Should You Avoid RBs on Bad Teams? (Fantasy Football)
Introduction
In the world of fantasy football, it is a common belief that it is smart to avoid running backs on bad teams, assuming their production will suffer due to the overall poor performance of their team. However, is this truly the case, or just a widely accepted myth? This article delves into the relationship between team performance, measured by Expected Points Added (EPA), and the fantasy output of RBs. By analyzing data and challenging conventional wisdom, we aim to uncover whether RBs on struggling teams are still worth drafting.
Analysis
Diving in, my approach is simple — I am taking the rolling average (three-week span) of total weekly offensive EPA for each team, and plotting out their RB’s fantasy point totals in each corresponding week.
We see from this first plot that the results are pretty random — while there does tend to be higher upside (more positive outliers) for backs on stronger-performing offenses, there does not seem to be a significant trend in that direction.
We can test this even further by plotting out rolling offensive EPA against carries, as managers generally assume poor teams who are always trailing will hand the ball off less. Yet again, this doesn’t seem to be the case — the results are very random. Running backs on bad offenses can see just as many carries as those on talented offenses.
Expanding this even further to touches, the results stay random.
You might be thinking, what about bad defensive teams? Similar to before, are teams who are constantly trailing running the ball less frequently, thus giving RBs less opportunity to score points? Simply put, the answer is no! The results are still random when we plot defensive team EPA (still rolling average from the last three games) against RB fantasy points. While not shown, the results are consistent with carries and touches.
Going one step further, if we plot the box plots of each level of team EPA against fantasy points, we can see if there is greater upside for backs at certain levels. For defensive EPA, it doesn’t look like it — there are an equal number of outliers for RBs on teams with negative and positive EPAs, and the mean fantasy points scored stays constant at every level.
There does, however, seem to be a slight upside for backs on strong offensive teams (those with high offensive EPAs). There are more outliers for players on teams with positive EPAs, telling us there is a higher chance of an RB booming on strong teams. One interesting thing to note is that the most extreme level of poorly performing offenses has the highest average of RB fantasy points — while this is likely an anomaly since the levels preceding this one don’t show consistent results, it may tell us that great backs on terrible offenses succeed, as they are constantly being fed.
Conclusion
This myth has been busted! Running backs on bad teams can be just as successful as those on good ones. While there is certainly an argument for backs on good teams to have more upside, don’t overthink this on draft day!
Comments
What Ryan said!
Your analysis has a faulty premise. You cite expected points added (EPA) as a metric for offensive production when total yards or total points (or a mixture of the two) should have been used. Your use of EPA shows only how well offenses did relative to expectations, not how well they performed overall. For example, if the Cowboys are projected to score 42 points against the Giants and they only score 38, their EPA is negative, despite having an outstanding offensive performance overall, and probably one of the best offensive performances of the week. However, their EPA would likely show them below average, which of course is not representative of their performance. Please show this data again with a meaningful metric of offensive performance!
You are right in theory, however EPA is calculated on a play-by-play basis, which mitigates this issue. It will scale with talent/scenario accordingly.