Draft Analysis: Drafting WR Heavy Isn't a Fad

The landscape of fantasy football has shifted recently. Wide receivers have supplanted running backs as the position of choice when investing your high draft capital. Per Fantasy Football Calculator, just five running backs are in the top-12 in ADP for standard leagues while just 11 of the top-24 players being selected are running backs. Just back in 2013, those numbers were at 11 top-12 and 17 top-24 running backs, respectively. When looking at PPR scoring, those current numbers fall to just four backs in the top-12 and nine in the top-24. Drafting wide receivers early has just become the way, and it’s here to stay until the NFL and fantasy structure alter their current course.

As a disclaimer, there’s no way around the fact that this is going to read as a Pro-WR Heavy approach early in drafts, but it’s intended to strictly provide backbone to how and why that approach came to the forefront and why it’s not going to fade under the current umbrella of the NFL and basic fantasy formats.

Whether you want to tie that lack of current early investment into the running back position as being more strategy based –as Shawn Siegele has thrust ZeroRB to the fantasy forefront — or due to the fact that the most talented skill players at this current time in the NFL happen to be wide receivers, owners are investing less and less into the running back position. I’d like to believe it’s a blend of both of those fronts in conjunction with the current trend of increased passing dependency by NFL teams in terms of moving the football.

Passing output continues to remain on the rise and it’s had an effect within the fantasy production of the top producers yearly at the running back position. Looking back at the past 10 seasons of production from the top-24 scorers in PPR leagues; you can see the impact the reversal in dependency of distribution in fantasy scoring within the position.

*The same chart for WR production can be found here

I listed PPR here to show the impact of individual receptions themselves, but there’s also the exact same overlap in hot and cold zones in standard scoring leagues for the picture above even though the rushing statistics carry more weight than they do here. It’s important to acknowledge that 2015 was a historically bad year for running backs. As Graham Barfield has pointed out earlier, last season was abnormal year for major running back injuries, so the bottom lines in 2015 were egregiously affected here by sheer volume of missed time by stars. Even with that in context, the dark orange and red was already seeping its way into the upper left hand portion of the chart.

My biggest takeaway from above isn’t necessarily the shift to green in receiving output recently. Receptions and receiving yardage weren’t grossly out of line last season. Rather that rushing output is dwindling, largely in regards to yardage and touchdowns on the ground.  Rushing yardage is still the most important statistic in contributing to fantasy points, but the receiving game is contributing more and more yearly because those yardage numbers have dropped under the 25,000 yard mark in four of the past five seasons and three years in a row.   As Barfield illuminated in that study, ground production is shrinking for those high end backs because they are steadily losing volume in terms of rushing attempts.

Number of RB to Reach a Set Level of Usage Per Game Over the Past 10 Years

Last season, just nine different running backs averaged 15 carries or more per game, the fewest over the past decade and right at half the amount from just 10 years ago. In terms of touches per game, a 240-touch seasonal pace is still obtainable compared to the past, but players pacing themselves towards 285 and 320 plus touches has fallen considerably. Even a weekly level, players reaching those high end watermarks in an individual game have taken a serious blow over the past decade.

Number of Times a RB Reached 20 carries or 20 Touches in A Game Over the Past 10 Years

Over a full 17 week season, the average number of backs to see 20 or more carries in a game in a given week has gone from 13.3 to 7.2 and the number of backs to see 20 or more touches in a given week has dropped from 18.4 to 11.6. The long story short from the tablews above is that it’s hard to score fantasy points without the football and individual running backs are seeing less tangible and higher end usage than ever before.

Going back to the color coded table at the top, receiving touchdowns have been trending up for top fantasy backs, but it’s concerning that rushing touchdowns have been trending way down. Committees and the fact that those committees have become more specialty based than ever have contributed to the movement in both directions, but it’s alarming that high end running backs are scoring less and less on the ground while teams in the NFL are scoring more and more touchdowns overall and those ground scores aren’t naturally being carried along for the ride to any degree.  Over the past 10 seasons, look at how NFL offenses have continued to score more touchdowns and percentage of those scores that have been through the air versus the ground. 

The dependency on rushing touchdowns has dropped for five consecutive NFL seasons while scoring has significantly trended upwards over the past decade. An average NFL game in 2015 featured 4.7 total touchdowns scored between the two teams with just 1.4 of those coming from the ground.  There were 1,211 offensive touchdowns in the NFL last season, 140 more than were scored 10 seasons ago in 2006. To illustrate that jump in terms of a decade, there were just 80 more touchdowns scored in 2006 than 1996. 368 of those scores last season were on the ground (30.4 percent of all offensive touchdowns), with top-24 backs accounting for just 36.4 percent of those rushing scores. You’d figure that with touchdowns overall trending so greatly upwards that rushing scores would carried along for the ride–even if marginal–,but despite the dramatic amount of increased scores overall, there were 57 fewer rushing touchdowns last year than 10 years ago, when top-24 backs accounted for 52.9 percent of those scores on the ground.

The NFL is becoming less and less reliant on rushing to produce real points weekly. Touchdowns happen to be the lifeblood of winning and losing fantasy contests week to week, so there’s importance there.  Of course receptions produce yards and touchdowns after the fact, but going back to the opening chart, receptions all by their lonesome for top scoring running backs have held higher weight in the makeup of seasonal scoring than rushing touchdowns have in three consecutive seasons. 

These numbers should all bottom out at some point and maybe 2015 is in fact that year that we reached that floor. Flat circles and life is perceived cyclical, so everyone is now wanting to take advantage of running back costs being depressed as the zigging method this season, but is there really reason to believe that the way the current way the NFL is structured to expect individual rushing totals to recoil tremendously? I definitely can see a reason to believe there will be a uptick on last season’s totals, but will they be more in line with 2013 and 2014 or will we get a bounce back all the way back to 2012 totals on the ground? I find it harder to invest into the latter given the way touches are dispensed at the position combining with the fact that there are largely just more running backs available now than there are jobs for them in the NFL.

I agree with Barfield’s analysis that top running backs aren’t in true decay to the point they aren’t valuable in a team structuring context, but receivers are doing more than ever before as the NFL itself continues rely on production through the air. To me, that’s the biggest point of emphasis in vaulting high caliber receivers over high caliber running backs in a fantasy sense.  It’s not so much just the running back position itself, it’s that wide receivers now are just superior fantasy options on their own merit. In fact, as a whole, we’re way late to party in that context.

Last season, the top-24 WR outscored the top-24 running backs on the season by 1,552 PPR points and 368 standard points. To a man, that’s on average 65 more points per top receiver than running back for the season, or roughly four points per week in PPR leagues. In standard leagues that scales down to 15 points per receiver and nearly one full point per week. If we scale that down and only use the top-24 scorers at each position per given week to account for player fluctuation, receivers still outscored backs by 1,539 PPR points and 274 standard points.  Those numbers aren’t strictly tied to death of running backs in 2015, either. 

From a seasonal stance, 2015 is the only time over the past decade that the receivers have outscored the backs in standard formats. That may prove to be an outlier given those aforementioned injuries, but you can see that the see the gap between the two was slowly trending in this direction regardless of the RB Apocalypse of 2015.  Even with the removal of receptions, wide receivers have been trending upwards in terms of scoring, so the inclusion of counting them in scoring in conjunction with the top running backs losing that higher end volume that we highlighted, full point PPR leagues are now massively exploitable by drafting with a wide receiver heavy approach.

The final noteworthy piece of the pie is that we’ve also been better at selecting wide receivers than running backs in either format.  Here’s a look at all backs and receivers selected on average in the first three rounds over the past five years and their success rates in terms of yearly finish.

Success Rates from Players Selected Rounds 1-3 Over the Past 5 Years

While the cutoffs are arbitrary, in terms of drafting players that end up in the top-24 at their respective positions, receivers have hit near a three out of four clip while backs are near a two out of three mark. Even in standard scoring leagues, receivers hold a light advantage in terms of paying off on investment.  

Success Rates from Players Selected Rounds 4-6 Over the Past 5 Years

Looking at the same data and using rounds four through six paints a similar picture. Things get much bleaker overall across the board, but receivers in PPR leagues over that grouping have a 50 percent top-24 success rate compared to just over 40 percent for backs with a much lower rate of falling outside of flex range status. Things tighten up here in standard formats, but receivers still hold an advantage. Since this is past ADP and more receivers are now being selected in 2016 the market could correct itself to the point where running backs become a value, but any overcorrection has still yet to occur with current ADP in completely tipping into that direction.

As mentioned early on, this definitely reads as a “Zero RB” endorsement, but it’s more of a suggestion as to where to spend your premium draft capital. I’m not telling you there’s a linear path you have to take during your draft by any means. Often the best teams incorporate multiple strategies as the draft changes tone and I’m more than positive that there will be running backs who help win fantasy titles in 2016. In standard scoring leagues, there’s still plenty of viability left in the position, even with the wide receiver position narrowing that gap.  Also, as Brandon Gdula points out, it’s far more unlikely that you’ll net a tangible running back off of waivers than it’s perceived by the community.

That might read as half stepping, but you still need to draft running backs along the way and you can mix them in while still going in with a wide receiver heavy approach if you’re not willing to go all the way down the rabbit hole. Even if you have a chance to land a Le’Veon Bell or another top back you covet, you can definitely do that. You can even take backs along the way as you see fit, but I’d still endorse going with an unbalanced tilt skewed towards the receiver position, steering clear of a balanced agenda early on. Going in with a balanced approach will likely let you down at both positions as you’re at the mercy of nailing your individual player assessments on the nose as viable resources naturally thin themselves out at wide receiver, which is being heightened in 2016 drafts. 

There are definitive reasons that an early wide receiver approach is here to stay in casual leagues that haven’t altered scoring or required roster makeup, which is the bulk of fantasy football leagues out there. Wide receivers are scoring more points in a more predictable fashion than ever and the majority of leagues require you to start and roster more of them than any other position when it comes to roster composition to cover injuries, busts and byes.  When flex positions are added, those levels increase tenfold. Even with a revival at the running back position in 2016 as a group, the wide receiver position itself warrants the bulk of your top dollars.

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