We know that Austin Ekeler is an awesome fantasy football asset. Despite being an undersized and undrafted player from a DII school, Ekeler forced his way onto the field as a rookie, scored a 35-yard touchdown on his first career carry, averaged over twelve PPR points per game in his second season despite sharing a backfield with a Pro Bowl player and that year’s RB5 in Melvin Gordon, and then made Gordon expendable just a year later by outproducing him by more than 20 scrimmage yards per game and posting 19.3 points per game on the way to an RB6 finish of his own. Since then, Ekeler has produced three more RB1-level seasons, including two straight 21+ point-per-game campaigns culminating in a 2022 season in which he finished as the RB1.

We also know that Ekeler is a good real-life football player. The most obvious evidence of that comes via his production and effectiveness as a pass-catcher: in the last four years (so including the 2019 season in which Gordon was a sizable presence in the Chargers backfield), Ekeler has vacuumed up no less than 14.7% of his offense’s targets in a single season, with marks that land in the 97th, 95th, 91st, and 96th percentiles, respectively, in that area. At the same time, he’s consistently finished near the top of the league in receiving efficiency, ranking first, 17th, 13th, and 21st, respectively, in yards per target among 50+ runners with at least 25 targets in those seasons. Further, Ekeler is one of the most dynamic route-running tailbacks in the NFL: he’s been deployed on route trees with Diversity above the 71st percentile in all but one season of his career, and despite that varied and advanced usage, has also earned targets at a RATE above the 84th percentile in all but one season.

Not just a pass-catching specialist, Ekeler has also been an effective runner of the football through six NFL seasons. He has posted an above-baseline Box-Adjusted Efficiency Rating in every year of his career, and has posted negative marks in Relative Success Rate and Rushing Yards Over Expected per Attempt just one time each. Even in recent years and as a 25+ year old runner theoretically on the downward slope of his career arc, Ekeler has performed like one of the best ball-carriers in the league, averaging no less than 4.42 yards per carry (a 64th-percentile mark) in any post-2019 season while notching the following marks in team-relative and expectation-based statistics during that same time-frame:

As I expanded upon in this article, Ekeler also doesn’t show many signs of slowing down when we widen our scope to include metrics that measure elusiveness and through-contact ability. Basically, he’s been one of the best dual-threat backs in the NFL since he entered the league, he still was one of the best dual-threat backs in the NFL last season, and we have little indication that he will cease being one of the best dual-threat backs in the NFL in 2023.

Contrast Ekeler’s chart with that of Joe Mixon, a member of the same draft class who -- until legal troubles and declining on-field performance resulted in nose-diving values this offseason -- was consistently regarded similarly to (and in some cases significantly higher than) Ekeler despite rarely matching his productivity:

To be fair, Mixon has enjoyed age-, contract-, and draft capital-based advantages over Ekeler that at least in some capacity contribute to the different standards by which their dynasty values have been judged, but that’s kind of the point: Ekeler has been one of the best and most consistent fantasy scorers in the last half decade, but because of various off-field factors not within his control, he hasn’t been valued in ways that reflect his actual contributions to dynasty rosters.

Recent evidence of that has come via Ekeler’s dropping outside the top ten running backs in KTC’s valuations multiple times this offseason, presumably due to the uncertainty that a since-rescinded trade request injected into his situation. I contend that the skittishness that such value dips indicate Ekeler is treated with in dynasty is due to a widespread relative lack of belief in him as a player: he just completed four straight top-ten seasons, two straight top-three seasons, and an overall RB1 finish while performing at elite or near-elite levels as both a runner and receiver, but the slightest chance that he might live in a different city and wear a different uniform next season means we can’t trust him to continue performing well enough to deserve being ranked ahead of Rhamondre Stevenson (KTC’s RB10 at the time of Ekeler’s RB14 ranking) -- who is a 25-year old former fourth-round pick who’s never averaged 15 points per game in an NFL season -- in dynasty.

I want to use the rest of this article to explore the implications and merits of the position that Ekeler’s fantasy value is disproportionately tied to the unique role he’s had in the Chargers offense in the last several years, not as a hypothetical, but as an issue directly relevant to his immediate future considering that changes to that offense -- especially the arrival of new offensive coordinator Kellen Moore -- could throw off the equilibrium of a situation that has undeniably been perfectly calibrated to allow for Ekeler’s dominance.

First, I think Ekeler’s consistent productivity and play-level effectiveness are sound evidence of his not being especially sensitive to circumstantial changes. Perhaps the DII product has a reputation for fantasy production propped up by heavy usage in areas where it’s easy to imagine a player simply being given opportunity -- through the air and at the goalline -- and despite a perception of mediocre ability as a “true” running back. I think the contextualized rushing efficiency numbers I presented above do enough to dispel the latter part of that argument, and the fact that Ekeler possesses legitimate downfield route-running ability and therefore earns a larger portion of his targets than most screen-pass mavens do should remove any notions that he’s simply a dumpoff-fueled volume hound in the passing game, but maybe it’s true that a disproportionate share of his fantasy production has come from his being the coincidental beneficiary of a lot of easy touchdown looks.

It’s definitely true that Ekeler has scored more touchdowns on a per-carry basis than we’d expect of the average NFL runner: professional backs scored on just under 3% of their collective rushing attempts in 2022, while Ekeler has scored on 6.4% and 5.8%, respectively, of his own carries in the last two seasons, and on 4.2% of carries over the course of his career. Still, that high touchdown rate has not been fueled by some ridiculous amount of goalline work in recent seasons: in 2022, Ekeler tied players like Jeff Wilson and Antonio Gibson with an 18th-ranked total of eight carries within the five-yard line, and he finished in a seven-way tie for seventh place in the same category in 2021. Much of his scoring in the short area of the field has come as a receiver, as he caught three one-yard touchdowns last season, and he just as often is creating scoring opportunities of his own from further out: he had seven touchdown receptions of 10+ yards in 2021, two more in 2022, and he ripped off a league-leading three scoring runs of at least 20 yards last season, including a 72-yard house call against the Rams on New Year’s Day. Basically, Ekeler has been the league’s premier touchdown scorer among running backs in each of the last two seasons not by being gifted a bunch of goalline carries, but by being one of the best dual-threat weapons in the NFL.

Austin Ekeler led the league in touchdowns in 2022 while seeing no more goalline carries than Jeff Wilson did.

Second, while the short-yardage and passing game opportunities that Ekeler does enjoy might feel like a product of the circumstances around him, that argument becomes tenuous when we zoom out even a little bit. Justin Herbert checks down to Ekeler frequently, but so did Phillip Rivers. The Joe Lombardi-run Chargers offenses of 2022 and 2021 allowed for high-volume and creative usage for Ekeler in the passing game, but so did the Shane Steichen-led offenses of 2020 and 2019, and so did the Ken Whisenhunt-led offense of 2018. Ekeler has been the same guy with two different quarterbacks, three different offensive coordinators, in systems that ran the gamut in run/pass philosophy, from the nearly-50% run days of Steichen and Whisenhunt to the sub-40% days of Lombardi, and in running schemes that have at times been incredibly gap-heavy (Whisenhunt’s 2018 offense ran gap concepts 58.6% of the time, a 91st-percentile mark) and at others incredibly gap-light (Steichen called only 35.7% gap runs in 2020, a 37th-percentile rate). Even the overall success of those offenses hasn’t been particularly stable: the Chargers have finished in the top ten in yards in each of the last four seasons, but their rank in points scored has been 13th, 5th, 18th, and 21st, respectively, in the same time-frame. Things in these Charges offenses have been in a near-perpetual state of flux since Ekeler joined the team, but just as Keenan Allen’s skill-set has allowed him to produce consistently despite the changes, so has Ekeler’s. Good players be good, and Ekeler has been far more resistant to situational uncertainty than he gets credit for.

Still, a history of consistency does not guarantee that the introduction of yet another new coordinator in Moore will not adversely affect Ekeler’s ability to score fantasy points, even if Moore is a net positive on the offense overall. Let’s examine the differences between how Lombardi ran things in Los Angeles and how Moore ran things for the last few seasons in Dallas, and particularly how those differences might impact Ekeler as a fantasy scorer.

Many of the bird’s-eye-view factors in this offense should remain fairly constant from last season. From a play-volume perspective, the offenses that Moore ran in Dallas finished 7th, 2nd, 2nd, and 8th, respectively, in plays per game, and 3rd, 1st, 2nd, and 4th, respectively, in seconds per play (with a higher rank indicating fewer seconds per snap), while Lombardi’s Charger offenses were 5th and 2nd, respectively, in plays per game and 1st and 3rd, respectively, in seconds per play in 2021 and 2022. Both coordinators ran fast-paced and high-volume offenses. Additionally, both play-callers have shown a willingness to mix things up in terms of run-blocking schematics. Moore architected zone-heavy running games early on in Dallas (with at least 62% of running back carries coming on zone plays in both 2019 and 2020) before getting increasingly balanced in terms of gap/zone splits in the last two years (in 2022, Cowboys runners handled 230 gap carries and 250 zone carries), while Lombardi’s running games were similarly balanced (Chargers running backs executed gap runs 154 times and zone runs 188 times last season). It seems unlikely that Ekeler will experience a large shift in gap versus zone responsibilities in 2023 than what he’s handled in the recent past.

What is liable to change is the rate at which the Chargers offense throws the ball. It’s difficult to separate Moore’s sensibilities from Mike McCarthy’s mandates in this area, but while Lombardi’s offenses ranked just second and fourth, respectively, in run rate in 2021 and 2022, Moore’s Cowboy attacks were far more run-heavy, especially last season. In both 2019 and 2021, their 39% run rate was right at the league mean, bookending a 2020 season in which they threw the ball at the fifth-highest rate despite being without Dak Prescott for all but five games. Then, Moore opted to run the ball on 48% of the team’s plays in 2022, the third-highest mark in the league. Perhaps more revealing than the raw splits, however, are these coordinators’ run/pass decisions in neutral game script situations (on first and second downs and when win probability for either team does not exceed 80%; essentially, when the playbook is wide open): in those cases, rbsdm.com reveals that Lombardi’s Chargers threw the ball 59.2% of the time over the last two seasons, the fourth-highest mark in the NFL, while Moore’s Cowboys did so just a sixteenth-ranked 52.0% of the time in the same span, and at essentially the same rate over the last four years total. Based on those numbers, it would stand to reason that Ekeler and the other Chargers running backs would be in line for more rushing work in 2023 and beyond than they’ve been accustomed to.

More (perhaps subtle) changes could also come via the ways in which Ekeler is used in the passing game. There’s some chicken-or-the-egg effect going on in determining whether coaches dictate the route inventory of running backs or whether running back ability mandates creative usage, but collegiate wide receiver Tony Pollard’s marks in Route Diversity exceeded the 55th percentile just once in four seasons with Moore, maxing out in the 77th percentile during a 40-target 2020 campaign. Further, the collective variety of the route trees of all Cowboys runners during Moore’s tenure as O.C. ranked just 21st in the league. As I touched on earlier, Ekeler has consistently been deployed on high-Diversity route trees in LA, something that correlates well with high-end fantasy production. If he’s no longer unleashed on the sorts of out, angle, and wheel routes that he’s proven dangerous on in recent seasons and is instead limited to the swing and dig routes that have typified running back pass-game usage in Dallas, we might see a slight decrease in Ekeler’s per-route efficiency: those latter two routes are two of the three least efficient pass-patterns on the running back route tree (based on league-wide yards per route run data), while angle and wheel routes are two of the three most efficient. Angle routes alone are worth more than four times as many yards on a per-route basis than are swings.

Tony Pollard has not been deployed anywhere near as creatively in the passing game as Austin Ekeler has been.

More chicken-and-the-egg conundrums comes from sussing out the per-route target rates for running backs in individual offenses; they’re obviously tied to running back ability to a certain extent, especially when we’re dealing with Ekeler-, Alvin Kamara-, or Christian McCaffrey-type guys who actively create their own opportunities by beating coverage beyond the line of scrimmage, but quarterback tendencies and coordinator play designs also likely factor in as well. To what degree each of those things contributes is hard to say, but it’s perhaps worth pointing out that quarterbacks under Moore in Dallas (which includes 16 games’ worth of starts from non-Prescott players) targeted running backs on a per-route basis at rates far below the league-average. Those players combined for a 33rd-percentile RATE to running backs of just 89.2%, contrasted with the 72nd-percentile RATE of 123.3% that Ekeler and the other Chargers runners have enjoyed at the hands of Lombardi and Herbert in the last two seasons. I don’t anticipate Herbert suddenly no longer having an interest in checking the ball down to Ekeler, but if Moore had anything to do with Prescott, Andy Dalton, and Cooper Rush preferring wideouts and tight ends over Pollard and Ezekiel Elliott in the passing game, then his oversight of the Chargers offense -- in addition to the short and intermediate work that rookie first-round receiver Quentin Johnston is likely to do early on in his career -- could mean a decrease in per-route target rates for Ekeler.

Ultimately, I think Ekeler’s talent will dictate that he continues to be utilized as one of the more versatile out-of-the-backfield receiving weapons in the league, though his Route Diversity and RATE marks will probably split the difference between where they’ve been in the past and where Pollard’s numbers have shaken out under Moore in Dallas. Moore’s propensity for running the ball should mean slightly more volume in that area detracting from Ekeler’s overall receiving production, and my current 2023 projections have a 17-game Ekeler statline at 214 carries for 983 yards and 11 touchdowns in addition to 97 targets (based on a 14% target share, which would be his lowest since 2018) for 80 receptions, 624 yards, and another 5 touchdowns through the air. Such numbers would see him post his lowest from-scrimmage marks in both yardage and touchdowns in the last three seasons while still scoring enough PPR points per game (19.8) to finish as a top-four running back in any season since 2019.