Impactful RB News To Know From NFL Cut Day

In today's Fantasy Life Newsletter, presented by Experian:

The 53-man roster cutdown deadline was yesterday afternoon, and it led to a flurry of transactions across the league.

A lot of them are nothing-burgers as far as fantasy impact, but there were a handful of newsworthy items at the RB position…

🚑️ Elijah Mitchell out for the year. This was a pretty big surprise, and solidifies Jordan Mason as the RB2 and a screaming late-round target across all formats.

🐶 Jonathon Brooks will remain on the PUP list. There was some hope that Brooks would avoid the PUP list (he’ll now miss at least the first four weeks of the season), though the Panthers have telegraphed all offseason that they plan to bring him along slowly. Chuba Hubbard getting off to a fast start isn’t much of a secret, but this news cements Miles Sanders as a decent late-round flier.

🚑️ Kendre Miller placed on IR. A nightmare offseason continues for Miller after a hamstring injury forced him into Dennis Allen’s unusually large doghouse. I really wish I had a deep Saints RB sleeper for you (with all due respect to the Swag Daddy), but this is shaping up to be Alvin Kamara or bust.

🚑️ AJ Dillon out for the year. There were initial rumblings that rookie MarShawn Lloyd would open up the season on IR with a hamstring injury, but that will no longer happen with Dillon out for the year. This is very positive news for Lloyd and Emanuel Wilson is also worth a stash in super-deep leagues.

🔒️ Kimani Vidal and Carson Steele lock up roster spots. Isaiah Spiller (LAC), Deneric Prince (KC), and Louis Rees-Zammit (KC) were all cut, which solidified Vidal and Steele’s roster spots. Both are super-intriguing late-round RB sleepers who could make noise at some point this year.

For more cutdown news, including a bizarre move involving D’Onta Foreman, check out our full breakdown on Fantasy Life.

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Waz’s Toughest Players To Rank
Watercooler: Cutdown news

Toughest Players To Rank

by Rob Waziak

As the fluidity of ADP trends become more rigid, so does the effectiveness of fantasy football rankings. With steady ADP data and our award-winning draft rankings come efficient fantasy football mock drafts. With valuable mock draft data comes the practical ability to forecast how your actual fantasy football draft will pan out.

By the time you are drafting, ADP, rankings, personnel usage, and depth charts should be optimized well enough to inform you who the best player available is for a specific position. Unfortunately, there are circumstances when all four of those determining factors are torn on a player and you are determined to choose one.

To provide further safe passage through your draft, I have identified five teams that project to split backfield work between two RBs who share similar ADP and evaluate each of those teams' options.

These are the 10 toughest players to rank.

🤷 Bengals RBs Chase Brown & Zack Moss

Chase Brown displayed his potential in the final six games of his 2023 rookie season, averaging 53.7 scrimmage yards per game with 4.1 yards per carry and 13.5 yards per catch. His explosive playmaking ability was evident when he reached 22.05 mph while bringing a screen pass 54 yards to the house, the second-fastest speed by a ballcarrier that year. He played second fiddle to Joe Mixon and sometimes Trayveon Williams as well, but despite the 11% rushing share on just 9% of snaps, he saw a target on 43% of his routes.

In March, the Bengals traded Mixon to the Texans, but not without signing UFA Zack Moss a day earlier. Moss had just finished a career-best season with the Colts where he rushed for 794 yards and scored five touchdowns on the ground while adding 27 receptions for 192 yards and two receiving touchdowns across 14 games. According to Next Gen Stats, he ranked fifth in rushing yards over expected (RYOE) per attempt (0.71) among all RBs who saw at least 90 attempts, which ensured a 41.8% rushing percentage over expected (ROE%), good for top-12 honors.

Preseason game usage between the two in August didn’t offer many answers. Moss didn’t see any work after an illness kept him out of the first game and he was rested alongside other starters the next two. On the other hand, Brown played in the first game and saw the entirety of the first drive, including two subsequent third-and-long situations.

According to PFF’s Nathan Janke, “Mixon had only taken 10% of those (third-and-long) snaps over the last five seasons” and believes that Brown seeing those passing-down situations “increases the chances it will only be a two-man backfield” since Williams or Chris Evans could have filled the role. Mixon was responsible for 68% of the Bengals' rush attempts in short-down-and-distance plays and 88% of attempts within the 5-yard line in 2023, so this coin flip could come down to who is offered more of those high-value opportunities.

Dwain McFarland is projecting a near-even split between the two backs, whereas Matthew Freedman projects Moss to see 60+% of the opportunities and over half of the touchdowns.