What are people doing about the 'running back by committee' trend?

Question

more and more teams seem to be giving two running backs an almost equal number of carries per game. how are fantasy football players responding to this?

Answer 1

Hi travis,

The best way to avoid the RBBC problem is by drafting RB who do not share many carries with other players (those not involved in a committe situation).  Unfortunately, many teams in the NFL today are finding that the RBBC approach is very effective for several reasons:

1.  You don't have to pay one player big money to be the starter, you can just rotate in serviceable RBs and do just fine. (money management)

2.  If one of the RBs gets injured, you have another one with plenty of game experience to handle the load (risk management)

3.  It can be very effective to have fresh legs in the 4th quarter.  Instead of having your workhorse sucking wind, you have two guys that are relatively fresh because they're only handling half of the overall workload.

Because of these factors, more and more teams are moving toward RBBC.  Unfortunately drafting 2 RB on the same team who are in a RBBC makes no sense because no matter who you start, they're only going to get half of the carries.  You wouldn't want to start both because you're limiting yourself to the production of a single team.  What to do?

Unfortunately, for fantasy owners, the only answer is to try to draft 2 RB where neither is in a RBBC; this is possible if you've done your research.  If you have to draft a RB in a RBBC, try to draft the player who is younger and less injury prone (MJD as opposed to Fred Taylor) because you're increasing your odds of success should one of the RBs go down because of injury.  As I said I would NEVER draft 2 RBs on the same team who are in a RBBC, that is a waste.

On my website I'm about to incorporate the 'RBBC' tag into my cheat sheet creation tool for RBs.  This way you can tag a player as 'RBBC' and be able to easily identify him on your cheat sheet while drafting.  If you want to check out my site, click on the link in my source list.  You can create your own player rankings using drag and drop, then generate a printable cheat sheet to take to your fantasy draft.  It's free.