We finally got it. Something resembling legitimate proof of Cam Akers’ ability to run the ball effectively in the NFL came to us over the course of the second half of 2022, when he ran for 610 yards and six touchdowns at 4.84 yards per carry in the Rams’ final eight games while also putting up 14.7 PPR points per game, fantasy numbers that would’ve slotted him ahead of Rhamondre Stevenson and Aaron Jones as the RB10 if they were his season-long stats. Akers was especially good in the final quarter of the season, averaging 5.47 yards per carry and rushing at a 1742-yard 17-game pace while scoring 19.5 points per game from week fifteen on.

I say we “finally” got “legitimate” proof because while Akers is obviously talented -- you don’t fall backwards into a 5-star rating as a high school recruit, multiple 1000-yard rushing seasons in the ACC (including one as an 18-year old true freshman), an 8.79 Relative Athletic Score, and second round capital in the NFL Draft -- we haven’t really seen convincing evidence of that talent manifest itself on the field until late last season.

We saw him suffer a brutal Achilles injury that resulted in a lost 2021 campaign, but even before then, Akers’ performance as a rookie hardly justified the RB6 heights that his dynasty value reached during the following summer (you can check his value history on KeepTradeCut). His crowning achievement in that season (and therefore in his career prior to his impressive second-half stretch in 2022) was a 29-for-171 game against the Patriots, and he strung together two more impressive outings 46-for-221 in the playoffs, but he spent much of the year ceding touches to Darrell Henderson and Malcolm Brown, had zero other (regular season) games with more than 84 rushing yards, had as many 10-carry games at less than three yards per carry as he did above four yards per carry, and context made his per-rush numbers look even worse. Pro Football Focus rated the Rams’ offensive line as the league’s fourth-best run-blocking unit that season, and according to both team-relative and expectation-based rushing efficiency metrics, Akers was doing far less with his carries than he should have been. Here are his rookie numbers compared to those he posted last season:

A 55th-percentile Box-Adjusted Efficiency Rating isn’t anything to be ashamed of, but Rushing Yards Over Expected per Attempt provides similar context from a different angle and Akers was in the 41st percentile there, yet the real issue was an incredible lack of consistency on the ground. Akers’ Relative Success Rate was a 10th-percentile mark that season, and only six players in the last seven years (as far back as data is available) have led their teams in carries while posting RSRs that low. Akers had a few big games, but he was profoundly unreliable as a ball-carrier in his rookie season.

That was a problem for me given that Akers was a tough eval coming out of college. He had staunch supporters despite his (according to playerprofiler.com) 29th-percentile per-carry rushing average at Florida State, with NFL.com’s oft-cited running back guru Lance Zierlein calling him “a three-down option” and “one of the more natural runners” in a 2020 draft class that -- at least at the time -- was considered pretty stacked at running back.

Separating individual player performance from the environment in which they operate is tricky, and while most seemed willing to give Akers the benefit of the doubt for his poor collegiate efficiency considering that he was playing behind an abysmal offensive line (PFF rated them as the seventh- and then sixth-worst unit in the country during Akers’ sophomore and junior seasons, respectively), I was looking for data-centric evidence affirming his on-field quality and simply couldn’t find much of it. The following are the rushing efficiency numbers that Akers ended his college career with:

A BAE Rating and RSR combo that hovers around the 50th percentile isn’t bad, but it’s literally mediocre: I didn’t have access to that data at the time I was evaluating Akers’ draft class, but even if I did, I don’t think it would have satisfied my thirst for evidence of his supposedly high-end ability.

What I did have access to was everything else on the above table, numbers that, to me, painted the picture of a fight-for-your-life runner who ultimately failed to produce contextually-adjusted rushing marks that were anything close to impressive relative to how other eventual pro backs performed in the context of their own college offenses. Akers outdid the per-carry efficiency of the other backs at Florida State, but just barely, and while he broke a lot of tackles, he lagged behind other Seminole runners in his creation of big plays and was plain bad in the open field, where the impact of a poor run-blocking unit wouldn’t be felt. It didn’t strike me as impossible that a player with such numbers could be a quality runner simply stifled by poor external circumstances, but the leap required to assume that was the case didn’t seem justifiable.

As a result, I’ve been lower than consensus on Akers ever since, and the hypothetical ability he possesses has felt less and less likely to actually materialize as he dealt with injuries and struggled to acclimate to the NFL game in the succeeding years. Now, though, we finally got it. RYOE still doesn’t think Akers was very good last season (though I’m not convinced that RYOE does a great job of separating poor post-handoff blocking from “poor” post-handoff running), but he was legitimately productive in the second half of the year and posted BAE Rating and -- especially encouraging to me -- RSR marks that were both decidedly good. The former landed in the 72nd percentile with the latter in the 82nd, and the only lead backs in the league who matched him in both categories last season were Austin Ekeler, Dameon Pierce, Josh Jacobs, and Travis Etienne. It’s a relatively small sample that is perhaps still outweighed by a long history of play that required extensive excuse-making in order to dismiss subpar on-field results, but Akers finally ran like one of the best backs in the league last season.

Dameon Pierce was a beast on the ground in his first NFL season.

What does that mean for how we should approach him as a fantasy asset in 2023 and beyond? For one, I think it means good things for his immediate opportunity. Akers is entering the final year of his rookie contract, so it’s difficult to project what things might look like for him a year from today, but he may not have to deal this season with one thing that’s had a major suppressive effect on his ability to assert himself thus far in his career: the fickleness with which Sean McVay has handed out playing time in the backfield.

Injuries have played a part in this phenomenon, but since Akers was drafted and prior to his productive second-half stretch in 2022, he never had longer than a four-week streak of games with at least 10 carries each, he’s had back-to-back games in which he played 2% and 4% of the snaps while never touching the ball bookended by contests in which he touched the ball 9 and 10 times, and even during last year’s late-season breakout, he had four consecutive games in which he played 30%, 72%, 42%, and then 76% of the snaps, and we know that Darrell Henderson’s usage in Los Angeles was similarly inconsistent. Perhaps I’m just bringing forth evidence that McVay can’t be trusted to actually give Akers a legitimate shot at a workhorse role in 2023, but Akers strung together eight straight games of either starting, receiving 10+ carries, or both at the end of last season, the longest such streak for any Rams running back in the last three years. He played well during that time, is currently healthy, and no longer has to deal with Henderson as a peer in the running back room, and while there are possibilities for other thorns to develop in Akers’ side here -- McVay may be planning on massively increasing Kyren Williams’ role after he had just 35 carries and 9 receptions as a rookie, including just one game over 10 attempts and four straight to end the year in which he played 9%, 12%, 6%, and 0% of the snaps, respectively, or Zach Evans could force his way onto the field by being as good in spot duty as I think he can be (see here and here), or Sony Michel could stick around as a frustrating presence on the active roster instead of simply being a camp body signed for the summer -- the runway is as clear as it’s ever been for the former Seminole to establish himself as a quality starting running back in the NFL.

We’ll circle back to Williams, Evans, and the other runners in this backfield in a bit, but I first want to assume that Akers stays healthy, holds on to a solid role throughout the season, and runs for 1000 yards for the first time in his career in 2023. Even on a bad offense -- the Rams went 2-6 and averaged fewer than 20 points per game in the last eight games of last season -- Akers produced at an RB1 level in that second-half stretch, so it’s clearly possible that he can deliver high-end fantasy numbers despite adverse circumstances (mediocre offensive line, poor quarterback play, etc.), but I’m particularly interested in what we can expect of his career arc in the event that things go his way this year.

Since the advent of free agency and therefore of the four-year rookie contract system in 1993 (unless my knowledge of recent NFL history and understanding of the terms of the relevant collective bargaining agreements is flawed), there have been eleven runners who found themselves in a similar post-year four situation as what Akers will hypothetically find himself in next offseason: Tiki Barber, Edgar Bennett, Ahmad Bradshaw, Stephen Davis, Reuben Droughns, Raymont Harris, Rudi Johnson, Dorsey Levens, Adrian Murrell, Tony Pollard, and Miles Sanders each finished off their rookie contracts with the first 1000-yard rushing season of their careers. Contract details from historical players are not easy to come by, but I think some basic insights can be gleaned from how these runners continued their careers from post-year four on.

Rudi Johnson started slow with the Bengals before stringing together four straight productive seasons.

Barber signed a six-year deal with the Giants immediately following his breakout season and scored at least 15 PPR points per game in every year of that deal before retiring after the 2006 campaign. Bennett played one more season with the Packers in which he posted 1075 scrimmage yards but averaged only 9.8 points per game, then ruptured his Achilles before his career petered out after two underwhelming seasons with the Bears. Bradshaw signed a four-year contract with the Giants after rushing for over 1200 yards in 2010, had two solid seasons (one at 16 PPG, one at 12.8) before getting cut and then finishing his career with the Colts. Davis stayed with Washington for three more years after his 1999 breakout, posting a 17.5-PPG season in 2000 and then two more at 13.9 in 2001 and 2002, after which he got cut, signed with the Panthers, and had another RB1-level season in 2003. Droughns posted his first 1000-yard rushing campaign as a Denver Bronco (which was actually his second team as he was drafted and then cut by the Lions) in 2004 and was subsequently traded to Cleveland, where he put together another 1200-yard season before significantly declining in 2006. Harris’ last season with the Bears was the one in which he ran for 1000 yards for the first time, and he totaled just 352 yards from scrimmage with three different teams over the next three years. Johnson signed a five-year deal with the Bengals after breaking out in 2004, after which he posted two more seasons of at least 1300 rushing yards before declining in 2007. Levens took over for Bennett in Green Bay with a 1400-yard campaign in 1997 and stayed with the team for another four years, battling injuries throughout that time but posting 20.8 PPG during a mostly-healthy 1999 season. Murrell played one more season with the Jets after his breakout, running for 1042 yards as a fifth-year guy before getting traded to the Cardinals, where he posted one last 1000-yard season in 1998. The other two guys on our list are Pollard and Sanders, who obviously haven’t had a chance to see the rest of their careers play out; still, Dallas hit Pollard with the franchise tag and Philadelphia was content to see Sanders move on to Carolina.

The particulars of each of these situations are very different, but all in all, it’s encouraging to me that most of our sample experienced legitimate success in subsequent seasons beyond year four, with five of them -- Barber, Bradshaw, Davis, Johnson, and Levens -- re-upping on substantial deals with their original teams and seven of the eligible nine (not counting Pollard and Sanders) -- Barber, Bradshaw, Davis, Droughns, Johnson, Levens, and Murrell -- proving to not be one-year wonders via quality seasons of production following their relatively late breakouts. It’s difficult to bet on any running back making a significant impact in fantasy football after the conclusion of their rookie contract in the landscape of the modern NFL, but I don’t think the slow start to Akers’ career should be viewed as a large negative in that area. He turned 24-years old just a couple weeks ago and will enter his fifth season in the league at more than a year younger than what Pollard and Sanders are now, so assuming things go well in 2023, I’d be willing to roll the dice on Akers stringing together another season or two of quality numbers.

We’ll finish off this piece with a short look at the other guys in the Rams backfield. Williams is the most established incumbent here (which isn’t saying much), but along with his subdued role as a rookie, he just didn’t play very well in his first NFL action: his BAE Rating, RSR, and RYOE numbers landed in the 31st, 31st, and 32nd percentiles, respectively. Those marks are pretty much in line with what I would have expected based on his collegiate performance, as well, as he produced a 23rd-percentile BAE Rating and a 33rd-percentile RSR over the course of his career at Notre Dame. He’s not very big, he’s not very athletic, and he’s not a very good runner of the football, so unless McVay invents some sort of pure pass-catching role for Williams, I don’t anticipate him making a much greater impact going forward than he did in 2022.

Michel has some sneaky potential to screw things up in this backfield considering that McVay gave him 208 carries in 2021, but the former Georgia Bulldog hasn’t posted either a positive RYOE or a greater-than-100% mark in BAE Rating in three years, and he hasn’t posted a positive RSR since he was a rookie. If opportunity is handed out based on merit this season, Michel shouldn’t be a factor.

Ronnie Rivers is also here, but he touched the ball only 14 times as rookie, gained only 50 yards on those touches, and came into the league as an undrafted five-year guy from a Group of Five conference whose final college season saw him post a 7th-percentile BAE Rating and a 25th-percentile RSR. His value in this offense is contingent upon McVay inventing a satellite back role that hasn’t really existed to date, as well as on Rivers’ beating out the more-established Williams for opportunity in that role.

The last guy in this running back room is Evans, who I’m a massive fan of. If Akers can’t stay healthy or if McVay can’t resist playing weekly backfield roulette, Evans has the potential to start games as a rookie, and if not, he’s easily the best candidate for breather-back touches among the depth pieces behind Akers. He’s dirt cheap in both dynasty (RB54 at KeepTradeCut) and redraft (RB71 on Underdog) right now, with the talent to outperform both his fantasy and real-life draft capital if things break right.