Ding dong, Dalvin Cook is gone, and now Alexander Mattison will presumably get his shot as the lead back in a Minnesota offense that finished seventh in the league in both total points scored and total yards gained last season. Sounds pretty cushy, and as the Underdog ADP and dynasty valuations over at 4for4.com and KeepTradeCut indicate -- Mattison is the current RB21 and RB20, respectively, on those platforms -- the people are bought in on the quintessential handcuff turning his newfound RB1 role into legitimate fantasy production. I want to explore whether or not that confidence is justified.

Mattison will play the entire 2023 season at 25-years old (his birthday is actually this coming Monday), making him an imperfect fit for the study on late-career running backs getting thrust into unprecedentedly large roles that I did for the purposes of this Tony Pollard article, but considering that -- like the backs who did qualify for that study -- he’ll have played four years in the league before his first season of averaging 15+ touches per game (assuming that’s the kind of workload he sees this year), I think it’s reasonable to apply the general insights gleaned there to this situation.

To start, we should probably temper our expectations for how effective Mattison will be on a per-touch basis as the Vikings’ lead runner. Among 18 backs (since 2000) who earned sizable workloads after their fourth seasons in the NFL and while never having handled at least 15 touches per game up to that point, just 33% either improved upon or maintained their career marks in yards per carry during their high-volume seasons, and just 28% either improved upon or maintained their career marks in yards per reception during the same campaigns. The average runner in that group saw their per-carry average drop by 0.19 yards from what it had been pre-volume increase, and their per-reception averages dropped by 0.32 yards. Given the baseline from which we’re working with Mattison, such a phenomenon would be near disastrous.

The Boise State product has averaged 4.13 yards per carry to date in his NFL career, a 49th-percentile mark among league-wide runners since 2016, so a 0.19-yard drop in that average would result in his producing a 3.94-yard per-carry mean that would’ve ranked 26th out 32 lead backs last season (ahead of only Michael Carter, Leonard Fournette, Ezekiel Elliott, Najee Harris, Brian Robinson, and Joe Mixon). A year ago, a “washed” Cook ranked 17th among starting running backs with a 4.44 per-carry average on this same Vikings team while Mattison produced an atrocious 3.82 in a breather back role off the bench, which brings me to my next point: the 4.13 yards-per-carry average we’re operating with for Mattison belies his actual effectiveness in recent years, as he’s averaged just 3.72 yards per carry over the last two seasons. Those numbers mean he ranked 24th and 27th, respectively, among league-wide RB2s in per-carry mean in 2022 and 2021, and the standard 0.19-yard drop in YPC for guys with late-career bumps in volume would see him average a Fournette-ian 3.53 yards per tote under a substantial workload increase.

It’s not as if we can make circumstantial excuses for Mattison in this area, either. He’s been on good teams with quality offensive lines (they’ve been rated 12th, 18th, 16th, and 4th, respectively, in run-blocking grade by Pro Football Focus in the years since Mattison was drafted) for his entire career, and his team-relative and expectation-based efficiency metrics have been as follows anyway:

Basically, Mattison has not been an effective NFL runner for several years now, even while enjoying light work and light defensive fronts (his Box Count+ numbers in 2022 and 2021 have each been below the 35th percentiles) and even in the context of the offenses he’s played on and the situations in which he’s carried the ball, and his efficiency floor as a high-volume runner is about as low as it gets as a result.

Being an inefficient runner doesn’t necessarily preclude one from receiving the sort of volume that would enable useful fantasy production, though, so perhaps there’s a chance that Mattison can slog his way to RB2 numbers at less than four yards a pop. In order for that to happen, however, Mattison will need to receive undeserved volume like not many players like him have received -- in the last 15 years, there have been 68 individual instances of running backs being given 200 or more carries in a single season despite averaging fewer than four yards per carry during the year in question. 47 of those campaigns came from guys who’d already run for 1000 yards in a single season at least once at some point in their NFL careers. Among those who hadn’t, four (Trent Richardson, Leonard Fournette, Najee Harris, and Sony Michel) were rookie first-round picks with sunk cost insulating their opportunity, another five (Matt Forte, Le’Veon Bell, Mikel Leshoure, David Montgomery, and Brian Robinson) were day-two rookies getting their first crack at workhorse jobs at the pro level, and three more (Andre Williams, Zac Stacy, and Vick Ballard) were later-drafted rookies thrust into volume but with no history of subpar NFL performance. Of the eight remaining players in this group, six of them (Carlos Hyde, Kevin Smith, James Conner, Alvin Kamara, Andre Ellington, and Marion Barber) had either flirted with 1000-yard rushing seasons in prior pro campaigns, already proven to be effective dual-threat weapons, or both. Really, the only guys in the last fifteen years who received heavy rushing volume while being ineffective on the ground and after never having proven deserving of that volume in the NFL are Le’Ron McClain, a fullback with eight career rushing attempts entering his 232-carry 2008 season, and Michael Bush, a fourth-year back who’d averaged 4.43 yards per carry as a committee runner prior to a 256-carry campaign in 2011. That’s your Alexander Mattison precedent.

Michael Bush was a beast at Louisville before turning in an RB2-level performance in a Mattison-like opportunity as a veteran in a first-time workhorse role with the Raiders.

McClain and Bush averaged 11.7 and 14.0 PPR points per game, respectively, in those high-volume seasons -- numbers that would’ve been good for RB26 and RB14 finishes, respectively, in 2022 -- and Mattison could obviously produce starting-level fantasy output if he were also to receive a similarly large workload in 2023. As everyone knows, dude has averaged 23.7 points per game in five career contests in which he played more than half the snaps. Of course, producing high-end fantasy numbers on a weekly basis as your team’s lead back is different than stealing the show as an understudy a couple times a year, and given the history I’ve outlined above that makes clear that NFL teams don’t often give heavy volume to veteran running backs who’ve never proven they deserve it, I think the assumption you have to make in order to prop up Mattison as a top-24 running back -- even in redraft but especially in dynasty -- is a risky one. 28 of the 68 pack mule runners (heavily burdened and slow moving) that we discussed above finished with fewer PPR points per game in their inefficient high-volume seasons than Cordarrelle Patterson did as last year’s RB24, an underperforming group that includes several backs who were both in their primes and far more talented than Mattison is, including Knowshon Moreno, Ray Rice, Michael Turner, David Montgomery, Thomas Jones, and Marshawn Lynch. Current ADP indicates production expectations for Mattison in the same range as what we’re expecting for players like Miles Sanders and Dameon Pierce, but history tells us that Mattison is far from a lock to either receive or perform up to par under the burden of the sort of workload that we can more reasonably anticipate from similarly priced runners who’ve done it before.

Also interesting to me in this Minnesota backfield is what appears to be a wide open competition for the RB2 spot between three guys: Ty Chandler, DeWayne McBride, and Kene Nwangwu. Let’s pontificate on how this pecking order might shake out.

To start, while it’s clear that we don’t have much (if any) evidence of these players contributing in the NFL to go off of for these determinations, Nwangwu’s lack of impact through two seasons as a pro is enough for me to regard him as the least likely among these three guys to earn the primary breather back role behind Mattison. Nwangwu is an excellent returner who has taken three kickoffs to the house in two years and was named second-team All Pro by the Associated Press in 2022, but he’s averaged 3.4 yards per carry on just 22 ground opportunities thus far in his NFL career. Further, the only evidence we have of him as an effective ball-carrier at the collegiate level comes in the form of a 57th-percentile Box-Adjusted Efficiency Rating that he posted on just 16 attempts as a junior at Iowa State -- he was below the 10th percentile in that metric in both of the other seasons for which data is available. Nwangwu is an explosive athlete with good size who offers special teams dynamism, but he’s probably not a legitimate threat to handle significant work at running back.

I’m not sure Kene Nwangwu is an NFL-caliber running back, but he’s one of the best kick returners in the league.

Chandler is also an explosive athlete who hasn’t proven much as an NFL rusher (he gained 20 yards on six carries as a rookie), but he at least has actual college production from which to draw insights. Unfortunately, I don’t think those insights are particularly confidence-inducing: it took a COVID-gifted extra season of eligibility for Chandler to gain more than 813 yards in a single season in college, and his 30th-percentile career marks in both BAE Rating and RSR suggest he’s nothing special as a runner. I think he’s got some juice as a receiver given the efficiency he posted in that area (68th-percentile yards per target) in addition to the consistency with which he ran highly diverse route trees at both Tennessee and North Carolina (above the 78th percentile in every season of his career), but he’s a former fifth-round pick who did nothing as rookie after having Travon McMillian, Tyler Badie, DeAndre Washington, Ty Johnson, and Da’Rel Scott as his five closest comps as a prospect. I don’t think this is some stud-in-waiting.

McBride may not be a stud-in-waiting, either, but based on the reasoning outlined in this article from earlier this offseason, I think he has the best shot at being a legitimate NFL contributor among non-Mattison backs on this depth chart. I won’t completely rehash that piece here, but these are the broad strokes:

Level of competition caveats apply with McBride’s efficiency numbers and film grades, but there’s not much else he could have done as a runner given that he was playing against Group of Five competition (and for good measure, he ran for 4.69 yards per carry against the legendary 2021 Georgia Bulldogs defense). He’s probably not going to offer much of anything in the passing game, and he needs to clean up some ball security issues, but McBride has as good a shot of being a quality NFL runner as any small school back we’ve seen in recent years.

If I had to guess, I’d say this backfield is going to be more of a committee than Mattison’s top-20 ADP would suggest, with Chandler sprinkled in on passing downs and McBride operating as the secondary rushing option and de facto next man up in the event of a Mattison injury. I’m cashing in yesterday if I roster Mattison in dynasty, and I’m similarly fading him in redraft based on the possibility that his 2023 season looks more like Brian Robinson’s rookie year than it does like Dameon Pierce’s, an outcome that is not baked into his current cost at all.