How Well Did High-Ownership Players Perform for Daily Fantasy Football in 2016?
Running Backs
Outside of kickers, no position hit its baseline value more often than running backs. That's good to begin with. When we dig deeper, things start to look even more favorable.
Here's the same chart from the quarterbacks except with running backs. Again, the over/under, implied team total, and salary are all tailored around the averages among the popular plays at the position so as to get a relatively even distribution on each side.
| Bust Rates by Classification | Percentage |
|---|---|
| Home | 26.67% |
| Road | 60.00% |
| Favored | 45.71% |
| Underdogs | 26.67% |
| Over/Under of 46 or Higher | 40.43% |
| Over/Under Below 46 | 44.74% |
| Implied Team Total of 25 or Higher | 36.36% |
| Implied Team Total Below 25 | 47.62% |
| Salary of $7,800 or Higher | 37.78% |
| Salary Below $7,800 | 47.50% |
Don't. Use. Road. Running backs. Got it?
Of the 45 popular running backs at home, only 12 failed to hit baseline value. It was 24 of 40 when they were on the road. You probably don't want to use running backs on the road too often to begin with, but that's especially true if they're projected to be popular.
That takeaway isn't super surprising, but the results of underdog running backs was. You'd assume those who were favored -- thus allowing the team to stick with the ground attack throughout the game -- would be the preferable option. That's not how the chart breaks down, though we do have similar issues as what we saw at quarterback.
There were just 15 running backs who were underdogs out of the 85 total popular options. Four of those 15 were either David Johnson or Le'Veon Bell, both of whom are complete freaks and heavily involved in the passing game. They hit their baseline value each time. We were dealing with a small sample before, and we likely shouldn't be drawing conclusions from the outliers at a position, which is exactly what Johnson and Bell are.
Things conform a bit more to expectation if we look just at teams that were favored by five or more points. Here, there were 29 total chalky running backs, and 11 of them (37.93%) go down as busts. Spread is still a good tool for running backs, and this information shouldn't dissuade us from considering it.
The chart does seem to indicate that we need to pay attention to implied team totals. As you can see above, players with an implied team total above 25 busted just 36.36% of the time. If we get a guy who's at home with an implied team total of 25 or higher, then we're actually finding a bit of safety among these high-owned backs. In fact, there were 28 backs who met these criteria, and only seven wound up busting.
Perhaps the most interesting implication here is that low-cost backs don't provide any additional safety. In fact, they busted on the regular. This should provide us the comfort to fade a low-priced running back jumping into a larger role if the other conditions aren't right. The increased volume is great, but we shouldn't toss all process aside to snag it.
Overall, running backs are likely the safest position of all to target with projected high ownership. That said, there are still times when we can fade them, and we should be inclined to do so when they're on the road. We don't need to be overly aggressive in fading low-cost backs, but we also need to keep in mind that their bust rates are higher, furthering the incentive to look elsewhere.
