Deeper Running Back Draft Sleepers for Fantasy Football (16+ Team Leagues)

June 20, 2022

Antonio Losada evaluates ADP data related to super-deep 16-plus team leagues and looks at a few players at the RB position than can ultimately become valuable sleepers in these leagues and formats.

Can you name every fantasy league you played in last season? Probably not. But can you think of their average structure? The most probable question is yes because most leagues are often comprised of eight to 12 teams with 15 roster spots each and use the now-standard PPR format of scoring. That is not always the case, though, and some fantasy GMs engage in way deeper leagues yearly in order to have a tougher challenge on their hands.

Fantasy leagues can be as large as the commish wants them to be, but for our purposes, we're going to define a deep league as one in which at least 16 teams take part. That means each draft round would consist of 16 picks and there would be 240 (15 rounds multiplied by 16 teams) players drafted overall. So for this exercise, I will be looking at players with ADP over 240 using a dataset comprised of drafts based on leagues with such structure. The data comes from PPR-format leagues, and whenever I mention stats, projections, and fantasy points, those would all be spoken of on the basis of that format.

Here is a look at a few running backs that can be considered sleepers in super deep, 16+ team leagues. Keep an eye on them and track their presence on the draft board as they can become interesting pieces down the road during the development of the 2022 season!

Deeper Running Back Draft Sleepers

Rex Burkhead, Houston Texans
ADP: 306

Last season definitely wasn't the one for good old Rex. Sure, he got the most opportunities among Texans' rushers with 154 (David Johnson logged 109) and he scored the most FPPG... only that figure read 6.5 by the end of the season in PPR leagues and that's a pretty mediocre outcome all things considered.

Burkhead finished the season outside of the top-50 rushers (he was RB52 last season) for the first time in three years--and the third time in the past four although he missed half the season that single time.

Burkhead has scored at least 101.1 PPR points in all of his seasons in New England and Houston from 2017 on barring 2018 (only eight games played). Historically and looking at rushers in the 2017-2021 span, scoring 100-to-120 PPR points over a season have yielded an RB42 finish

Given the current landscape and running back usage trends (committees, touch-sharing, small workloads), that means that even the smallest of upticks in production can foster a rusher way past that rank and into the RB3 realm.

Houston has added oft-injured Marlon Mack and rookie Dameon Pierce to the fold this offseason to battle Burkhead for reps and touches. I am a Mack believer and he's still very young, but he's played all of seven games total in the past two years while also missing two, four, and two games in his first three seasons.

Dameon Pierce could get that RB1 role with time, but he doesn't project to become a bona fide starter getting the bulk of the workload from the get-go. What I'm saying is that Burkhead should have a good chance to get enough opportunities to reach that 100+ PPR mark and all he can add to add through the season as the team 1A/1B with Mack--as long as Mack lasts, of course. All of that for the price of... nothing?

Kenyan Drake, Las Vegas Raiders
ADP: 240

It feels like Drake has been around forever. He was drafted "early" by Miami all the way back in 2016, spent three seasons with the Fins, got traded to the Cardinals, and most recently he signed with the Raiders to ball last season. And ball... he did not.

More than anything, though, that lack of production was about a reduced amount of touches and opportunities for the first time in Drake's career. He went from averaging 205 touches in the 2017-2020 span (ever-growing from 165 to 173 to 220 to 264 in 2020) to only logging 93 in 2021.

Alas, the cratering production: from 12.8 PPR points per game in 2020 to just 8.5 last year playing a clear RB2 role. That's definitely not going to change next season, or as long as Josh Jacobs stays healthy. Jacobs has been the true bellcow of the Raiders for three years and he's missed time, but not ample (three, one, and two games in his three years in the NFL). Drake, of course, is the clear secondary option in the backfield now with both rushing and pass-catching chops.

Las Vegas reduced Jacobs' workload from 306 touches to just 271 last season while Drake got fewer touches than any of the RB2 that got paired with Jacobs in 2019 and 2020. In other words: Jacobs is going down in terms of touches (reasonable to preserve his health) while Drake's usage should be increased at least a little bit to around 110-120 touches even as the RB2 of the team.

Payton Barber is out of Las Vegas and replaced by rookie Zamir White, but Drake should start the year with that RB2 role and upside for a low-end RB2/high-end RB3 finish if Jacobs misses a few games--and even without those perks.

Mark Ingram II, New Orleans Saints
ADP: 241

After seven games in Houston, the Texans traded Ingram back to his first NFL team in New Orleans. He went on a weird Baltimore detour in 2019 and 2020 (one extraordinary RB11 season, one putrid RB77 year) but he's now back in the place that saw him grow into an unstoppable backfield force.

It's a rather impressive development, though, as Ingram had three very tough seasons to kick his career off (fewer than 100 PPR points and no more than 162 touches) but then absolutely exploded into a perennial RB1.

From 2014 to 2019, Ingram scored at least 142 PPR points and averaged 11.9 at the very least. Of course, those two "low" marks belonged to his 12-game 2018 season. Other than that, Ingram averaged 16.1 FPPG and an RB10 finish in that span. Just ridiculous.

Baltimore didn't use Ingram nearly enough to help him have a terrific season in 2020 (they gave him a measly 78 touches), but Ingram bounced back a bit in 2021 in HOU/NO as an RB2 with 187 touches for 108.6 PPR points and an average of 7.8 FPPG.

Alvin Kamara is going to miss the first six games with a suspension. Beyond that, he and Ingram shared the backfield in the 2017 and 2018 seasons and Mark still got to score 17.4 and 11.9 FPPG, the former figure a career-high. While Kamara is definitely a legit threat on pass plays, Ingram could eat from the his target pie.

Ingram has scored 10 receiving touchdowns from 2016 on, and five as recently as 2019 on just 29 targets and 26 receptions. He is entering his age-33 season, so it'd make sense for the Saints to preserve him as much as possible and deploy him exclusively in high-leverage and scoring situations.

Ingram will be an RB2 at the end of the day, and thus the low ADP. But for the really low price, you will definitely be getting one of the strongest backup running backs in the NFL.

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