Bears' RB Matt Forte proved himself a rare breed in 2008.

I am not referring to revelations involving deities or the meaning of life, nor am I privy to the government conspiracies espoused by the like of Jesse Ventura and Michael Moore. No, my one true revelation involves the one thing most sacred to us all: the extinction of a truly marvelous creature.

The rare breed in question is the Studus runningbackus… otherwise known as the Stud Running Back. For the past several years, I’ve been writing an article entitled Workhorse or Racehorse—in fact, this article was intended to be the 2009 installment of the long-running feature. However, statistical analysis has led me to this somber state.

You see, I was always of the belief that workhorses and racehorses were the key to fantasy football success. A workhorse was a runner who logged 75% of his team’s carries; a racehorse logged at least 75% of his team’s rushing yards.

Well, asking the Sports Grumblings supercomputer, Mighty Max, to crunch the numbers for 2008 produced a continuation of startling results: there was just one racehorse runner— Adrian Petereson—who logged 75.47% of the Vikings’ rush yards. Looking for workhorse runners produced an even more dismal result: there were no workhorse runners in the NFL in 2008.

Shocked, I asked Max to produce the workhorse/racehorse data for the top 10 runners from 2008 (using World Championship of Fantasy Football scoring rules). Max gleefully complied: 
 

Matt Forte came tantalizingly close to being the now-rare Workhorse/Racehorse combo… something to keep in mind come draft time.

Of course, the Sports Grumblings famous BDDM will more fully address the statistical value of RBs in 2009 (due in late June), but it should be obvious even to Terry Bradshaw that there are fewer and fewer runners that fantasy owners can depend on. So what are we to do in our upcoming drafts?

Let’s redefine “workhorse” and “racehorse” runners to better reflect the changing nature of RB corps in the NFL; setting the cutoff at perhaps 65% of their teams’ rushing attempts and rush yards, respectively, would give us insight into solid RB candidates for our 2009 drafts. Mighty Max was quick to produce the results:
 

Looking at the results above, there are some observations that stand out: 

·         There is only a handful or runners that qualify for either Workhorse or Racehorse status

·         There are six runners that meet our new criteria to be true “stud running backs”: Clinton Portis, Matt Forte, Thomas Jones, Kevin Smith, Michael Turner and Adrian Peterson.

·         Some players are conspicuous by their absence. Notably, top performers like Brian Westbrook (54%/55%), Steven Jackson (61%/63%) and Marshawn Lynch (57%/56%) qualify as neither workhorses nor racehorses.

So I think it’s fair to say that “65 is the new 75” when it comes to classifying our new breed of Studus runningbackus.

Another Parameter

A few of my readers requested an extension to my analysis—they wanted to know which runners were responsible for at least 75% of their team’s rushing touchdowns. A damn fine idea—I’ve always said that the readers of Fantasy Forecast are the savviest in the industry! Let’s call this a search for Stock Horses (heavily-muscled riding horses):

If we were to extend our new cut-off level of 65% to the Stock Horses as well, the list would expand a wee bit: