EBF
Footballguy
Any 1k season is valuable, but your odds of getting one from a late round player are very low. I went back and tallied the numbers for every draft class between 1998-2010. I chose 2010 as the cutoff date because relatively few players drafted before then are still compiling 1k seasons (Peterson, Forte, Stewart, Mathews, Forsett, and handful still have a chance to add to their totals). I tried to cut out fullbacks, pure return men, defensive players, and other players listed on drafthistory who might skew the data. Here are the numbers I came up with:So while what you are saying is true, the actual number of top 12 seasons one should expect based on historical data (using the best of the best) is only two seasons. So it isn't realistic to expect any RB to do much more than that.
% of RBs with at least one 1k+ rushing season by round:
First Round - 73.2%
Second Round - 39.3%
Third Round - 32.3%
Fourth Round - 10.8%
Fifth Round - 5.0%
Sixth Round - 10.5%
Seventh Round - 10.8%
1k rushing yards isn't the perfect gauge of a "good" FF season, but in general I think it works as an approximation. It does cut out a few pretty good players (Sproles, Marion Barber III), which may be why the 4th round looks lighter than the 5th-7th rounds, which shouldn't be the case. The general pattern is clear though: your odds of getting even one good season from a back are roughly 70% for a first round NFL draft pick, 30-40% for a 2nd-3rd round NFL draft pick, and 10% for the remaining rounds. The hit rate for the 5th-7th rounds is actually higher than I would have guessed. 10% isn't that bad.
But...that's just one good season. When you start to look for sustained success, you get the following results:
% of RBs with multiple 1k+ rushing seasons by round:
First Round - 51.2%
Second Round - 25.0%
Third Round - 19.4%
Fourth Round - 8.2%
Fifth Round - 5.0%
Sixth Round - 5.3%
Seventh Round - 2.7%
Here we see a similar pattern at the top. First round RBs are worth almost twice second round RBs, with third round lagging only slightly behind the second. There's another significant % drop to the 4th-7th round RBs, who are all single-digit percentage plays to have multiple 1k seasons. These numbers suggest that the average RB picked in the first round has a 1 in 2 chance of yielding multiple 1k seasons, whereas the average RB picked in the 5th-7th round has about a 1 in 20 chance.
This does a pretty good job of telling us how likely you are to get sustained success, but even two seasons of 1k production doesn't necessarily qualify as a great career. Players like Domanick Davis and Shonn Greene meet that mark even though I wouldn't consider them to have been great FF assets. If you become even more selective and look at players who had at least four 1k rushing seasons, you get these results:
% of RBs with at least four 1k+ rushing seasons by round:
First Round - 31.7%
Second Round - 14.3%
Third Round - 9.7%
Fourth Round - 0%
Fifth Round - 0%
Sixth Round - 0%
Seventh Round - 0%
These results are really interesting because the hit rate on 4th-7th round picks drops to zero while the hit rate on first round picks remains almost as high as the "one good season" hit rate for 2nd-3rd round picks. These results illustrate that it's nearly impossible to find a true long-term star RB outside the first three rounds. Most of the productive players beyond that range do not have any real staying power, but are instead guys who have 1-3 years of utility. I think this can be explained by things I've said previously about talent level and competition. "Successful" 4th-7th round RBs tend not to be as talented as successful 1st-3rd round RBs, and are less likely to fend off challengers in the long-term. Having said that, Michael Turner likely could have had 4+ 1k seasons if not for depth chart problems in San Diego and both Arian Foster and Priest Holmes (two UDFAs) would qualify.
Lastly, here is the "average 1k seasons" per pick per round info:
Average Career 1k Rushing Seasons by Round
First Round - 2.57
Second Round - 1.11
Third Round - 0.94
Fourth Round - 0.22
Fifth Round - 0.15
Sixth Round - 0.16
Seventh Round - 0.14
If you put any stock in these numbers, this means that we can expect the average first round RB like Zeke Elliott to yield 2.57 good seasons. A fifth round back like Paul Perkins, Jordan Howard, DeAndre Washington, or Wendell Smallwood could be expected to yield 0.15 good seasons. On average, you would need about 17 backs like Perkins and Howard to match the career value of one Elliott.
Recent seasons have seen a handful of day three/UDFA backs break the 1k rushing barrier (D Freeman, L Miller, C Ivory, L Murray, A Morris, B Green-Ellis). Some people are going to point towards this as justification for reaching on backs like Perkins, Dixon, and Howard. There's probably a viable argument that the NFL has devalued the RB position in recent years and that this will result in more viable backs falling further than they would've 20 years ago, but I think that this trend has been overstated and can be partially explained by random statistical variance in the supply of backs available. IMO the last five years of RB drafts have been a bit short on obvious elite talent compared with the drafts of the early 2000s. I still don't think the league lets great backs slide very far, and I believe that the day three successes I just mentioned earlier in this paragraph generally fit the "useful for a short time" mold and not the "great career" mold. We've already seen the most accomplished player of this group (Morris) relegated to a likely backup role in the prime of his career.
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