As we all know, having a successful or consistent running back is a core pillar of having a successful fantasy football team. Also, as we all know, having a workhorse RB that is guaranteed 20+ carries a game is a long forgotten bygone of the past. So, finding a reliable RB that you can depend on to carry you week to week is a staple that we're all desperately searching for. We're only in week 3, but by this point in the season you can start to see reliable trends emerge. For running backs, this season is certainly a weird one.

For our league, only 4 running backs were drafted in the 1st round. For comparison, in 2021 there were 6 RBs drafted in round 1, and in 2020 there were 7. Of those 4 running backs that were drafted this year, are any of them returning 1st round value? If you're like me and you own one of them, you know the answer is a resounding no. Let's take a look at the actual numbers.

What an awful chart that is. The only one returning 1st round value is Jonathan Taylor, and he's only the 8th ranked RB by fantasy points, and 31st overall! McCaffrey, Cook, and Ekeler all are dramatically underperforming their ADP. Now the conclusion you might draw from this is -- maybe it's even more vital to draft one of the early RBs in order to stave off the RB dropoff when the value of them starts to diminish. So, let's take a look at the current list of top 10 RBs and where they were drafted.

Uhhh..what? Excuse me? Does that say James Robinson is the 3rd RB by fantasy points? What happened to ETNSZN? Didn't his achillies rupture like Joe's bank account cause he lives in magical tax-free land? Okay well, he must've been drafted pretty early for that value...THE 12TH ROUND? Okay..let's see who else went in the 12th round. *checks notes* Kadarious Toney, Brian Robinson, Skyy Moore...okay.

Imagine you're like me. You drafted CPatt in the 10th round thinking, "well he did great last year, but that kind of production was an outlier. Maybe he has a few good games and then age really catches up with him. You're much better off starting a potential volume monster like Najee Harris rather than a 31 year old converted special teams player who all of a sudden figured out he could generate massive yards after contact." Well look who's 0-3. The guy who's sat CPatt for 3 weeks and he's the 4th best RB and 23rd overall.

But, just looking at the numbers removes the emotional and story driven part of the draft process and regular season. Swift was slightly injured so it allowed room for Williams to take the bulk of the running game. Herbert took over for Montgomery when he went down so his volume increased dramatically. A number of the top RBs had injury concerns so their ADP fell compared to previous years (McCaffrey, Henry, etc.). Some RBs decided to beat the shit out of people in Vegas, which I thought we all learned from previous incidents (Ray Rice, Kareem Hunt) that doing so is a bad idea, and bad for your career. But, even those top RBs drafted later are not returning close to any value of where they were drafted.

What conclusions can we actually draw from this? Honestly, it's all luck and we have no idea what we're doing. Trying to draw meaning from random occurrences of statistics is a fruitless process. Or maybe I'm just bitter cause I lost by less than 1 point because I started a receiver that got -1 and I hate this whole season already. For those of you with wins on the books, congrats. Hope your team dies in a fire. I'll be over here chugging along trying to get to 100 points every week along with Brett and Mike. Boyer don't get me started on you. If I were you I'd run this luck while I have it. Make a bunch of investments, go gambling, play some russian roulette. You've got a streak baby, ride it.

Good luck this week I guess. Power rankings tomorrow. Guess who's last. 😑