For newbies, the word handcuff is used in fantasy football to describe the act of drafting a player in order to provide insurance for another player already on the roster. For example, if an owner drafted LeVeon Bell in the first round, he could later draft DeAngelo Williams as a handcuff. Not only will owners be covered for Bell’s two-game suspension, but if he goes down with an injury, then Williams would likely start in his place.

Handcuffing RBs is not an exact science. The importance of a handcuff depends on several factors, including the value of the RB1 in question, the durability of the RB1, the talent (and price) of the handcuff, the overall clarity of the RB situation and the roster size of the league. It's typically a good idea to handcuff your top 1-2 RBs provided the aforementioned factors don't make it difficult or wasteful to do so. RB is the most injury-prone position in fantasy football and it makes sense to buy insurance if the handcuff meets the necessary criteria.

It's easier to handcuff with larger roster sizes. If you can only carry 16 players, it may only make sense to handcuff one RB1 (or none), depending on how many slots you intend to use for RBs. I don't typically worry about handcuffing RBs I don’t plan to start on a weekly basis, though there are the occasional exceptions.

You’ll notice that some of these potential handcuffs have ADPs in the 9th-11th round (or even earlier). Be careful using such a valuable pick on what amounts to insurance. Looking at 2014 ADP, some big-name receivers went in the 9th-11th rounds, namely Mike Evans (WR11), Kelvin Benjamin (WR16), Anquan Boldin (WR23) and Jordan Matthews (WR24). Zach Ertz (TE13) and Martellus Bennett (TE5) went in that range as well. There were even a couple of gems at the running back position in Jeremy Hill (RB10) and Fred Jackson (RB25). Owners who were worried about drafting their expensive handcuffs would have missed an opportunity to draft a couple of backs that finished the year in the top 25. (Then again, if they happened to be Giovani Bernard or C.J. Spiller owners, then they did a nice job of insuring their early pick.)

Below you'll find the table of the 32 RB1s, in the order of our standard scoring rankings . I've also listed the probable handcuff for each RB1 along with their Priority, which is on a scale of one to five, with one being “don’t bother” and five being a "you-must-handcuff-this-player-or-suffer-the-consequences" situation.

Note: An asterisk indicates a player that I recommend targeting even if you don’t have the RB1 on your roster. These are players going late in drafts that are all capable of posting RB2 numbers if the RB1 goes down with an injury.

A few observations: