Fantasy Football: Don't Worry About RBBCs

First off, you may have read a few articles here on Bleacher Report that say running backs are not the key to success in fantasy football, due to the increase in Running Back By Committees (RBBCs).

They're wrong.

In order to debunk this myth, I took a look at the leading rusher for each team from 2002 through 2007. The results are in the following table:

You can see that there is no clear trend to the amount of carries for the leading rusher on each team. (That number even went up from '05-'06, when experts were still proclaiming the RBBC as a fantasy owner's worst nightmare.)

I'm not here to state that there is no such thing as a RBBC; instead, I am here to denounce the "harsh effects" of the RBBC for fantasy football purposes.

I computed with pencil and paper (with Excel, actually, but you don't have to know that) the total amount of rushing yards and carries in the NFL from 2002 through 2007 to find the average yards per carry. There were 85,847 carries and 353,945 rushing yards in that time, good for a 4.12 YPC.

Why is that relevant?

Take a look at the carries table again. Let's venture out and say the 234 from 2007 drops 10-15 carries to about 220 carries for the leading rusher of each team.

With the average YPC per player already found, we can estimate that the 10-15 carries will produce about 40-60 less yards per leading rusher for each team—and that's only four-to-six fantasy points over the course of a 16-week season!

(Quick side note: By losing those 10-15 carries, there won't be a touchdown lost, as the highest carry-to-TD ratio among the top-10 rushing TD leaders last year was 18.5, by Maurice Jones-Drew.)

And if for some unknown reason the carries drop by 30, as it did from 2006 to 2007, that's only about 123 yards lost for each runner—which equates to 12 fantasy points over the course of a season, or 0.75 less fantasy points-per-game.

Now keep in mind, while the carries for the leading rusher for each team decreases, the amount of carries for the other rushers should increase. So we have the leading rushers losing about four-to-six points on the season, and then the players those rushers are splitting time with gaining points on the season.

All the reason that running backs don't lose value due to RBBCs. Take a running back with pride in your first two rounds, and reap the benefit while everyone else is taking WRs or QBs in that same time.

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