When Should You Sell Running Backs in Dynasty Leagues?
As often occurs after discussing any matter with Scott Connor (@CharlesChillFFB), I begin to think in larger terms. One of our most recent discussions centered around the running back market. Specifically, if there may be a shift going forward in how the NFL – and by extension the fantasy community – values running backs.
But before we get there, I felt it important to find out how exactly the community values running backs. More specifically, when do we believe is the time to sell the position? Towards that end, I posted a poll from my podcast’s Twitter handle, asking at what age you should sell.
At what age should you sell running backs? @DLFootball@CharlesChillFFB @MyFantasyLeague
— DynastyTrades HQ Pod (@DynastyTradesHQ) June 7, 2020
Slightly over half of the respondents voted for “depends on the running back”. This answer vexes me on a number of levels. One, I have a binary mind and it’s hard for me to wrap my head around what essentially “depends”. I love black and white answers – they are easy to act on, and that comforts me. “If this, then that” makes me happy in ways I could never fully describe to do it justice. The second issue I had with that response is it that is wrong, and wrong by a wide margin.
I’ve delved into this previously for the DynastyTradesHQ podcast patrons but I still feel like this subject deserves a deeper dive. Starting with the 2012 season, I listed the top 24 RBs for each season and added the ages at the time of the top 24 seasons.
Notes: Player ages were pulled from Pro Football Reference and RB finishes were pulled from FantasyPros PPR scoring. Fantasy scoring was based on per-game scoring from weeks 1-13 (the fantasy regular season for most leagues), and only includes players who played ten or more games during those weeks.
Top 24 Running Backs
When tweeting out this poll, I purposely selected 25 years old as the youngest option for when to sell a running back. To help illustrate why that is, I had my good friend @ff_spaceman take a bunch of ugly data and make it pretty.
Since the 2016 season, nearly half (49%) of all top 24 running back seasons have come from running backs under the age of 25. Even prior to digging into the data this felt intuitive, and I believed that the community at large was sharp enough to know this as well. Of the four options provided in the poll, selling running backs at the age of 25 garnered the fewest votes (by a significant margin), which bolsters my belief that the community at large realizes you don’t sell prior to that age. The peak age for the top 24 running backs comes from 25-year-olds, who accounted for 20.8% of such seasons. Adding it all up, 69.8% of the top 24 seasons come from running backs 25 and younger.
That means that 30.2% of all top 24 running back seasons come from players 26 and older, so every respondent stating they sell running backs depending on the player are wrong way more often than they’re right.
I will concede that I’m speaking about high-level production. I will be taking a look at the age for RB3s and flex-worthy scoring seasons at a later date, so maybe I’ll find you can get lower-level production from the elderly RBs. I will also admit that my poll was a bit open-ended so the respondents might have been looking beyond high-level running back production.
All that said, based on the poll results, no less than 41.5% of respondents think the best time to sell a running back is when they’re a declining asset. That number is likely much higher though, since 51.3% of respondents think it depends upon the player. If you believe you’re good enough to consistently thread that needle you are incorrect, we all are. Christian McCaffrey, Alvin Kamara and Saquon Barkley,all seem like they could be outliers, but the past indicates that they can’t all be.
The Age of the RB1
To further drive home the point that running back production is quite literally a young man’s game, let’s break running back production by age down even further.
Again, looking at it from the 2016 season onwards, 60.4% of RB1 seasons have come from players 24 or younger. Running backs hit the ground running from the start of their careers, with 8.3% of top 12 seasons coming from 21-year-olds, and the percentage of top 12 seasons and age rising in unison until cresting at the age of 24 when 20.8% of top 12 running back seasons come from players who started the season at age 24. Another 14.6% of RB1 seasons came from running backs who were 25 years of age, meaning a cool 75% of RB1 seasons came from players 25 or younger.
I’ve discussed this before but sometimes I’m too binary when it comes to fantasy football strategy, I doubt that I’m alone. In this specific instance though, having an age cut-off for running backs of 25 works in my favor. Yes, there are outliers, players like Adrian Peterson and Frank Gore who continue to produce at a high level after the age of 25, but as borne out by the statistics, they are decidedly outliers. After the age of 25, the percentage of RB1 seasons nosedives sharply to 6.3% of those seasons being turned in by running backs at the age of 26. After the age of 25, no running back age group hits any higher than 6.3% of running back production.
The Trend Continues
Unlike RB1 seasons, where the highest percentage of seasons come from 24-year-olds, 25-year-olds hold the largest share of RB2 seasons, checking in at 27.1%.
Overall, most of the RB2 seasons come from the kids, with 64.6% of those seasons coming from players 25 or younger. There’s a weird spike where 12.5% of the running backs who produced RB2 seasons were 27 years of age, but even in that case, it still only made up six of 48 possible RB2 seasons. Even including those players, only 35.4% of RB2 seasons were produced by running backs aged 26 and older.
Small Sample Size
Because I can feel the eyes of the (sample) size queens judging me right now I want to share some additional data that I pulled to help explain why I looked at “only” the past four seasons for this article.
I initially pulled the ages going back to the 2012 season for every top 24 running back. While I was doing that, I could see a pattern emerging. As the years have gone on, top 24 running back production has come from younger and younger players. The average age for every running back finish (1-24) is younger over the past four seasons than the prior four seasons (2012-2015), excluding RB5, RB16, and the RB24.
Rather than making the data more robust at the expense of making it more actionable, I decided to use just the past four years for this article. Why top running back production is coming from younger players is something I’ll dive into deeper, but I suspect that it has something to do with college players declaring earlier and running backs failing to secure second contracts with the teams that drafted them. But that’s something I can look into at a later date.
The End Comes Suddenly
So that you have names to place with the ages I’ve discussed throughout this article, below are the top 12 running backs (per game scoring), from 2016 courtesy of our friends at FantasyPros.
Two of the top four scoring running backs from that season are so devalued it’s near impossible for a cogent argument to be made against that being the absolute peak time to sell those players. Another one of the top four is currently without a job, and once he does (if) sign he won’t be more than a backup.
Now, if we just take a look at Le’Veon Bell as an example, he played the 2016 season at the age of 24. Using the DLF ADP/Rank vs PPG app (one of the many amazing tools available to DLF subscribers (and writers!!)), we see the fun water slide that Bell’s production has become.
He crushed during the 2017 season, so you certainly got your money’s worth drafting him as the RB2. Bell sat out the 2018 season, and then significantly underproduced in 2019. If you had the foresight to trade Bell after his epic 2016 or 2017 seasons you could have taken in a haul. Today? Not so much. Again using another DLF app, this time the Dynasty Trade Finder, we can see Bell’s relative trade value on the open market.
Bell was included in 27 trades made on the MFL platform during the month of June, so far, in 12-team leagues. In most trades, he was simply part of a larger package and with just a few notable exceptions (looking at you, guy trading AJ Brown away) Bell isn’t getting you any players who are roster changing level pieces. You can go down the list of top 12 running backs from 2016 and you’ll find the same is true for every one of those players who are still active excluding Ezekiel Elliott. In fact, I’d argue that only two of those top 12 running backs are even likely to ever be an RB1 even once during career again: Elliott and Melvin Gordon.
The same can’t be said of the top 12 wide receivers from the same season.
At least five wide receivers from that group, Michael Thomas, Davante Adams, Mike Evans, Julio Jones, and Odell Bekcham Jr. are likely to have multiple top 12 scoring seasons in their futures.
Thank you for reading. Hopefully, this has helped you get a better idea of when to cash out on running backs (or at least confirmed your suspicions) and the type of decrease in trade value and production you can look forward to if you fail to cash out.
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