This season has been chock full of surprises. Scoring is way up and with that comes the ripple effect of more players being more fantasy viable. The only issue that arises from more fantasy viable players, is the need for your studs to be actual studs. If you have been dealing with injuries or ineffective players, then you may have gotten off to a rough start. If you need to get your team on track, let’s look at some players trending in the right direction that you could buy low on.

This article is all about watching how a backfield is being used for every team. Snap counts are very useful, but I want to know what a player is doing when he has the ball in his hands. Anytime a running back gets a touch, what is being done with that touch?

Watching a trend with touches for running backs will not only let us know their usage for any given week or period, but how effective they are with the ball. High volume plus high effectiveness is always the best outcome. High volume with low effectiveness can be great and low volume with high efficiency can be streaky at times. Let’s dive into our Week 5 preview.

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RB Touches and Efficiency Breakdown

Week 4 Report



David Johnson Will Be Just Fine

If you own David Johnson, you probably spent a top-five draft pick on him. It’s been well over a year since we saw the Johnson that warranted a top pick. Even though we continue to worry about Johnson, the Cardinals have increased his touch total every single week. Maybe the Cardinals were just easing Johnson back into action?

Since Week 1 when Johnson had 64% of the backfield touches, he has seen the number increase to 70% to 76% and all the way up to 86% in Week 5. If the volume continues to increase and stay well above 80%, he will break out soon. Johnson is still averaging 4.2 yards per carry and as the rust continues to fall off, that should start to climb as well.

If you missed out on an RB1 in the draft or have a ton of injuries, contact the Johnson owner and see if you can work out a deal. You could get him for an RB2 and WR2 and receive a huge upgrade to your team the rest of the season.

Should Jordan Howard Owners Panic?

You pop into the live scoring sections of your fantasy football app on Sunday afternoon and see that the Chicago Bears are beating the Tampa Bay Buccaneers 48-10. This is great news because you have Jordan Howard and this score screams positive game script and Howard more than likely had a nice workload in a blowout. However, the box score tells a different point of view and now you are screaming at Tarik Cohen through your phone.

How could the Bears do this to us? Their best fantasy performance of the year and Howard touches the ball 11 times for 25 yards. Why was this the game Cohen decided to breakout? Is it a legitimate concern moving forward that Cohen is going to take more and more touches away from Howard?

Cohen had 63% of the touches in Week 4 and on top of that, he had 8.7 yards per touch, which raised his season yards per touch to 7.5 yards. Cohen has not had more than 30% of the touches leading up to Week 4, but Matt Nagy won’t be able to ignore how effective Cohen was last week.

What Will Joe Mixon Return To?

Joe Mixon looked poised to take control of the backfield after receiving 92% of the touches in Week 1, but after a procedure on his knee, he missed back to back games. Gio Bernard handled 100% of the touches in Week 4, which was expected, but good to see because Mixon owners are not worried about Bernard. No matter what happens, Bernard will have a role in this offense with Mixon on the field. Unless Bernard sprains his MCL and is out for 2-4 weeks. Now we are looking at a backfield of Mixon and Mark Walton moving forward.

Last week Walton also made his way into the timeshare and was not bad in limited action. Walton had seven touches for 27% of the share and averaged 5.3 yards per touch. This is a limited sample size and we shouldn’t overreact to his efficiency, but if he can perform well behind Mixon while Bernard is out, it could be an interesting situation when all three are healthy. Having three healthy, effective running backs is great for the Bengals, but bad for fantasy owners.

Peyton Barber May Have Run Out of Time

After running away with the starting job (no pun intended) in the pre-season, Peyton Barber hasn’t been able to do anything to prove his worth to fantasy football owners. Barber has seen his touch share drop since Week 1 going from 38% to 65% and 57% in Week 3 all the way down to 42% with the activation of Ronald Jones. The time may be now for Jones.

Even if you don’t like Jones, you couldn’t dismiss the fact that the Buccaneers would have to get him on the field this year. They spent a second-round pick on him and after he was deactivated for the first three weeks, it was hard to tell what would happen. Jones finally found the field and 58% of the touches in Week 4. Jones didn’t do much more than Barber, averaging only 2.5 yards per touch, but the fact that Barber hasn’t been productive means the Buccaneers don’t have a reason to stay with him. Someone is going to get the volume but who will be the first to do something with it?

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