(Photo by Andrew Dieb/Icon Sportswire)

Introduction: Setting a Standard

While it’s not just the running back position in Fantasy Football that suffers from ambiguity and subjectivity when it comes to discussing and assessing what tier (i.e. RB1, high-end RB2, RB3 with RB2 upside, etc. Try Googling “what is a fantasy football RB1” and tell us what kind of uniform consensus you get.) a player falls into compared to their peers, here, at the RB1Machine.com, all we care about are Fantasy Football running backs. We believe that the RB1 is the most valuable commodity and foundational building black in Fantasy Football. We believe that being able to accurately assess who an RB1 is (or an RB2, or an RB3, etc.) better informs our draft strategies, our in-season roster management, and leads to simpler, more enjoyable, and more successful Fantasy Football seasons.

So what we’ve done is analyze every single running back’s fantasy football performance from every single game of every single NFL season since the year 2000. We’ve searched for trends, correlations, averages, etc., and everything we’ve found (and will continue to find as we drill down into our data sets more and more) is going to be presented to you here at RB1Machine.com. If you love Fantasy Football and data, you’re in luck.

Below, the first set of data you’ll see is what we have created to represent the standard for the tiering of Fantasy Football running backs. It is manifested in an easy-to-understand and easy-to-reference table that is grounded in how running backs have historically performed and how the trends and frequencies of those performances allow us to confidently assess their tiers today. So without further ado, let’s get into the data.

Aggregating and Assessing the Data: A Review 19 Seasons of Fantasy Football Running Back Performances

While we have the same data set for Non-PPR and Full-Point PPR leagues, let’s try to kill three birds with one stone, roughly split the difference, and focus on Half-Point PPR league season totals. The above image shows the distribution of Fantasy Football season point totals for every running back in the NFL from the 2000 season to the 2018 season broken down into 10-point tiers.

The first thing you likely noticed is that the vast majority of Fantasy Football running backs score less than 80 total points in any given fantasy season, for an average of 5 points or less per game over a 16-game Fantasy Football season. In your standard 12-team, 2 running back, and 1 RB/WR/TE FLEX league, nearly 70% (68.42%, to be exact) of running backs are what we here at the RB1Machine.com consider “Non-contributors” (“Non-cons”), those scoring less than 80 total points in a season in Half-Point PPR leagues. That means that you must wade through the remaining ~30% of Fantasy Football running backs, key-in on the best performers (or those with the highest probability of being the best performers), and find a way to get as many of them on your roster as you possibly can.

But now look at the opposite end of that graph. What do you notice? Since 2000, in Half-Point PPR leagues, there have only been 41 running backs (1.4% of all Fantasy Football running backs since the year 2000 NFL season) who have scored 300 points or more in a single Fantasy Football season. Last season, in 2018, there were 4 running backs who went over the 300 point mark (which is significant for a reason you’ll read shortly.

(Also, these totals do not include 2-pt conversions or other performance-based point bonuses. The goal was to focus purely on what we consider foundational metrics: yards, catches, and touchdowns. Assessing the probably of 2 point conversions, 50+ yard runs, etc. is a fool’s errand, as these occurrences are still rare enough occurrences to account for marginal amounts of total points. Until a team starts going for a 2 point conversion all of the time, bonuses should ultimately have no bearing on the common Fantasy GM’s analysis in most fantasy league formats.):

1. Saqoun Barkely (338.3)
2. Todd Gurley (336.6)
3. Christian McCaffery (326)
4. Alvin Kamara (307.7)

Now, let’s look at the next 8 running backs, to round out the Top 12 Fantasy Football running backs of 2018:

1. Ezekiel Elliott (290.6)
2. James Conner (248.5)
3. Melvin Gordon (246.5)
4. James White (233.1)
5. Joe Mixon (221.90)
6. David Johnson (219.6)
7. Kareem Hunt (217.2)
8. Phillip Lindsay (205.3)

The first thing these numbers should do is dispel the myth that the Top 12 running backs in your Fantasy Football league–or, one “RB1” per team, the first starting running back for each team–are all indeed RB1s. If Saquon Barkely is an RB1, and so is Phillip Lindsay, then how do you explain the 133+ total point gulf between the two, which is the equivalent of an extra touchdown and 21 rushing yards more per game? How could they even been on the same plane? Would you have been open to accepting Philip Lindsay for Saquon Barkley straight-up, if you owned Saquon? Of course not, and if you’ve played fantasy football for any length of time you’ve heard that “the Top 12 Fantasy Football running backs are RB1s” argument, and it was those types of lazy, non-academic, and highly-frustrating assessments that led to the creation of RB1Machine.com.

So now that we’ve had some data to look at, we’ve laid the first of many layers to the foundation of what an RB1 is, and we’ve quickly debunked the “the Top 12 Fantasy Football running backs are RB1s” idea, let’s see what the above bar chart looks like in tabular form, and then understand how we’ve built our running back tiers:

Getting into Specifics: The Official RB1Machine.com Fantasy Football Running Back Tiers