Bijan Robinson is an Atlanta Falcon, and now we gotta figure out what to do with him in dynasty. He’ll obviously remain the top-ranked running back in the player pool (a spot he’s occupied all offseason), and there’s an argument to be made that he deserves to be the top-ranked flex player overall, but with situational factors to consider on top of a recent track record for highly-drafted runners that doesn’t necessarily inspire the same degree of confidence that the community currently has in Robinson specifically, it’s worth exploring how his skill-set fits with this team and what kind of fantasy output we should expect as a result.

To start, it would not shock me if Bijan joined Najee Harris and Ezekiel Elliott as the only runners in the last decade to receive 300 or more carries in their rookie seasons. Since 2000, backs drafted in the top half of the first round have averaged 14.7 carries per game as first-year players, so 250 is the baseline of what we should expect from a player in Robinson’s range assuming healthy, 17-game participation. On top of that precedent, Tyler Allgeier and Cordarrelle Patterson combined for 354 carries (while Caleb Huntley contributed another 76) on a Falcons squad that led the league in rushing attempts last season, and Arthur Smith-led teams have historically shown a strong propensity for pounding the rock. The Atlanta offense’s 0.52 pass/run ratio made them both the only team in the NFL to run more than they passed in 2022 and the most relatively run-heavy team of the last five years (tied with the 2018 Seahawks and the 2019 49ers). According to rbsdm.com, the Falcons opted to run the ball 59.2% of the time in early-down and neutral game script situations last season (when win probability for either team did not exceed 80%), the highest mark in the league and the second-highest mark since 2018 (behind only the 2018 Seahawks).

Bijan Robinson may be in line for the kind of first-year rushing volume that we haven’t seen since Ezekiel Elliott in 2016.

Smith’s Titans teams were also run establishers, posting pass/run ratios of 0.50 in both 2019 and 2020 (Smith-led offenses represent half of all 0.50+ pass/run ratio squads in the last half-decade) while opting to run the ball in neutral script situations 51.2% and 56.9% of the time, respectively, during a stretch when the league-average run rate in such scenarios has been 47.3%. The only season in which Smith has called plays for an NFL team and did not establish the run like his life depended on it was the 2021 season with Atlanta in which his best running back was a wide receiver (Patterson), and after riding Derrick Henry during his most productive seasons, Smith once again has a premier backfield talent in Robinson. We should expect heavy rushing volume for Bijan starting on day one of his NFL career.

How that volume translates into fantasy points given the marriage between Smith’s scheme and Bijan’s skill-set as a runner is a different question. In a league that has had zone concept runs account for 55.3% of all running back rushing attempts in the last five years (and, as tendencies shifted a bit, 51.9% of them in 2022), Smith’s offenses have posted the following rates of zone and gap runs going back to 2019:

While the NFL as a whole has gotten increasingly gap-happy recently, Smith has dug in his heels as a zone-heavy play-caller. Those four squads each land in the top-25 in zone percentage among all teams in the last five years, and outside of the 2020 Titans, they all land in the top-10, with the 2022 Falcons executing the highest rate of zone runs for their running backs among all teams in the sample time-frame save for the 2020 Chicago Bears. We can’t be certain that such an extreme propensity will maintain itself going forward, but it feels like a safe bet that Bijan will handle more carries on zone concepts than he will on gap concepts for the foreseeable future.

Based on the results of my film-charting analysis of Robinson’s performance at Texas, that schematic bent should not move the needle much for our expectations of his effectiveness in the NFL. Bijan graded out slightly below-average for me on the aggregate and accounting for various decision-making-centric factors on a per-carry basis on both gap and zone concepts, but nothing I saw from him in those areas struck me as prohibitively deficient, and his scores on zone runs in the categories of vision, discipline, and especially manipulation all came out above the mean among the 2023 class. Robinson’s best traits are of the physical variety, and his impact as a decision-maker behind the line of scrimmage is likely to be neutral at worst.

That should be just fine in the context of Atlanta’s offense, as they boast one of the best run-blocking offensive lines in the NFL. Football Outsiders had the Falcons unit as the fifth-best in their Line Yards metric last year while Pro Football Focus graded them at the very top, with an 83.7 overall grade that dwarfs the second-place Baltimore Ravens’ mark of 77.2 -- that 6.5-point difference between first- and second-rated squads is greater than the dropoff from second to sixth. While Allgeier is a fine runner and Patterson offers valuable versatility, none of the backs on last season’s Falcons team were world-beaters in and of themselves, and yet each of Allgeier, Patterson, Huntley, and Avery Williams (a converted defensive back) averaged at least 4.76 yards per carry in 2022 (per-carry efficiency that exceeds the 76th-percentile among all NFL backs going back to 2016). Bijan should feast behind such an effective group of blockers.

If he merely duplicates Allgeier’s per-carry efficiency from last season on the 250 carries that a healthy season’s worth of early first-round running back work would typically come with, Robinson would rush for over 1200 yards and be well on his way to a high-end fantasy season, but his ability as a runner is only part of the reason the Falcons thought highly enough of Bijan to take him at eighth overall on Thursday night. We’re already hearing the expected talking points about how Robinson “is more than a running back”, and while that’s a silly justification for selecting a player at a low-value position in the top-ten of the Draft, it is true that Bijan is a stud pass-catcher. As I laid out in this article from earlier this offseason, however, a top-notch receiving skillset isn’t always a guarantee to actually manifest in the NFL for backs with a combination of size, durability, and running skills that gives a coaching staff an easy out of actually utilizing that part of their game (see: Joe Mixon). The workhorse escape hatch provides Robinson with a high floor, but it can also result in lazy and uncreative deployment because you’re not forced to optimize him as a receiver in order to feel like he’s making a strong impact.

Encouragingly, though, Smith-led offenses have a solid history of using versatile players in ways that accentuate their varied talents. There are smarter analysts than I who can wax poetic about the flavorful intricacies of this offense, but who among us can forget newly-acquired Falcons tight end Jonnu Smith’s moments of glory back with Smith in Tennessee (see here and here)? More relevant to Bijan is the multi-talented Patterson, who enjoyed his best season as a pro in 2021 under the offensive guidance of Smith, as he went for over 600 yards as a rusher and over 500 yards as a receiver while leading the team in carries, lining up out wide or in the slot on more than half of his pass routes, and enjoying 96th-percentile diversity in his route tree. That varied usage as a receiver continued in 2022, when only Christian McCaffrey and Aaron Jones ran more diverse arrays of pass patterns than Patterson did.

Especially impressive is Smith’s talent for using backs in creative ways while not stifling their per-route efficiency; in preparation for the sort of landing spot-based analysis I’m doing in this article, I’ve collected coach-centric route-running data for running backs, and among the play-callers across the league who’ve historically dialed up particularly diverse route trees for their backs (there’s a clear top tier of eight guys whose running back trees are above the 85th percentile on aggregate), all of them have seen the expected value of their running backs’ pass patterns take a nosedive as a result.

In layman’s terms: each route type carries an expected value based on league-wide yards per route run numbers for running backs performing those routes, and some routes carry more expected value than others. Across the entire running back route tree, NFL backs average 1.34 yards per route run. At the high end, those same players average 4.86 yards per route run on screens, 2.97 yards per route run on angle routes, and 1.60 yards per route run on wheel routes, while at the bottom end of things, they average just 1.06 yards per route run on flat routes, 0.93 yards per route run on dig routes, and 0.68 yards per route run on swing passes. Because of the relative expected value of those different route types, different route trees are more valuable than others, and it just so happens (and I mean that literally, because this relationship, as we’ll see below, does not have to be the case) that the most diverse route trees are often the least valuable on a per-route basis.

Smith’s usage of Patterson in the last couple years has been unique in that it has been both diverse and valuable: while the diversity of his route trees have been in the 96th and 80th percentiles, respectively, in 2021 and 2022, the expected value of his routes on those trees (based solely on him simply running the routes and ignoring targets, catches, YAC, etc.) has been 0.13 and 0.25 yards per route run, respectively, greater than the league-wide average 0f 1.34 yards per route run. Those numbers land in the 78th and 92nd percentiles, respectively, among all running back route trees since 2016.

While that doesn’t guarantee that Bijan will be used in either creative or high-value ways in the passing game (this isn’t an indictment, but Smith-coached backs like Allgeier and Henry have not had exotic receiving usage schemed up for them), it’s at least evidence that Smith is able and willing to modify his plan on offense to account for (and maximize) dynamic and versatile talents, of which Robinson certainly is one.

The other piece of the Bijan-being-unlocked puzzle is quarterback play, where we have a relative unknown in Atlanta in second-year guy Desmond Ridder. Ridder wasn’t awful last season, as he averaged over 200 passing yards per game and completed two-thirds of his attempts and threw no interceptions (though he did lose two of three fumbles) in a three-game stretch after an uninspiring first start in week 15, but he also didn’t show enough to instill much confidence in his ability to elevate this offense. Because of that, the Falcons should continue their run-heavy ways in 2023 (and perhaps beyond), but I’m particularly interested in how Ridder’s tendencies as a dropback passer might influence Robinson’s receiving production.

Desmond Ridder is a dynamic athlete who ran for 28 touchdowns and over 2700 yards in college.

Ridder’s 4.52 in the forty-yard dash means he has elite speed for a quarterback, and while he didn’t take off and run much as a rookie (he gained a total of 26 rushing yards on 10 attempts across those three late games after running for 38 in his first start), that speed paired with the mobility he showed in college -- with sacks removed from the sample, he averaged 6.5 rushing attempts and 55.4 ground yards per game at Cincinnati -- often portends bad things for backs hoping for checkdown opportunities in the flats. Indeed, Ridder targeted Bearcat runners on basic, dumpoff-type routes 28% less often on a per-route basis than CFB-wide averages over the course of his college career, a mark in the 26th percentile. Interestingly, that doesn’t seem to be due to any sort of compulsion for scrambling that he might have, as Ridder’s per-dropback scramble rate of 4.6% was also lower than the CFB-wide average of 6.2%, and 64% of his collegiate rushing yards came on designed rushes. It seems more likely to me that Ridder wasn’t targeting his backfield mates at Cincinnati because they simply weren’t great receiving options rather than due to his being a run-first guy who ignores checkdown opportunities. The small sample that we have of him in the NFL also backs up that characterization, as he targeted running backs on 23% of his 115 pass attempts last season, slightly above the league-wide average that typically hovers in the 19-20% range.

In all, I think the Atlanta landing spot is pretty juicy for Bijan Robinson’s prospects as a high-end producer in the NFL. He should see heavy volume almost immediately on a team with a strong offensive line and a desire to establish the run, and Arthur Smith’s history as a creative schemer of versatile talent is encouraging for Robinson’s potential to see the sort of receiving usage that would give him access to an elite fantasy ceiling. Bijan was the 1.01 in rookie drafts and the RB1 in dynasty before he landed with the Falcons, and, if anything, you should feel more confident in him now that he has.