Fantasy Football Today - Leonard Fournette Profile: Another Big Season Coming? (07/31 Fantasy Football Podcast)

Episode Date: July 31, 2022

Leonard Fournette was one of the biggest surprises of the 2021 season. What could prevent him from repeating as a Top 10 RB? You can also follow the full-length Fantasy Football Today podcast here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/fantasy-football-today-podcast/id261735167 Get 20% off Fantasy Football Today merch: https://store.cbssports.com/collections/fantasy-football-today%20?utm_source=podcast-apple-com&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=buy-our-merch&utm_content=fantasy-football-collection Follow our FFT team on Twitter: @FFToday, @AdamAizer, @JameyEisenberg, @daverichard, @heathcummingssr, @ctowerscbs, You can listen to Fantasy Football Today in 5 on your smart speakers! Simply say "Alexa, play the latest episode of the Fantasy Football Today in 5 podcast" or "Hey Google, play the latest episode of the Fantasy Football Today in 5 podcast." Watch FFT on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/fantasyfootballtoday Join our Facebook group https://www.facebook.com/groups/FantasyFootballToday/ Sign up for the FFT newsletter https://www.cbssports.com/newsletter To hear more from the CBS Sports Podcast Network, visit https://www.cbssports.com/podcasts/ To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What does possible sound like for your business? It's having the spend to power your scale with no preset spending limit. Redefine possible with Business Platinum. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Terms and conditions apply. Visit amex.ca slash business platinum. Leonard Fournette was the number 11 running back in non-PPR, but number six in full PPR last year, a very pleasant surprise. Let's talk about Fournette in 2022. I'm Adam Azer. I'm joined by Jacob Gibbs here on Fantasy Football Today in five.

Jacob is an advanced stats machine for Sportsline, comes on our podcast all the time. And make sure you go to Sportsline, by the way. Great product there. And follow Jacob at JAGibbs underscore 23. All right, let's talk about Leonard Fournette and the role he's going to have in this offense. Do you see anyone challenging his red zone role? No, it seems like the red zone role and the early down touches are pretty much locked in. Um, and

that was really, um, a fruitful role for him last year. Only Jonathan Taylor and Austin Eckler had more red zone touches, um, in 2021 than Four than four net he also ranked fourth in touches from inside the 10 yard line um and when you combine that um with the type of receiving role he's looking at and the route involvement and the snap rate that he's looking at it's it's really hard to not project for net for like a top five top eight finish um which is now where he's being drafted. But with everything that we're expecting for Tampa Bay, if they're going to be anywhere close to the offense that we've seen in the past few years and these red zone touches do sustain,

then like the history we have of running backs seeing the type of usage that Fournette is penciled in for pretty much always results in a top five finish. We'll get to that here in a second with the receiving role. Yeah, the receiving role is the only question I have, I guess. He had 69 catches in 14 games. He was on pace for 81

catches, just a massive number. And he was only on pace for 224 carries, so he really needed those catches because he was not a workhorse ball carrier. That's just not the way the Bucs ran their offense last year. They had so many pass attempts. For Fournette,

is anyone going to challenge him in that receiving role? I think Rashad White could. I think there are a lot of data points that are really exciting about Rashad White, particularly as a receiver. We have seen Fournette now several times just command a massive target load

and different offenses and we also see you know tom brady often you know not prefer rookies on the field with him right away and so wouldn't surprise me at all if for net just continues to play the role that we saw from late the year last year um and it was really you know pretty insane stuff for fantasy from week 10 on he had target totals of nine six eight eight seven and seven and nine which extrapolates to 131 targets over 17 games yeah uh that was seven straight games with six or more targets and that was without antonio brown i wanted to bring that right right his target rate went up not immediately when antonio brown went out but like the last six

or seven games he played without an Brown is insane. Yeah, no, his, his, um, his target rate isn't, you know, as correlated as Chris Godwin, like we just discussed,

um, to Antonio Brown's absence, but his target rate did go up with a B at any time. He's been off the field over the last two seasons. And the same thing with Gronkowski off the field, uh, for net has been leaned on more. Uh,

I think there might be something there. Um, and really the consistency we saw with the targets last year was pretty nuts. Uh, seven straight games, with the targets last year was pretty nuts. Seven straight games, six plus targets. DeAndre Swift had five straight games with six plus targets. And the other running back even had four consecutive games with that many targets. It's just really, really, it was bankable every single week.

The Bucs were throwing a ton. So even though we didn't get the huge workload on the ground that you mentioned, just the amount of dropbacks that they had and for getting all those routes and drawing targets at a high rate, it would just like continue to, you know, every single week, just like being one of the highest targeted running backs. On the year, he was the third highest target per hour run rate at the running back position among 26 guys who ran at least 250 routes, higher than Austin Eckler, Saquon Barkley, Aaron Jones.

I just, I don't think people really realize like how involved he has been as a pass catcher we don't you know put him up there with Austin Eckler but like his target per hour rates have been in that range uh for quite a while now and so what I did is I looked at over the past 10 seasons running backs who have averaged three and a half red zone touches per game and were targeted on at least 20 percent of the routes Fortinet was 23 percent last year that's the range that dropped a little bit. The red zone touches was basically exactly where it was at. So Fortinet and Austin Eckler joined that list in 2021.

Here are the running backs who have hit both those marks. Here's where they finished in fantasy. RB 2, 6, 1, 3, 1, 2, 3, 5, 1, 2, 6, 1, 2, 2. Wow. So 11 of 14 finishes a top three fantasy running back. And none lower than sixth. No. And that was the year they did it or the year after?

That was the year they did it. They had 20% target per run rate and 3.5 red zone touches per game. So it's pretty simple. If Fournette's red zone roll and receiving roll are what we saw in 2021, the odds will be stacked against him to not finish as a top five running back um in fantasy when i ran my projections initially at the beginning of the offseason he was rb4 um i think i haven't ranked eight right now um but that's definitely within his range of outcomes if he gets the three down roll he's probably going to be a top five running back give me 30 seconds on rashad white yeah so

unfortunately we only have 233 route sample size for Rashad White at the college level. But in that sample size, he was insanely good as a pass-catching running back. He was targeted on 24% of his routes. Kenneth Gainwell is the only guy who's been targeted at a higher rate recently. That's much higher than Tony Pollard, DeAndre Swift,

Saquon Barkley, James Cook, Travis Etienne. And he averaged 2.6 yards per run, which is the highest of any of those guys. Gainwell at 2.5, James Cook at 2, Saquon Barkley at 2, Tony Pollard at 1.8, Etienne 1.7. It's like blowing all these guys out of the water. Really small sample size, but really, really encouraging. He was good as a rusher, but I think really what he brings to the table is his ability as a pass

catcher. And so if he does take the role from four net, then it's going to be a little bit frustrating here for fantasy. Both guys are probably going to underperform, but it, the potential is there for a three down roll for Chad. Why, if something happened to four net or just looking at dynasty,

I think he's really an exciting prospect. All right. Thank you to Jacob Gibbs. Thank you all for watching and listening. And we'll talk to you tomorrow on Fantasy Football Today. Bye.