Actually, reader, perhaps the better reference here is my end of January ‘Tales of Two Cities’ blog, a piece where I compared tactics useful for city cycling with the various techniques used by helmet football players. In that post, I noted how wide receivers must (a) run a route and (b) catch the ball.
In The Quarterback Whisperer, former Arizona Cardinals head coach Bruce Arians does a similar task by writing out a list of ingredients for a top quarterback. For Arians, the top qualities are grit, heart, smarts, leadership ability, and throwing accuracy. The player should also have just enough athleticism to evade oncoming defenders.
The connection between these two thoughts is how it describes my strategy for drafting young players in my fantasy football league. I came to this strategy years ago when I realized I needed to come up with a way to assess players who had yet to play a significant number of games in the league. For these players, the usual statistical history I relied on for longer-tenured players did not exist. In order to figure out who had the most potential for future success, I needed to think of a way to break the position down into its simplest components and analyze potential selections using those non-statistical criteria.
The savvy helmet football fans among my readers are probably wondering at this point – well, hotshot, what about running backs? What’s the key ingredient? For me, the key is the ability to break tackles. After all, a running back’s statistical output is based on how long he keeps running. If he breaks more tackles, he’ll run for a longer time.
Footnotes / endnote / a deeper look at the running back
0. A note about being just enough…
One thing I really liked in The Quarterback Whisperer was the way Arians described the amount of athleticism a quarterback needed – just enough. I feel the concept is important to understand in order to best make sense of the thoughts I included in this post.
A short and slow wide receiver with small hands, no matter how well he runs routes or catches the ball, will probably have less value than a wide receiver who is tall, fast, and has big hands. The key with these attributes like size and speed is to have just enough. Once the minimum is reached, the ingredients I list above become more important.
0a. Other ingredients for a running back…
A tricky aspect in assessing running backs comes with the variety of styles these players have. So, in addition to tackle-breaking ability, I think an argument can be made for skills such as open-field agility, forward lean, and vision. However, not everyone with those skills succeeds in the way most running backs with tackle-breaking ability succeed. Therefore, since tackle-breaking tends to best predict who will do well as a professional, I almost always opt to pick players who can break tackles. In the context I care about – predicting the performance of unproven players for my fantasy football team – being right with the choices I make is important enough that I can stomach incorrectly dismissing a few standout players along the way.
