Whenever I start researching a topic, I'll generally have a hypothesis existing in my head about what I think the data will say. This is something that's best to avoid as it may taint the way you view the results, but that's honestly pretty hard to do.

The pretty clear preconceived notion when researching how matchups affect quarterback fantasy output was that quarterbacks would see a significant boost when facing lesser competition. This ended up being the case if you base the analysis on numberFire's Net Expected Points (NEP), and the jump from one group to another was considerable.

That got me to thinking about the role matchups would play in running back production.