Next up in the series is a 12 team , 1QB, redraft auction with a budget of $100. A field of Pros and Readers went head-to-head to test the limits of value drafting vs over spending for juiced position groups. Who came out ahead? First up let’s review the running backs.

Our Drafters are, from Fantasy Index, Ian Allan, Andy Richardson and myself, Ben Prator. Jerry Donabedian from Rotowire was nice enough to join along with Shane Hallam from Draft Sharks. Several long time Fantasy Index subscribers joined including Chuck Anderson, and Ernie Freund who have been stalwarts in this mock draft series. Bryce Emmanuel was a top finisher in the 2024 FI Open and Don McCown, Richard Micheli and Michael Moriarty are experienced auction drafters. Rounding out the field from the Fantasy Index Discord is BreeceIndex who wisely exploited his late summer availability to mock against Industry Pros in all of our mocks.

As you might expect with a mixed field of drafters, we had a wide variety of approaches and a wide variety of outcomes. The industry vets were happy to feast on value after the amateurs blew through all their cash in the early going. Some drafters took a hybrid approach; over-paying compared to projected values but picking their spots to preserve enough bankroll to stay viable. While others went all in early to build player combinations snake drafters can only dream of; then scrambled to assemble the best team they could with their remaining cash.

Let’s look at the drafted running backs, in the order they were nominated and see what we can derive from the outcomes. In the table below, players who went at or below their Fantasy Index projected auction value are in bold, meaning every player not bolded was an overpay. Players marked with an asterisk are significantly over or under their projected value, 40% or more. I’ve also put together a stat for comparative reference, Price/Proj approximates the cost of each 10 projected points for that player. It’s not 1:1 with FI projections but should give a general idea of how the players values compare.

You can see a shift from mostly overpays to mostly values at the 73nd player off the board, Joe Mixon. Only 10 out of 32 players who went at or below their projected value are currently ranked in the top 24 running backs by Fantasy Index, and that number only jumps to 12 if you consider the top 36. In fact, only one back, Chase Brown, went for at or under his projected value and is ranked in the top 12. The immediate assumption would be that overpaying is a prerequisite for competing at the position, and the numbers bear that out at first glance, but if we break down the teams by draft style, we can start to see the strengths and weaknesses of each approach. In this mock 9 of our 12 teams fit into useful categories: Value Drafters, Hybrid Drafters and Big Spenders. The other three are outliers, I’ll discuss those at the end. This table summarizes the averages of each type of drafter:

First let’s look at our value drafters which include three of our professional analysts: Ian Allan, Jerry Donabedian and Shane Hallem. The table below shows each players cost and Price/Proj, followed by the average of all their backs, the average of their top two (Starters) and the average of the rest (Depth). At the bottom is the averages for all three teams.

With the 56th pick Shane Hallam drafted Chase Brown for $15.00 which is the most any of the value drafting managers paid for a running back. With the 73rd pick he landed a solid value on his RB2, Joe Mixon for $7.00.

Ian Allan waited longer than anyone for a back, winning James Cook with the 75th pick for $7, which is considerably less than this projected value. Two picks later he landed Alvin Kamara for the same price and nearly as good of a value. Having spent less on his two starters than Shane did for his RB1, Ian is trailing him at the position by fewer than three projected points.

Jerry Donabedian spent the least on running back of any roster, an average nearly $2 less per player than the next least expensive group. It shows up in the projections as his starters rank just 11th but James Conner is a solid RB1 for rosters that don’t prioritize the position and both RJ Harvey and Kaleb Johnson could find their way into a starting role this season.

Andy Richardson managed the best example of the hybrid approach and put together one of the better backfields in the draft. Both Kyren Williams and Bucky Irving at 32nd and 44th off the board cost him $18 which is an overpay but within 10% of projections. He balanced those reaches by adding two likely starters in Isiah Pacheco and Javonte Williams, both at nearly half their value. Andy ends up with the 3rd most projected points from his bench and the 3rd highest projection for his starters.

Chuck Anderson took a big swing to get Derrick Henry for $20 as the 35th player off the board. Compared to some of the top backs this was a relatively modest overpay and put Chuck in great position to wait for value. He didn’t win another back until Brian Robinson and Tony Pollard at 110th and 111th. He acquired both starters for less than half their projected value. The average cost per 10 projected points for this group is $0.24 which is the lowest cost in the draft

Ernie Freund took Breece Hall for $19.00 as the 4th player off the board. By the numbers this is the single biggest overpay of the draft for a player over $4, in fact Breece is the RB3 on this roster by our projections. He’s also the first player to top $1.00 per projected point. That difference of opinion aside Ernie built a solid backfield with TreVeyon Henderson and David Montgomery leading the projections and D’Andre Swift as the 4th starting back on the roster.

We have seen the average cost for a starter climb from $8.67 for the value drafters to $11.67 for the hybrid drafters and now we are in the upper echelon at $27.67 per starter in the big spender group. These are the super teams that drained more than half of the manager’s budget on a single position. Bryce Emmanuel spent $34 on Bijan Robinson as the 13th player off the board which was the highest price for any running back. It took another $21 to get Devon Achane at 31st. This gives Bryce the highest projected points from his starters, yet at $58.00 in total his backfield is significantly less expensive than the other big spenders.

Michael Moriarty dropped big money to assemble a potential super group with last year’s RB1 Saquon Barkley and the dynasty 1.01 Ashton Jeanty in the first eight players nominated. That’s 57% of his budget in the first ten minutes! Aaron Jones provides some solid depth but this backfield is not very deep. His price per 10 projected points is around $0.53, the second highest total in the draft.

Richard Micheli started with Jahmyr Gibbs for $33, more than double his projected cost. Jonathan Taylor is a great RB2 and Kenneth Walker ranks as the RB3 but there might not be that much distance between him and Tyrone Tracy by the start of the season. For $3 Tracy is a solid pick up and makes this the deepest backfield in the league, averaging 20 projected points more than the next bench.

This last group didn't really fit into the way I was analyzing backs in this writeup because, one way or another, these drafters messed up. Don McCown was called away from the draft several times so his results are shakey at best. Auto-Draft and Auctions don’t go well together. My backfield went sideways because I was price protecting low value players that got nominated early. Najee Harris, Jaydon Blue and Quinshon Judkins may all turn out to be great backs but I won them in the auction by accident and it left me reaching to find starting backs in the middle rounds. BreeceIndex had the opposite issue. He won Christian McCaffrey early on then covered his RB2 spot with a smattering of late round freebies. This isn’t to say that these rosters can’t work out, but I don’t think the approach or values are accurately described as Value Drafts, Hybrid Drafts or Big Spender Drafts. Hopefully the Wide Reciever article will shed some light on what the managers did right and how their weak backfields contributed to strengths in other position groups.