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P Fraze's Take on Week 7 Running Backs

By Pat Frazier

This week in the world of fantasy football things can get tricky. It is gonna be a field day for some with a high possibility for one of these three running backs to score you a quick 30 fantasy points.

First is Clinton Portis (duh!), with him recently tearing up the league he is a lock for high numbers. Then add the fact he is going up against Cleveland, which has given up an average of 137 rushing yards per game, I would say he's a pretty safe call.

The second is Marion Barber. With Tony Romo out, the Cowboys are bound to stick to more of a ground game. Although with the recent acquisition of Roy Williams it would seem tempting to throw, the Cowboys won't be testing their veteran's arm too much. Add the fact that they are playing St.Louis, which has given up nearly 170 yards on the ground, I would say he is gonna have a great game.

Lastly is Chris Johnson. Although we have seen his yardage total slowly dropping, he is playing the Chiefs and that is a perfect opportunity to get back into the swing of things because the Chiefs have the worst run defense in the league.

My shot in the dark running backs are Rudi Johnson and Le'Ron McClain.

Rudi is going up against the easily penetrable Houston defense. The only problem is he only has been getting around 15 carries a game, splitting time with rookie Kevin Smith.

Le'Ron McClain is coming off of a 2 carry for -2 yards game against Indianapolis. Yeah, that's right, INDIANAPOLIS! The same team that hasn't been able to stop the run all year. You guys must think I am crazy with him going up against Miami, which has been a terror for running backs. But get this, Le'Ron had 63 yards and a TD against Pittsburgh, and 51 yards and a TD against Tennessee. So in a weird way he plays better against the better run defensive teams. If they get anywhere close to the goal line, the ball will be in his hands, meaning easy TDs. He is a risk, but one I am personally going to take.

The Keys to a Good Draft: Football

     Few things surpass waking up in the morning to a big draft. After the grogginess subsides and that first moment of joy has passed, I get to thinking about the task ahead. For success in this game you need the right strategy and the patience to prepare. What follows is the first of a weekly three part series, briefly covering the three majors—football, baseball and basketball—in which I bring you smart strategies to be worked towards when prepping for a big draft.

This week it's back to the gridiron.

1. Football drafts are no different from any other sport in that you need to do your research. There is no supplement for knowing more than the opponent. Heading into your first draft of the season can be tough when you're not as prepared as you'd like to be. Too much time away from the game, spent with other fantasy sports and that little thing called reality, can cut your legs out from under you. You lose your edge and ability to make quick decisions, and you even lose a bit of your strategy. Here are some good things to know when heading into your draft:

• Who's been injured in the offseason — You need to know who's out, for how long and with what type of injury. If you don't do this first step, you're setting a poor tone for the rest.

• Who's changed teams — This knowledge goes hand in hand with knowing injuries. When players switch teams they usually step into different roles, and the players left behind get new roles too. When Dominic Rhodes headed for Oakland in '06, Joseph Addai vaulted to a top fantasy option in Indianapolis, while Rhodes saw a bit of a decrease in value, heading from a time share with a good offense to a time share with a bad one. Many owners got what they were looking for out of Kevin Curtis last year. In his change from the third option in St. Louis to option 1A in Philly, White Lightning had moved far up on people's draft boards, and to few people's surprise his numbers improved drastically.

• Which running backs are likely to break out — Those banking on Marshawn Lynch last year were certainly left satisfied. But those Nostradamuses, like Yahoo! columnist Brandon Funston, who saw Adrian Peterson's monster season coming out of nowhere were left ecstatic. All I heard on my favorite site was Chester Taylor hype. Everyone was so caught up in the situation of the time share and Chester's solid season in '06, they didn't see pure talent winning out. As Peterson proved, it's favorable to have knowledge of the new guard as well as the old. Knowing when to seperate the hype from the truth comes in handy when knowing where to rate youngsters entering new situations. Many were banking on Cedric Benson coming into his own last season. But instead of being the work horse everyone thought he would be, he looked more like he was ready to be put out to stud.

• What teams had coaching changes and when to buy or sell — New coaches bring new playbooks and different strategy, which carries over to players getting new roles and different results. But as shown in Atlanta last season, this change is hard to rely on. Jerious Norwood was a young guy people thought the coaching change to Bobby Petrino would benefit. Many were saying Norwood was going to take over as the primary back for the aging Warrick Dunn. After all he ended strongly the year before and their was the factor that Petrino preferred bigger backs. Well apparently he wasn't big enough. And when it came to choosing between the two undersized backs, Petrino took the aging light weight and rushed him more than twice as much as Norwood to the chagrin of many.
  

• Which young recievers have finally gotten their heads out of the playbook and into the game — If you develop more than a layperson's knowledge of fantasy football, you'll hear the myth of the third year reciever. It's simply that by the third season of an NFL wideout's career they are ready to excel into what they are going to become: boom or bust. Braylon Edwards' '07 sesaon is the perfect example. This guy was the number 3 overall pick in the '05 draft. He was supposed to be a special player, heads and shoulders above any other receiver coming into the league that year. He started off solid enough. Between his first and second seasons he doubled his catch total to 61 and his TD total to 6 while bumping his receiving yards up by more than a third to make an 880 total. In his third season, he absolutely erupted, posting 80 catches, nearly 1,300 yards and 16 TD's. If you bought on this guy in the 6th round, you most likely found yourself a bargain that walked you right into your fantasy league's playoffs.

• What vets are entering the twilights of their careers — When an aging running back gets ready to step aside, a youngster with fresh legs is usually waiting in the wings. When an elderly quarterback suffers a lengthy injury, there often happen to be unknown guys who are able to fill their shoes. So you don't miss any of the future Larry Johnsons or Tom Bradys out there, always be ready to pounce when a crucial cog in a team's engine is replaced by a younger part.
  

2. Take your running backs early and often. Like many, I have trouble sticking to this rule. But it is an important one to follow because while being your most valuable commodities, the most oft-injured players on a fantasy football team will be running backs. When Steven Jackson went down at the beginning of last season it hurt a lot of people who were banking on him to give them great production. They needed to have good backup running backs to survive that hit so early on.

    With the idea of hoarding backs the most popular strategy around, and the need for a team to fill two starting slots with only so many useful options, pickings get slim toward the middle rounds. QB's and wideouts have less than equal value because they come in more abundance. Two thirds of the leagues quarterbacks are sufficient enough to start, needing to fill only one slot. And on each NFL team there are generally up to three decent wide receiver options with a total of three fantasy slots to fill. By the end of the season Tom Brady and Peyton Manning will probably score more points, but LaDanian Tomlinson and Brian Westbrook will win more championships.

3.Make kickers and defenses your last two picks. This is a standard part to any draft I do. Those who get antsy and reach for these are statisically less likely to succeed. A kicker scores a lot of points but their performances are hard to predict from week to week, let alone over a full season. On the other side of the ball,  you have examples of Baltimore in '06 and San Diego and Chicago in '07; the list goes on and on of defense/special teams people have reached for in the draft only to come up short. For some teams like the Chargers, they're a little slow out of the gate and people throw them back into free agency, wasting their 9th or 10th round pick.

Instead of taking a Chicago in the middle of the draft, these defense-reachers should have taken a chance on a third or fourth running back, and if they were lucky could have found an undervalued Adrian Peterson. That way when their top pick Laurence Maroney was a bust, their fantasy season wouldn't have been over.