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Rookie Running Backs

The National Football League Draft is an annual event that takes place at the end of April and was watched on ESPN by over five million viewers in 2009. Once the draft is completed, the analysis begins as to which teams won or lost the draft and which players will have the biggest impact with their new team for the upcoming season. In terms of fantasy analysis, rookie players are amongst the hardest to analyze because all we have are college statistics which are often flawed by the varying quality of opponents, the system of play or the talent surrounding the players. I was curious to find out whether rookie players were overrated or underrated by the average manager in fantasy drafts. In this article, I will compare the average draft position for rookie running backs with their ranking in fantasy points (in a points per reception scoring system) to try and determine whether or not rookie running backs are worth drafting.

For this analysis I decided to look at running backs drafted in the first four rounds of the NFL Draft since the year 2000. To be part of this analysis, the running backs had to have been drafted in at least 5% of fantasy drafts according to data from myfantasyleague.com and had to play in at least one NFL game in their rookie season. This left us with 67 rookie running backs to analyze. As mentioned in my introduction, in order to determine if rookie running backs are generally overrated or underrated, I am comparing their ranking amongst other running backs before the season (average draft position) and after the season (fantasy points). Of the 67 rookie running backs since 2000, only 22 of them performed better than their average draft position which is equal to only 32.8%. However, only 36.8% of the non-rookie running backs performed better than their average draft position since 2000. As you can see, by drafting a rookie running back, your chances to make a good pick are 4% lower than by drafting a non-rookie running back.

By looking at the data I noticed that the lowest average draft position for a running back since 2000 was 14. Moreover, it is evident that players drafted later in a fantasy draft are more likely to improve than players drafted early in drafts because they have more room to improve. For that reason, instead of comparing the rookie running backs with all non-rookie running backs, I thought it would be fairer to compare them with only the running backs that were between the 14th and 68th running backs taken in fantasy drafts. This ensured that the average of the average draft positions for both groups would be the similat. By choosing only that group of running backs, the percentage of non-rookie running backs that improved increased from the original 36.8% to 41.3%.  This means that your chances of making a good pick in your fantasy draft decrease by 8.5% when you choose a rookie running back over a non-rookie running back.