RADIO
Did your parents ever ask you, "If all your friends jumped off a cliff, does that mean you would too?" Well, that is how fantasy football mostly works when it comes to drafting your team yearly. There is something called ADP (Average Draft Position) that is nothing more than just an aggregated mark that lets us know where a player is being drafted on average. Oh, and although most folks take it as gospel and follow the crowd like lemmings, you shouldn't do so.
While ADP is very informative and can help you be informed about where you should start worrying about potentially missing out on a player, it shouldn't affect your decisions massively. Take Josh Allen's 2021 season: 402.6 fantasy points to lead the whole NFL and the current holder of a 34 ADP that is seeing him drafted inside the first three rounds of drafts these days and as the clear-cut no. 1 QB. Does that mean you should absolutely trust Allen having another monster year that when all is said and done gives you a good return on investment after paying a second-round pick for him? Nope! In fact, the most logical thing to happen is Allen regressing and finishing with more average-ish fantasy numbers in 2022.
In this four-entry series, I'll go through the four offensive positions of fantasy football, highlighting names that are going cheap in early drafts and evaluating how they are expected to produce similar numbers to other much more-hyped players.
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Identifying Undervalued RBs for Fantasy Football
I'm not going to play games in this column and bring middling names to the table. Instead, I'll be swinging for the fences and swinging the bat full force to get some fantasy-heavy names here and there. No second-tier players here.
There are 35 players with an ADP under 36 (PPR format) at the time of this writing, and 17 of them (almost 50%) are running backs. Injuries sustained last season are keeping Christian McCaffrey (ADP 2.5) from having the highest ADP above Jonathan Taylor's 1.2, but it's understandable those are giving a little bit of pause to fantasy GMs out there. Draft CMC first or second overall, though, and I'll congratulate you. Draft him third (somehow) and you'd become a fantasy God. Other than the Panther and the Colt, though, things start to become harder to assess when it comes to price and actual value.
In PPR leagues, four other rushers are going off the board in the first round: Austin Ekeler, Najee Harris, Derrick Henry, and Dalvin Cook. There is an almost-even split in terms of where RBs are getting drafted in the first three rounds, with six inside the first, six more in the second, and five in the third.
Here is what I'm looking for when trying to identify comps for those top-ADP rushers at lower spots. If we build some sort of "combined profile" of them, we can land at something close to:
- At least 12 FPPG
- Ideally 150+ PPR on the season
- Ideally 95+ fantasy points on pure rushing stats
- Ideally 80+ fantasy points on pure receiving stats
Identifying Running Back Bargains with RD4+ ADP
After applying those filters and thresholds to the projections data, this is what I was left with.
The players going at cheaper prices/later spots are those to the right of the plot. As you see, almost all of them (with the great exception of Cordarrelle Patterson) racked up fewer points than those bunched to the left, but the differences are not staggering while the price you'll be paying for them is definitely going to be much lower. In fact, there is an ADP gap of almost 30 spots (nearly three full rounds) between Patterson and second-cheapest (among those depicted) Antonio Gibson, and one of three legitimately full rounds between Patterson and new Jacobs.
Let's go through the identified players, highlighting their value for the 2022 season.
David Montgomery, Chicago Bears (ADP 46.2)
Montgomery is pretty much going to have a similar workload as he did last year as he didn't have any sort of competition in 2021 and he won't have it next year (Khalil Herbert and Darrynton Evans project 100 combined opportunities in PFF's last run of projections compared to Montgomery's 273 all by himself).
The Bears rusher is getting drafted as the RB20 off the board while having a positive ROI right now projected to an RB17 finish by PFF. There is an upside for a little bit more as PFF only has a projection of one receiving touchdown and seven rushing ones while having him projected to a massive workload of 226 carries (the TD rate would be just 3.1%) and 47 targets (TD% of 2.1%).
Any sort of improvement (and I'm talking one or two more touchdowns, nothing crazy) on those projections would have DM hitting a high-end RB2 finish with upside to entering the RB1 realm. You have to like the fact that he's also going to operate in an offense that, while lacking elite players on the receiving corps, has a capable rushing quarterback in second-year man Justin Fields, which should also boost Montgomery's numbers a bit by keeping defenses guessing on some plays.
Montgomery averaged the 12th-most FPPG among rushers with 13+ games last season. Honestly, if you can grab this guy at a 45+ pick price, you should smash that button without hesitation because you'd be paying half the price his upside carries.
Josh Jacobs, Las Vegas Raiders (ADP 56.5)
Is there any doubt Jacobs is a bona fide steal these days? He's getting drafted outside of the top-55 draft picks (RB22) while he projects for a top-85 finish (or RB19, if you prefer) overall next year, judging by PFF's latest projections. Now, you explain that to me. Jacobs has very capable teammates around him that won't hesitate in removing him from the RB1 role (Kenyan Drake, rookie Zamir White) but he's still the go-to rusher of the Raiders and projects to 198 PPR points next season as PFF sees him.
Jacobs has been able to string three consecutive seasons of top-21 production among rushers in the NFL since he got drafted in 2019. He's averaged 14.7, 15.4, and 15.1 PPR points per game since he entered the league, so you see how steady he's been every single year he's been doing it in Oakland and Las Vegas.
Jacobs has never carried the ball fewer than 217 times and that only happened last year after he played in 15 of the 17 possible games... something he made up for by posting up a career-high 64 targets on pass plays. Uh oh, flex on the devil.
While Jacobs is a one-dimensional running back who finds his mojo on the ground way more than on the air, he's slowly but surely getting there on the latter front. The Raiders are trusting him more and more on a yearly basis (from 27 to 45 to 64 targets) and he's giving back to them with increasingly large receiving yardage (166 to 238 to 348), only lacking touchdown scoring on pass plays.
Antonio Gibson, Washington Commanders (ADP 61.4)
Gibson clearly hit the NFL running a couple of years ago as even though he "only" started 10 games of the 14 he played as a rookie he still was good to put up the 13th-most PPR points among rushers in the 2020 season. He improved on that tally a bit last year with a way bulkier workload that helped him finish RB10 in 2021. It was Gibson's breakout year at age 23 after getting 258 carries and 52 targets for a combined 1,331 yards and 10 total TDs putting together the rushing (seven) and the receiving (three) he got.
Of course, Gibson might have already shown his ceiling after having back-to-back 14.4 and 14.3 FPPG averages in PPR leagues and just a 27 PPR point improvement between his first and second years in the league even though he got nearly 100 more touches in his sophomore season.
That said, even if Gibson doesn't improve just one bit in 2022 but manages to keep his prior production up, he'd still be a fantastic pick at an ADP as low as 61+ as it is nowadays. History says that only 21 running backs with an ADP of 60+ went on to score 200+ PPR points in the past five years, and only four (Damien Harris, Leonard Fournette, James Conner, and Cordarrelle Patterson) did so last year. Count Gibson as one of the future members of the 2022 such class if his ADP doesn't rise a bunch in the next few days ahead of the Week 1 of the regular season.
Cordarrelle Patterson, Atlanta Falcons (ADP 92.4)
Patterson, aka The GOAT Returner, turned into a bonafide RB/WR hybrid for the Falcons last season in a very coming-out-of-left-field way. After an eight-year NFL career that saw Patt play for four teams before landing in the ATL, the best CP has done was scoring 161.7 PPR points... as a rookie!
After that, nothing. Then, 2021 arrived, and with it Patterson's first 30-year campaign and quite a nice welcome to his third decade on earth! Patterson almost tripled his prior-high in touches with 205 and closed the season as the RB9 and the 45th-best player overall.
Nothing surprising in finding his ADP as low as 310 by this time last year considering his putrid past. That shouldn't hold any longer after we saw him doing it in Atlanta... but his current 92+ ADP is definitely not that expensive at the end of the day, all things considered. It's true that the Falcons suck, and that defenses might actually be able to just focus on and shut CP down with no threats at any other position (except TE).
Also, the Falcons might enter full-rebuild mode if they think that they are really going to do nothing by trying to push for a postseason berth this year, thus cutting CP's usage short not to hurt their chances at a high draft pick and so on.
Patterson is definitely a risky play and surely one that doesn't quite fit the mold. Even then, it makes zero sense to find CP getting drafted with an ADP of RB32 when his projection (and most platforms agree, mind you) is that of the RB20, if not higher. You might give Patterson a bit of pause if you're not part of a PPR-format league. If you happen to manage a fantasy team in that format, though, you'd better be rushing (no pun intended) to land Patterson with a draft pick before it's too late.
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