as the “low-value touches.” It’s long been common to refer to backs who don’t catch a lot of passes and get subbed out near the end zone as “between the 20s” rushers — that’s what we’re talking about here. The initial stat I researched was actually to identify the backs with these profiles to avoid, and it looked at the percentage of touches a back had that were these low-value touches. That stat was referred to as TRAP (Trivial Rush Attempt Percentage), which serves to argue that not all 20-touch backs are created equal, depending on what percentage of those 20 touches are HVTs — receptions and touches close to the goal-line.
Got it? For fantasy, HVTs good. TRAP backs not good.
My favorite way to break this down since the initial work in 2019 has pretty clearly become to look at it from the team perspective. The market tends to recognize and identify the upside of HVTs these days, at least so far as the market believes what it sees, and these are the backs that score a ton of points. But the edge that remains is in those Justin Jackson scenarios — identifying the backs that could step into highly-valuable HVT-rich situations if a starter were to go down.
But as I said, the NFL has moved away from RB HVTs on both sides of the equation, both RB receptions and RB green zone touches. Check out the per-team-game numbers over the past five seasons (controlling for the 17-game schedule but also the Bills and Bengals only playing 16 last year).
We’re talking about huge samples here obviously, so to lose a little more than 10% of the league’s HVTs since the stable rates from 2018-2020 is a pretty aggressive tax on RB ceilings. There are a variety of reasons that could explain this, but I think QB mobility is a potentially driving factor (not only does it lead to fewer checkdowns, but it has also seemingly changed the green zone touch equation, as rates of QB and also WR/TE/other rush attempts in the green zone are on the rise).
But this league-wide decrease could make the impact at the top of the HVT spectrum that much more impactful. If RB ceilings are down en masse, the players who have the ability to rack up big-time HVT numbers can be huge difference-makers. As we’ve talked about recently, we still want to see efficiency, but the question is about what the size of our payoff could be if we’re right on our bets. This is both true at the top end of fantasy rankings, and also as we consider which later-round RBs are most worth stashing.
To identify those, the key is not trying to predict injuries or the likelihood that some player might get work, which was the mistake the Kelley and Rountree fans were making. The key is a greater focus on the other side of the Expected Value equation, which is to say what the payoff could be. (EV is defined as probability of occurrence multiplied by magnitude of payoff i.e. what you get when you’re right. The market overemphasizes the probability of occurrence side of that equation in fantasy football, and especially in looking at RB stashes, by a wide margin.)
More about how to apply Team HVT
It seems in last year’s writeup I had quoted the year before, which also referenced times I’d written about this in 2019 and 2020, dating back to my CBS days, so we’re in a Ben Gretch quoting himself timeloop.
Here are those points written more cleanly, pulled from last year’s preseason piece on HVT:
I’ve written about this concept in both 2019 and 2020, but the Cliff’s Notes are this:
Team HVT is not very sticky, but many of the biggest changes year over year were fairly predictable based on personnel changes. What it’s measuring is which teams threw to their backs and used their backs near the goal line.
Team HVT is a very good indicator of high-upside RB seasons. That is obviously a self-fulfilling statement because high-upside RB seasons have a lot of HVT, and they are high-volume pieces of those offenses. But particularly when we think about backups — think Mike Davis [behind CMC in 2020], or DeAngelo Williams and James Conner behind Le’Veon Bell years ago — the offensive system can be very beneficial.
One big part of Team HVT is the quarterback. Rushing QBs tend to throw to their RBs less frequently. Some QBs have always been gold mines for RB value (we’ll miss you Drew Brees and Philip Rivers).
From 2019, a section titled “Rethinking the word committee”: “I would argue a committee — as it pertains to fantasy — shouldn't be defined by how the overall touches are split up, but how the HVT are. That means that if a back is getting plenty of touches but giving up a few key goal-line touches, he may be in more of a Fantasy committee than his touch count indicates. More specifically, if an early-down back is only conceding five or six touches a game but those are all coming on passing downs, he's in a committee. He's losing high-value touches, and that's what matters.”
Later in that section: “But we also have more of a tolerance for some players in committees than others. Alvin Kamara is a top-three pick despite not projecting to be a workhorse. Why is that? Because his offense generates an absurd amount of HVT.”
Third time’s a charm: “It's the HVT that's the key. If you are looking to draft a running back who may cede high-value touches, his offense better at least be able to generate a lot of them overall. Teams that finish high on this list can support multiple backs; teams near the bottom that may have a committee should be avoided.”
And then I dropped a link to HVT numbers for the previous five seasons, by offense, which I’ve updated to include 2021 so it now has six seasons of data. I put it in the worse format for you guys to play around with last year; this year, you should be able to go to File > Make a Copy and then sort and filter to your heart’s content.
And now I’ve created a new document to include 2022 numbers, and I’ve added some fun other columns as well (data courtesy of The RotoViz Screener).
Hopefully those notes are helpful, though. What we’re trying to determine is the players who can consolidate this work in their backfields, or the offenses where this work is plentiful and allows for multiple backs to get theirs. And it’s that latter point that I’m more focused on when I look at this from the lens of Team HVT.
2023 Team HVT Projections
One of the things I noted in the above is Team HVT isn’t particularly sticky, but I hypothesized that it could be projected decently based on things like personnel changes. Certainly, in some of the biggest shifts, it feels obvious — take Matt Ryan turning into Anthony Richardson at QB for the Colts, or Tom Brady into Baker Mayfield for the Bucs, as examples of how RB receiving should be expected to get knocked.
But what I’ve never really done is tried to project this, which I know you guys have asked for before. After being asked again this year and giving it some thought, I figured it would be pretty well baked into my team projections, in that I could just take the projected RB receptions and then also a generic rate of leaguewide green zone rushes per rushing TD, and use my rushing TD projections to predict a loose green zone rush attempt figure (I used total rushing TDs, not just green zone rush TDs, figuring the rate of explosive rush TDs would likely balance somewhat, and for the 2022 season that came to 2.7 RB green zone rushes per total RB rush TD).
So I did that, and I added that to the doc I just linked and will link again here. To be clear, this is pulled directly from my projections which are a month or so old, with no changes. I don’t stand by these projections; I’m just sharing them as a potential reference point. There’s going to be a heavy dose of QB mobility influence on the reception side, and then — because my TD totals are influenced by the betting market’s team scoring projections — a heavy dose of market deference on the TD potential side (but again, the projected RB touchdowns are going to be impacted by the QB’s rush TD rate — *cough* Eagles *cough* — and also the pass TD rate).
Anyway, my top five and bottom five projected offenses for RB HVTs come out to be:
Lions
Chargers
49ers
Patriots
Bengals
…
Eagles
Bears
Rams
Colts
Ravens
First thoughts there are the top teams make sense — they mostly mirror last year’s top five, with San Francisco being the big riser, but we’re projecting a full year of Christian McCaffrey to have a very positive impact on the Team HVT element (I haven’t really hit on it specifically today yet, but definitely in past seasons, but yes, absolutely the specific RBs influence the Team HVT numbers).
On the bottom five teams, I would say my Ravens projection feels a little off, especially with how extremely low I projected their RB receiving, but then I look at last year’s data and they were easily last in RB HVTs per game. The offense could look different enough to change that this year, though.
2023 takeaways
This can be more of an art than a science, and I want to hit on some teams that I think are especially notable, even if they don’t show it in the projections. Over the years I’ve done this, I’ve tended to have a really strong hit rate on these team observations. It’s actually been really shocking even to me, and it’s why I continue to go through the process this way.
That trend continued in 2022, where this is the one analysis where I might have gotten myself on Josh Jacobs. Yep, in my team bullets last year, I talked about how the Raiders could be on the rise in this stat, specifically saying there could be “more value in Las Vegas than I have been accounting for,” before then saying “the way I like to play this is through Ameer Abdullah cheaply on the belief he really could have something of a James White-type season” in that Josh McDaniels offense, which is just hilarious in retrospect.
Basically all of the other notes were also accurate on the team level, including predicting the Bucs, Chargers, and Patriots among the league leaders, and then some nuanced looks at New Orleans, Atlanta, Indianapolis, and Arizona. I’m actually just checking this now, as I’m this far down into the post, and it’s once again shocking to me how consistently actionable this line of analysis has been.
Here are the ways I considered Team HVT while setting the 2023 rankings: