Fantasy Football: What Derrick Henry's Prior Workload Actually Means for His 2021 Season

How can something that's delicious make you sick?

Unless...too much of a good thing is actually a bad thing.

Derrick Henry's workload is a giant cookie!

Just like Troy Barnes had to learn the hard way by eating a 60-inch diameter treat, sometimes you don't room with your best friend, and sometimes -- at a certain point -- volume could be detrimental to a fantasy football running back.

Sometimes.

Not always, but sometimes.

And that's why Derrick Henry's 378-carry, 31-target, 409-opportunity season for the Tennessee Titans in 2020 is something we can't simply gloss over entering 2021.

The workload was nearly unprecedented in recent seasons, and well, what happens after isn't always great. But does that really mean we should downgrade Henry in 2021?

Contextualizing Derrick Henry's 2020 Season

So, I already mentioned that Henry totaled 409 opportunities -- carries plus targets -- last season with the Titans. He played in all 16 games to do so and totaled 2,027 rushing yards with 17 rushing touchdowns (and added a meager 114 yards receiving with no touchdowns).

Since the 2000 season, there have been only 38 total instances of a running back crossing the 400-opportunity threshold. That's around 1.9 per season.

That sounds a bit wrong, though, right? We don't see multiple 400-chance backs often.

That's because we really don't anymore.

Of those 38 instances, 27 of them (71.1%) have come between the 2000 and 2006 seasons. That gives us 11 campaigns since 2007 that crossed the threshold -- around 0.8 per season.

Now, here's where things get difficult to convey.

Cookies are good, and so are mega opportunity counts in a given season. We want the outlierishly good workload. Nobody would turn down a guaranteed 400-chance season for a fantasy rusher.

It's just the consequences of too much of that good thing that we have to watch out for.

The Follow-Up Seasons From Featured Backs

I'm not breaking ground by touching upon the Curse of 370 or 400 or whatever benchmark others before me have examined. Just Google it. It's a thing and has been a thing for a long time.

But is it still true in the current NFL? Does age prevent the drop off? Let's look at some things and get our bearings.

Let's revisit that 38-season sample of 400-plus chances and remove Henry (because we don't yet know what he did the following year, and if we did somehow know that, we would probably keep that skill to ourselves).

Three of the 37 remaining rushers did not play the following season: Ricky Williams (2003), Tiki Barber (2006), and Le'Veon Bell (2017) seasons. That leaves us with 34 campaigns with a follow-up season.

Of these 34 seasons, the average position rank for the backs in their high-volume initial season worked out to be RB3 in half-PPR formats, and on a per-game basis, they averaged out to rank as the RB4. That's not surprising. You give backs a ton of work, and they're going to finish, generally, as a top-five performer.

In the follow-up seasons, the backs averaged out to be the RB18 overall and the RB11 on a per-game basis. That's worse, but it's also not always terrible, and averages really skew things in this regard.

Notably, 26 of the 34 (76.5%) followed up with at least RB24 finishes. We'd all be disappointed if Henry was merely a low-end RB2, given that his average draft position is the fourth-overall pick since July began.

So let's aim higher: 18 of the 34 (more than half) were top-12 fantasy backs the next season. Three individual RB1 seasons came after big-volume campaigns, as well.

Now, the average opportunity count for this sample did fall to 320.1 the following season. That's not as good, but it's also not bad. Only 15 backs hit that threshold (320 chances) over the past three seasons.

By no means is a 400-opportunity season absolute proof that a rusher will fall off, and we have still seen high-end output from the backs with bigger workloads.

What About His Age?

Henry's 409-opportunity season came during his age-26 season, so that's not old, but it's also not overly youthful, either, for an NFL running back.

The sample pares down to 18 backs if we look at seasons that came at 26-year-olds or older, so I scaled the sample back to 375 opportunities to get more seasons from guys at least as old as Henry, and you know what? It still ain't that bad.

Removing Henry, Barber, and Williams (who didn't play for reasons other than injury), we see that 23 of 46 backs (a nice 50.0%) to qualify finished with a top-12 season the following year in this subset. And 78.3% (or 36) were the RB24 or better.

In the following season, this group averaged 13.9 games played, and all but five played in double-digit games.

For some context, if you look at all RB24 seasons from one year and remove those who flat out didn't play a single game the next season, those productive backs averaged 13.1 games in their N+1 season.

If we remove RB1s and look at RB2s and RB3s (so the RB12 to RB36) in the initial year, those players -- after removing backs with zero games played the next season -- averaged 12.6 games the next season.

This, most of all, might be the most interesting aspect of what I'm finding.

Like, yeah, backs who stayed healthy enough to get 375-or-more chances are likely to play fewer games and get fewer touches after an outlier season with health and opportunity.

But that doesn't necessarily mean they underperform in the health column compared to their lower-volume counterparts.

Derrick Henry's 2021 Fantasy Football Projections

I'd give a blanket statement that we should expect Henry's opportunity count to dwindle, but we're now dealing with a pesky 17th game on the schedule, so who knows?

And after all, only 6 of the 34 seasons in that initial sample increased opportunities the following year, and the average drop was 100 chances.

But half of those players played all 16 games and saw an average decrease of...11 opportunities the following season.

So, yes, if Henry gets hurt, he'll disappoint, but the sample from big-workload backs has plenty of strong follow-up seasons.

The risk doesn't seem to be substantially great here, and that quells my initial and expected concerns about Henry.

Henry ranks as numberFire's RB4 in half-PPR formats entering the 2021 season. His 17-game projection totals 348 rushes and 35 targets (for 383 opportunities) as well as 1,680 rushing yards, 194 receiving yards, 15.4 rushing touchdowns, and 1.3 receiving touchdowns.