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Chris Meaney
During the NFL season, we’re going to break down how different offenses are utilizing their running backs. As the year goes on, patterns begin to emerge that will allow us to anticipate and exploit mismatches between a defense and an offense that we’re targeting in fantasy football.
Bird’s eye view
Red is left, gray is middle, blue is right
From a team-level, the Chiefs seem wholly unwilling to rush to the left. I’ve noted this each week, and we haven’t seen that change. The Colts and Jaguars boast a similar disinterest in rushing right. These could be matchup driven anomalies or a sign of something larger. We’ll keep an eye on it as the weeks turn into months.
I’m not sure if Andy Reid is a subscriber here, but he must have heard that we noticed Clyde Edwards-Helaire being unable to run left. They slightly rectified that situation this weekend.
Rushing – Left
Chris Carson and Nick Chubb are the leaders in the clubhouse for total yardage from rushes to the left outside. Joe Mixon was playing as I was writing this and got banged up near the end of the game, so his situation will be one to monitor. James Robinson, on the other hand, saw a big workload Thursday; he’ll be climbing way up on all of these boards this time next week.
Rushing – Right
Dalvin Cook was overtaken by Mike Davis after sitting out Week 3. As much as we wanted Davis to be the poster boy of the dead zone, it just hasn’t happened over the first month of the season. It certainly helps that there is such a dearth of talent on the depth chart behind him, but he’s getting the workload to justify his preseason ADP. Whether that continues, remains to be seen.
Rushing – Middle
Peyton Barber being at the top of this list is … something? He saw 23 rushes last week and rushed for over 110 yards for the Raiders. Damien Harris is another name to watch in this group. He’ll do most of his damage in between the tackles. Over 85% of his rushing yards have come on runs up the gut.
The others
We’ll wrap up with a quick look at the ball carriers who saw somewhere between 10-30 rushes and where they were deployed most often.
