I recently published an article about Saquon Barkley, Leonard Fournette, and what their widely disparate yards per carry (5.0 and 3.3, respectively) might mean for their 2019 fantasy prospects. As often happens, this took me down a couple of other rat-holes – including how many RBs have been drafted in the first round since 1988.
That led to this graph:
The blue diamonds show how many running backs have been taken in the first round of each draft. The blue line is the trend: obviously down. And the line understates the degree of decline: there were only 28 first round picks in 1988 vs. 32 since 2002, meaning that RBs have been an even smaller percentage of first rounders in recent years than at the beginning of this period.
But at the top if the draft, the change has been much less marked. The red triangles show the number RBs chosen of Top 10 of each draft. The red trend line is almost flat, just a very slight downward path. Elite RB talent is valued about as much as ever in the NFL; it’s the next tier of very good RBs who aren’t as highly drafted.
If you look at Top 10 RBs, 2013-2014, or more broadly, 2009 to 2014 seemed to indicate the de-valuation of elite RBs. But that wasn’t much different from the 2002-2004 period. Looked at over a long period, and especially considering the last four years, 2009-2014 appears to just be random variation. And we can’t discount the impact of the relatively poor NFL performance of the RBs drafted in the Top 10 in 2010 (C.J. Spiller) and 2012 (Trent Richardson) on teams’ draft decisions in 2013-2014. Todd Gurley (#10 in 2015) had a strong rookie year and that probably had an influence on the willingness of teams to risk high picks in 2016-2018 (Ezekiel Elliott, Fournette, Christian McCaffrey, and Barkley).
If you’ve been following Russell Clay’s articles on the site, you’ll know that he’s done some excellent work on the upcoming draft and how draft rank correlates to future NFL performance. In that last article, he observes that an “immense number of high-pedigree RB prospects that came into the NFL over the last four seasons.” That comment led me to produce this graph:
Here the blue bars represent the cumulative 1st round picks in the last four drafts: the 2018 bar says that 8 backs were taken in the 1st round of the 2015-2018 drafts. The dark blue bars highlight three key years: 1991, which was the peak year of the period; 2018, which represented a recent high; and 2012, which was the last time before 2018 that 8 or more RBs had been taken in the first rounds of the four most recent drafts. The blue trend line again shows the devaluation of very good backs from 1988 to the present (remember the 1991 bar is for drafts from 1988-1991).
Red again represents the Top 10 RBs – in this case, the four-year cumulative number of Top 10 RB picks. “Peak” Top 10 RBs came in 2001 and 2018 is a recent high, with 2008 being the last year when more projected elite RBs had entered in a four-year period. The red trend line (naturally) echoes what we saw in the first chart.
Now I’m not sure I’d say that an “immense” amount of RB talent has come into the league in the last four years, but Russell’s overall point is correct: it’s a lot more than we had grown accustomed to in the preceding years.
Unfortunately, this appears to be a down year for RBs in the draft: Russell isn’t projecting any first-rounds backs. But that doesn’t tell us much about the 2020 draft and beyond: there will still be elite RB prospects will continue to get highly drafted.
