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Challenge Contests — by Justin Eleff

In 2006, Ian Allan opened the Running Backs section of our annual magazine with a four-letter abbreviation: RBBC. By now you know that it stands for Running Back By Committee. Back then, Ian agreed that it was getting to be a problem in fantasy football.

No more.

This year's Running Backs section opens as follows:

You hear a lot of talk nowadays about how more and more NFL teams are switching to a committee approach at running back. It's just too hard for one back to carry the load, so the smart strategy is to divide the work between multiple backs.

This change in the NFL landscape, the theory goes, could dramatically alter the world of fantasy football -- if the full-time running back has gone the way of the dinosaur, then it no longer makes sense to target that position in the first round.

It all sounds good, except that none of it is true. When you look at the numbers, it's actually the opposite. More and more running backs are reaching the 1,000-yard mark, and the number of 10-touchdown scorers keeps rising.

I did some editing work on this year's magazine. Running Backs was one of the sections I looked at. To be honest, I found that opening disagreeable. No doubt that was partly because I have done my share of talking about how more and more teams have gone to committees; Ian was rejecting a premise I had personally assumed to be true.

But it was more than that. The opening nagged me. I kept coming back to it, kept thinking -- like a bad detective in a worse movie -- something was just not quite right.

I saw a draft of the Running Backs section in May -- which makes three full months that I have been thinking about this, an embarrassing length of time. But gradually I've gotten to where the nagging feeling I had at first is more of a composed thought.

Over the next week -- just in time to help shape your draft, I hope -- I'm going to try to convince you that how you've been thinking about RBBC is not quite right, either. Maybe you'll read what I write and your thinking will shift. Maybe you'll go away thinking I'm a nitwit, and this exercise will only reinforce opinions you already hold.

Either way, I believe we should all be thinking about the following. I believe this will prove to be a valuable use of your time. Here we go.

* * *

If you've found this article at all -- if you've found this website -- you've already taken one more step than those of your leaguemates who'll do the minimum possible preparation for your draft. Everyone looks at the mock drafts at ESPN.com. Not everyone discovers Ian's work. So congratulations. That one step suggests that you want to win your league, not just avoid embarrassment.

So ask yourself: What would winning your league really mean?

Figuring that the typical fantasy league consists of a dozen teams, in most cases it would mean being right more times, in making more decisions, than eleven other people. That's no Herculean task -- not when at least half of the people you meet are drooling idiots -- but it's not the easiest thing in the world either. Eleven other owners make for a lot of variables. Different draft strategies and ownership styles come into play in every league. Different effort levels. Different auto-draft rankings at the different websites.

The most efficient way to beat eleven people at once is to be right about something that they all have wrong.

With that in mind, I direct your attention to the one most widely held belief in fantasy football -- the one thing that owners at all levels of commitment and preparedness can agree on:

In the first round, you take a running back.

Of course there are years when a quarterback or wide receiver looks especially likely to dominate his position and the league, and even in other years not everyone sticks to the script, but the smartest move in the first round is to take a running back. All of your leaguemates believe this. So the very most efficient way to beat them would be if they were wrong.

And this is why what Ian wrote bugged me so much: In my gut, in my 34 years on this planet, I have come to believe that most people are wrong about most things. Being a contrarian usually gets you closer to being right than going with the crowd does. I say again: At least half of the people you meet are drooling idiots. And the fact that the others don't drool doesn't necessarily mean ...

Yet here was Ian, the one fantasy analyst I trust most, the person I think is best at this job, writing that "it no longer makes sense to target that position in the first round ... except that none of it is true." Here was Ian, going with the crowd. In my gut I knew he was wrong. I just couldn't say why.

I did have an easy way to counter part of what he had written. "More and more running backs are reaching the 1,000-yard mark" -- OK, but in the last two seasons, two running backs have reached that mark precisely because their teams used a committee approach. Derrick Ward was a No. 2 back behind Brandon Jacobs in 2008; Jonathan Stewart was a No. 2 (for the most part) while DeAngelo Williams was healthy in 2009. Is it just a coincidence that only five teams in NFL history have produced two 1,000-yard running backs, but now two teams have done it in two years?

Then again, Ward and Stewart are only two guys. Ian wasn't talking about two guys when he wrote that "[i]n the last decade, running backs went over 1,000 yards 177 times. That's 36 more than either the '80s or the '90s."

If Ian was wrong, something else was wrong here. Something bigger. Something -- actually, more than one something. When it finally hit me, I realized I'd been nagged not by one thought but by two.

* * *

My first nagging thought:

RBBC is not a problem we have to contend with in the first round of any draft.

Duh. This seems obvious now, but if Ian can conflate the central concepts -- and, again, I trust Ian's analysis more than anyone else's; I rely more heavily on Fantasy Index Weekly than on any other fantasy resource -- if Ian can move directly from "if the full-time running back has gone the way of the dinosaur" to "it no longer makes sense to target that position in the first round," anyone can.

But think about this.

With very few exceptions, the true committee backfields do not sneak up on us. Heading into the 2010 season you can be absolutely certain that carries will be split in Dallas, Kansas City, New England, New Orleans, Oakland, Washington, and of course by the Giants (with Ahmad Bradshaw in Ward's old role) and Panthers. How many backs on any of those eight teams would you consider taking in the first round of a draft? Williams in Carolina, maybe?

RBBC isn't a first-round problem. It may be a problem that keeps you from taking certain players in the first round, but your top pick isn't suddenly going to fall into a timeshare. In fact, if anything, RBBC might push running backs into the first round, not out of it. Here we are in 2010, and Cedric Benson and Rashard Mendenhall are somehow very attractive players. Who saw that coming 18 months ago?

So even if Ian was right that RBBC is not a growing problem -- that it "has been with us all along," as the Running Backs section eventually concludes -- the fact is, that's largely a separate issue from whether (as the section also concludes) "there are still plenty of good running backs to target in the first and second rounds." The bigger a problem RBBC got to be, the earlier we would have to target running backs -- because fewer and fewer backs would have more than fractional jobs.

In other words, if Ian was right that our RBBC troubles have been overstated, it seems to me that he was exactly wrong to sign off on targeting running backs near the top of a draft. The more players who reach the 1,000-yard mark, and the more 10-touchdown scorers there are, the more sense it makes to wait on picking any of them.

But that was only part of what bothered me.

* * *

My second nagging thought:

What are all of these first-round running backs actually doing for the teams that take them?

Ah.

This is why you'll want to read next week, too. This is what bugged me most over the last three months -- with good reason. But to get to the bottom of it ...

Look, in order to understand how so many people in so many leagues could be wrong -- eleven-twelfths of all fantasy owners, just not you -- we're going to have to do some work. Knowing that the people you meet are idiots is not the same as proving it. In this case, proof will require that we reframe our conversation.

It may be interesting in an academic sense that there were many more 1,000-yard rushers in the '00s than in the '80s or '90s, but knowing that hardly helps you get ready for this year's draft. Look over the leaderboards from the '80s and '90s and you'll see names like Lynn Cain (9th in rushing yards, 1980) and Mark Higgs (also 9th, 1991) -- names so much less than half-remembered that they might belong to middle relief pitchers, or to Marvin Hagler's sparring partners.

So forget comparing one decade to another; one decade by itself is plenty to chew on. Remember, it was 2006 before Ian wrote his first RBBC opening to a Running Backs section. What happened at the position earlier in the '00s?

That, it turns out, is a very good question.

This under-articulated sense so many of us have that running back is a different position now than it used to be, that even as we continue to take runner after runner in first round after first round, something fundamental has changed -- this is a recent development. No one was talking about RBBC in 1999, let alone 1989. But when you compare only the last few seasons, when people have been talking about it, to the seasons just before them ...

Actually, hold that thought.

Before we get into comparisons, ask yourself exactly what we should be comparing. In this year's magazine Ian wrote that "[m]ore and more running backs are reaching the 1,000-yard mark, and the number of 10-touchdown scorers keeps rising," and concluded partly on that basis that "there are still plenty of good running backs to target in the first and second rounds." But, again, my sense of this is that as more players reach 1,000 yards and 10 touchdowns, it makes less sense to target any of them early on. You can afford to wait on what will continue to be available. The most important factor in your decision to pick a running back in the first (or second) round should not be how many good backs there are, but how good each one of them is.

That is, we ought to make a different comparison than the one Ian has suggested -- not merely counting the 1,000-yard rushers and 10-touchdown scorers, but gauging the performance of the best ones from recent seasons against the performance of the best ones from previous (but still recent) seasons.

Q: How many running backs are taken in the first round of a typical fantasy draft?

A: Again figuring that the typical league consists of a dozen teams, I'd say more than 6 but fewer than 11. We could call any number in that range our best guess and not be far wrong; I've gone with 10 for today's purposes, but I've done enough math to know that what I'm about to show you also works at 7 and 8 and 9.

Q: Whatever the number of first-round backs, is there a difference in how we might expect them to perform now as opposed to a few years ago -- not in the '80s or '90s, but in the '00s?

A: This is what you've been thinking as RBBC has become a more and more constant topic of conversation. Below are the average fantasy points earned by the top 10 running backs in each year of the last decade -- not the top 10 according to any preseason publication, but the ones who actually finished each season with the highest totals (according to Pro-Football-Reference.com, which uses the standard 1 point per 10 yards rushing or receiving and 6 points per touchdown, and also accounts for the odd passing statistics that running backs occasionally produce):

'00: 273 points

'01: 247 points

'02: 284 points

'03: 287 points

'04: 258 points

'05: 270 points

'06: 277 points

'07: 229 points

'08: 241 points

'09: 245 points

The three worst seasons of the decade -- at least for the best running backs -- were the last three. From 2000 to 2006, the top 10 fantasy backs averaged 271 points per man per year. From 2007 to 2009, they averaged 238. Maybe this is a multiyear aberration, and the position has not actually changed. Or maybe Ian was a year early when he wrote about how it was changing in 2006. Either way, this much is fact: When you owned a top 10 running back over the last three seasons, you could expect him to be about 12 percent less productive than a top 10 back from earlier in the decade.

And that's when you succeeded in finding a top 10 back in the first place.

Bear in mind that looking only at how the top 10 backs of each season performed skews our numbers significantly in the direction of justifying high draft picks. But it isn't easy to get those picks right. Again, I believe Ian is the best analyst in this business. I trust him with my own teams; through the years I've "earned" thousands of dollars by following his advice.

But his top 10 running backs in 2006 (at least as they appeared in the magazine)? In order: Larry Johnson, LaDainian Tomlinson, Shaun Alexander, Tiki Barber, Clinton Portis, Ronnie Brown, Rudi Johnson, Edgerrin James, Steven Jackson and LaMont Jordan.

How they finished among all running backs in that season's fantasy rankings (again according to Pro-Football-Reference.com): 2nd, 1st, 28th, 7th, 36th, 25th, 9th, 20th, 3rd and 55th, respectively.

Players get hurt, team circumstances change, and even the best fantasy analyst isn't perfect. Whether or not you find real meaning in the drop in production of the top running backs over the last three seasons, one thing you know for sure on draft day is that none of the preseason rankings you consult will match the year-end leaderboards.

I know this is a lot to digest. Lately I can't write a single word without writing 2,500 of them. (Except on Twitter; follow me at twitter.com/FantasyIndexJE.) So take the weekend to recover, and then come back fresh for part two.

The briefest of previews:

Remember how I wrote that the most important factor in your decision to pick a running back in the first round should not be how many good backs there are?

Eventually, that does get to be important.