When Should You Draft a Fantasy Running Back v. Quarterback? Follow-up Quantitative Analysis.

Yesterday, I posted a basic analysis regarding the benefits of drafting QB’s in certain rounds. Available here:

When Should You Draft a Fantasy Quarterback? A Simple Quantitative Analysis

A similar analysis on RB’s helps to reiterate the value of drafting RB’s high and waiting on QB’s. In this analysis, I determined the per game fantasy scoring of 23 RB’s from last year. I then found the average scoring of running backs taken in the early, middle and later rounds of current drafts. To have a sensible data set, I had to somewhat arbitrarily narrow the list down to RB’s that are in somewhat similar situations to last year.

Here are the results:

Rounds	Players	Avg. FP/G
Rounds 1-2	Arian Foster, Adrian Peterson, Jamaal Charles, Chris Johnson, Rashard Mendenhall, Michael Turner, Ray Rice, Darren McFadden, LeSean McCoy, Maurice Jones-Drew, Frank Gore	15.0
Rounds 3-6	Peyton Hillis, Matt Forte, Steven Jackson, Ahmad Bradshaw, LeGarrette Blount	12.0
Rounds 7-11	BenJarvus Green-Ellis, Cedric Benson, Knowshon Moreno, Fred Jackson, Jahvid Best, Brandon Jacobs, Michael Bush	9.3

As you can see, there really is a significant drop-off for RB’s based on round selected. The drop-off from top to bottom is much larger for RB’s (5.3 points) than for QB’s (3.12 points). On a percentage basis, the gap is even worse. A late round RB only scores 64% of what an early round RB scores, while a late round QB scores 84% of an early QB’s tally on average.

Statistics from www.pro-football-reference.com.

When Should You Draft a Fantasy Football Kicker? Which Kicker Should You Draft? The Numbers Don’t Lie