5 Players Whose Fantasy Football Stock Has Risen Since Free Agency Started

Rex Burkhead, RB, New England Patriots

It's still March, so there's no telling whether or not Rex Burkhead will slot into the LeGarrette Blount role in New England's offense next season. But I can tell you one thing: there's probably no better spot for Burkhead to show his upside than with the Patriots.

Pushed aside in Cincinnati for three years, Burkhead finally got some opportunity in 2016 with injuries to the Bengals' backfield. He turned 74 carries into 344 yards and a pair of scores and, while it's a limited sample to draw from, crushed the other Cincinnati running backs in effectiveness according to our numbers.

Burkhead dee-stroyed them in Rushing NEP per rush, but I'm less concerned about the difference considering the small sample -- a handful of big plays can skew a number like that, similar to other rate stats like yards per carry.

But when you look at Success Rate...whew, boy.

Success Rate measures the percentage of positive runs made by a running back. It's more of a binary way of looking at efficiency -- if a rush resulted in 0.01 expected points or 3.45, they count the same. They're a success.

Measuring things this way shows us consistency more than anything else. And when you combine a high Rushing NEP per rush with a high Success Rate, you get unicorn running backs.

You apparently get Rex Burkhead.

That's a plot of every 50-plus attempt running back from 2016, comparing their Rushing NEP per rush averages to their Success Rates. The only player that was better overall than Burkhead throughout the league was Mike Gillislee.

There's a lot of noise here, obviously. Burkhead hadn't seen a lot of touches in the early parts of the year, so he did most of his damage with fresh legs against exhausted defenses. Even still, his effectiveness is intriguing, especially if he ends up getting a significant workload in New England.

But that's still a big if.