Fantasy Football Stat of the Day: Dominant Christian McCaffrey

(Leading up to the 2021 NFL season, FTN’s Tyler Loechner will dive into the fantasy football numbers to bring you his Fantasy Stat of the Day, five days a week.)

Date: June 2, 2020.
Location: FTN Slack.
Event: FTN content czar Josh Collacchi messages me and says I get to write a story each day about a fantasy football stat of my choosing.

Hell yes.

Welcome to the first of many “Fantasy Football Stat of the Day” pieces, where I hope to drown you with some killer stats to help you crush in fantasy.

Our first stat is a look at fantasy RB1 consistency rates. What’s more important: Season-long stats, or weekly ceilings?

The truth is that they both matter, but it’s fair to say that weekly consistency is talked about far, far less in fantasy analysis. So that’s exactly where our Stat of the Day series will start.

Let’s do running backs. Snagging a top-tier RB to anchor your squad is a strategy that has withstood the test of time. But not all “fantasy RB1s” are created equal on the consistency front.

Christian McCaffrey is the most dominant fantasy RB1

To the surprise of nobody, Christian McCaffrey has been a fantasy cheat code when on the field over the last two seasons (three, really, but the below chart just goes back two seasons to keep it as fresh as possible).

Player	RB1 Games	Games Played	% of Games as a fantasy RB1
Christian McCaffrey	17	19	89%
Alvin Kamara	19	29	66%
Dalvin Cook	18	28	64%
Derrick Henry	18	31	58%
Ezekiel Elliott	16	31	52%
Nick Chubb	13	28	46%
Aaron Jones	13	30	43%
Josh Jacobs	11	28	39%
Austin Ekeler	10	26	38%
David Johnson	10	27	37%
Chris Carson	10	27	37%
Joe Mixon	8	22	36%

Alvin Kamara leads all RBs with 19 fantasy RB1 weeks (top-12 finish in a given week in PPR scoring) over the last two seasons. He’s followed by Dalvin Cook (18), Derrick Henry (18), McCaffrey (17) and Ezekiel Elliott (16).

But on the consistency front, McCaffrey laps the field. He produced as a fantasy RB1 a ridiculous 89% of the time over the last two seasons. Nobody even comes close.

The next-most-consistent are Kamara (66%), Cook (64%), Henry (58%) and Elliott (52%). No other RB has been a weekly fantasy RB1 over 50% of the time, though Nick Chubb (46%) and Aaron Jones (43%) are not too far off.

We already knew McCaffrey was awesome — who cares?

Fair point, I guess. But the utter dominance was surprising.

And there’s more to it than just the high hit rates. Not only has McCaffrey crushed the competition in terms of consistency, he also scores more points while doing it.

McCaffrey has averaged 31.5 fantasy PPG in his fantasy RB1 weeks. Next-closest is Aaron Jones (28.5 PPG) — a full 10% behind CMC’s production.

The first action item is to not pass on McCaffrey if you have the first overall pick. The second is to scoop up Kamara, Cook, Henry and Elliott if you are drafting in the top five.

None of this is groundbreaking, but it should be reassuring. And here are a few other parting takeaways from this small study:

Nick Chubb is on the verge of breaking into that upper class, even with Kareem Hunt siphoning plays.
The Joe Mixon hype train has some legitimate steam.
Chris Carson’s return to Seattle should not be downplayed from a fantasy perspective.