How To Add An RB1 To Your Dynasty Team

In Part 2 of his series, ASL's Founder, Leonard LaPadula, explores RB success rate vs ADP and provides you his strategies for efficiently strengthening your RB position.

RC Intro: Leonard LaPadula is the founder of Advanced Sports Logic, and a long-time friend and colleague of mine. You may know his work as the creator of the DFS Optimizer (that uses FFM for number projections) or way back with the ahead-of-its-time Dynasty/Fantasy software 'The Machine' (which is planned for a comeback/redesign upgrade in the near future! Good news for 'Machine' fans!). Leonard was one of the FFM original customers back in FFM's infancy and has been with FFM for all his Dynasty/Fantasy teams for over a decade. Leonard has some unique, data-driven thoughts about how to manage his Dynasty teams and he shares them in published articles from time-to-time. He thought this report might be of interest to the FFM community, so I'm glad to post his thoughts/data here.

Introduction of the Study

This article is an analytical analysis of dynasty rookie RB draft picks, comparing average draft position (ADP) with success rate. It is the 2nd part of a four part series. The first part is How To Add A QB1 To Your Dynasty Team.

I do these analyses for myself to manage my own dynasty football team. My previous analysis destroyed a long time belief that I held that top QBs have the longest NFL longevity of the fantasy football relevant positions. I was shocked to see that generally top QBs peak in year two and decline after that. I also discovered that there seems to a successful band by ADP of QB picks in the 2.07 to 3.03 range.

Doing the similar analysis for RBs I was surprised to find the opposite of both of my findings regarding QBs. So let's dive in.

Historical ADP Information

Based on historical ADP information, this is where running backs were drafted over the last nine years:

Some notable RBs that had an ADP greater than 36 include Austin Ekeler, Aaron Jones and Tony Pollard. Besides these RBs that somehow managed to completely escape the radar of the mainstream echo-chamber, there really aren't any deep ADP steals of the decade. Perhaps the closest to this are David Johnson and Kareem Hunt, both drafted at 2.03 (15th overall). We might see some RBs with later ADPs from last year pop such as Rachaad White, Isiah Pacheco and Dameon Pierce. I drafted Tyler Allgeier in the 2nd round last year and all the signs were pointing to Allgeier taking over the RB reigns from Cordarrelle Paterson this year but with media-hyped favorite Bijan Robinson joining the Atlanta backfield those hopes are now greatly diminished.

Success Rate vs Years of Experience

The next step in my analysis is to see how the RBs drafted in the last nine years panned-out. If you read my QB analysis, you know I only valued top 12 QBs, assigning them a value of 1 if they were in the top 6, and a value of 0.5 if they ranked 7th to 12th. Since we must start two RBs in my league, I valued the top 24 RBs, accordingly:

• Ranked 1-6: 1.00
• Ranked 7-12: 0.75
• Ranked 13-18: 0.50
• Ranked 19-24: 0.25

Then I took the integral of their results by years experience and got this chart: