Marshawn Lynch and Adrian Peterson will don new uniforms in 2017. For fans of those teams, I don’t see much of a difference in expectations for the coming year.
For fantasy football owners, those signings could have a rippling effect on how to meander through the 2017 fantasy football draft.
It’s difficult to assess the value of both running backs with Lynch heading to Oakland and Peterson going to New Orleans. Both are aging running backs who have taken quite a few hits during their career.
Peterson has fought through injuries during the last year. Lynch took a year off, but we’ve seen other running backs (i.e. Peterson) miss an entire season and come back even stronger.
We’ve seen other running backs hit 30 and completely crumble. Lynch is 31 and Peterson is 32.
So that doesn’t bode well for their prospects. Another major issue at hand is that both teams aren’t known for committing to the run.
Oakland and New Orleans are centered around their quarterbacks. That’s a much different scenario than what we saw with their previous teams, with Lynch and Peterson carrying the load for Seattle and Minnesota, respectively.
Both teams also employ a frustrating strategy of using multiple running backs, as seen by Oakland on far too many occasions last year, limiting Latavius Murray’s production. The Raiders had the 11th-most attempts as a team rushing (thanks to building leads), but last year’s starter Murray averaged only 13.9 attempts per game, good enough for 24th in the NFL.
Mark Ingram, meanwhile, also was limited in his carries, despite rushing for more than 1,000 yards. He averaged only 12.8 carries per game.
Oh, and Ingram is still a member of the Saints, so that complicates things even further for fantasy owners. How is that offense going to work? We’ve seen Sean Payton use two running backs in the past, but that was more of a strategy utilizing a fast, good ball-catcher out of the backfield like Reggie Bush and Darren Sproles, than what they currently have — two running backs who are workhorses.
The Peterson move likely does more to limit Ingram’s fantasy value than make Peterson a top-tier pick. Peterson needs carries to maximum his value. He’s the king of getting a few 2-yard gains, and then breaking off the big run. That can only happen with a decent amount of carries, which won’t happen in New Orleans.
While playing a full season, Peterson has never had less than 17 carries per game in his career. Ingram, in a year where he excelled in New Orleans offense, garnered less than 13 carries. Now both of them reside on the same team. I’m staying away from those backs in the early going of the upcoming draft.
Lynch has more upside, especially since he’ll be the featured running back in Oakland. He won’t have the same opportunities that he was used to in Seattle (he averaged at least 17.5 carries per game in full seasons in Seattle), but he still should get more opportunities than Murray last year.
I like Lynch to sneak into that lower second tier/upper third tier of running backs in fantasy football, with a similar grade as Houston’s Lamar Miller.
