current average draft position of 37^th overall.

Looking a bit further down the list, Reuben Droughns and LeGarrette Blount aren't absolutely terrible guys to be compared with, and Ryan Torain did have 742 yards in only eight starts for the Broncos in 2010. But if I'm Montee Ball and looking at this list, I'm starting to be a bit discouraged about my breakout potential.

The Team Analytics

This is the fun one: just how much will the Broncos actually rush the ball with Wes Welker on board? Last season, the Broncos rushed the ball 481 total times, the ninth-most rushing attempts in the entire NFL. However, their 588 passing attempts were also the 10^th-most, bring the total rushing proportion to just 45.0 percent of all plays.

That's not too surprising, though, considering the Broncos were less efficient than average running the ball and more efficient than average passing the ball. The Broncos totaled -0.04 NEP per rush last season, ranking 22^nd overall in the NFL. McGahee wasn't the issue; he posted -0.01 NEP per rush while the rest of the Broncos backs brought the total down. But on the flip side, Denver averaged 0.19 NEP per pass gained in 2012, the sixth-most efficient passing game in the league. Which one they'd prefer to go with should be obvious.

With passing the greatest priority in Denver, don't expect to see whoever wins the running back competition to receive copious opportunities. It's almost like Mike Shanahan never even left as fantasy owners are tortured by Denver backs. Maybe Ball will hit 200 carries, but that's not a definite. Maybe Peyton will just pass the ball 80 percent of the time, you never really know. Not knowing scares the life out of me.

The Sanity Check

Now, let's play the elimination game. To find Ball's true top comparable players, I'm going to cut off two groups of people:

1. Players who weren't drafted between the second and fourth rounds: People who were drafted too high (hello, Mark Ingram) or low (hello, Quincy Wilson) didn't truly come into the league with the same expectations as Ball, did they?

2. Players who didn't receive 50 carries their first NFL season: Small sample sizes aren't useful in projecting how a player will truly perform.

With those players out of the way, the comparables begin to thin out. And for Ball, the results only look decent, but not spectacular, when viewing each player's rookie season.

To me, Smith and Davis are the two most interesting names on this list. Despite being mid-round picks (third for Smith and fourth for Davis), both were expected to step right in as rookies and perform right away. Both had about 35 more carries than we project for Ball, but both finished right around the 1000 yard mark. And finally, they did what the rest of Ball's comparables (with the exception of Lamar Gordon's hilariously bad low-sample size rookie campaign) did and finished right around the NFL average in expected points per rush.

The Final Projection

So with all of that out of the way, what are we expecting for Montee Ball? Not too much. Given Smith and Davis's efficiency but slightly fewer opportunities in the Denver offense, we don't see Montee Ball as this year's Alfred Morris-patented breakout rookie star. In fact, he's only the No. 24 RB and No. 63 overall player on the early version of our fantasy draft kit.

As you can see, given Denver's use of the running back in the passing game, Ball adds a little bit of value catching the ball as well. But it's still not enough to make up for an expected weaker-than-average running game for the Broncos this season as they shift towards the pass even more.

Montee Ball may be good, but he's not the 37^th best player overall like current mock drafts have made him out to be. Among running backs, we like Chris Ivory and Ryan Mathews more even though they are being drafted later. And in the fourth or fifth round, you'd be much better off going wide receiver or tight end than trying to reach for this boom-or-bust back.