The high rate of running back involvement in the passing game may have won or lost you a fantasy football matchup in Week 1. And it wasn’t just the usual suspects. Several players who led the position’s charge through the air are not typical targets.
Call it the Cordarrelle Patterson Effect. Patterson was a receiver the first eight years of his career. When he moved to running back last season, he had his best receptions total (52) in five years – and he was not just getting dump-offs; he was running routes. An interesting example of the Cordarrelle Patterson Effect last week was Tennessee’s Dontrell Hilliard. The Titans back averaged 4.6 yards on 19 catches last season. Last week, Hilliard caught three passes for 61 yards and two scores.
Running backs’ usage in the passing game came to a head last week when Javonte Williams posted a 28% target share on Monday Night Football, and he wasn’t the only back to lead his team in targets. Running backs catching passes, and a lot of them, is nothing new, but this level of involvement came as somewhat of a surprise.
A one-week sample size isn’t much to go on, but let’s check how Week 1 stacks up to past seasons to see what we can learn.
The Broncos targeted the running back position on a league-high 36.6% of their pass attempts, according to Fantasy Pros data. The biggest beneficiary of that was Williams, who caught 11 of 12 targets for 65 yards. Melvin Gordon got involved with two targets and Mike Boone saw one. So that’s 15 of Russell Wilson’s 41 targets funneled toward the running back position while his top two receivers—Jerry Jeudy and Courtland Sutton—combined to see 14.
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Denver’s league-high laser focus on the running back position in Week 1 was actually low compared to the previous four seasons. The team leaders in percentage of targets to running backs in the opener from 2018-2021 funneled an even higher percentage of their looks to the position—all 40% or higher.
In the 2021 opener, the Colts targeted the position on 42% of their attempts—seven to Jonathan Taylor, eight to Nyheim Hines. Meanwhile the Lions threw a league-high 20 attempts (36.4%) to running backs. D’Andre Swift got 11 looks and Jamaal Williams fielded nine.
Overall, though, the total number of targets to running backs (233) is up compared to last season (226), and that’s despite fewer targets to go around overall. The league-wide running back target percentage was 21.2% in Week 1 compared to 19.9% last year. That’s a noticeable bump.
Again, this is a one-week sample size. Despite ranking first and second in running back target percentage to begin the 2021 season, the Colts and Lions finished eighth and sixth respectively, by that same metric. The Saints led the NFL with a 28.3% running back target share a year ago, though they ranked near the bottom of the league last week at 15.6%; Alvin Kamara was uncharacteristically targeted just four times.
That brings us to perhaps the most surprising part of running backs’ Week 1 usage: The top receiving backs in the league were lightly targeted compared with their past involvement.
Najee Harris and Austin Ekeler tied to lead the position in targets last season with 94 apiece. Harris, who left the game early with a foot injury, had just two targets and Ekeler had four. Leonard Fournette, D’Andre Swift and Cordarrelle Patterson rounded out the top-five most-targeted running backs last season and they combined for just five Week 1 targets. Patterson, instead, carried the ball a career-high 22 times.
The most-targeted running backs in Week 1, besides Williams, were rookie Breece Hall (10), Joe Mixon (nine), Michael Carter (nine), Rex Burkhead (eight) and Antonio Gibson (eight). That came as quite the surprise, as did AJ Dillon, Green Bay’s bruising back, leading the team in targets, receptions and receiving yards (of course, that may also be a product of Green Bay’s shaky WR corps).
Individual and team target distributions are bound to fluctuate week to week, but continued high involvement of running backs in the receiving game, and not just those dubbed pass-catching specialists, is something to keep an eye on this season.
