Prior to this year’s NFL Draft, there was much gnashing of teeth regarding the supposed likelihood that Dameon Pierce would be replaced by the Texans given the relatively light investment made in him a year ago on top of what was supposed to be a stacked 2023 running back class. Now, after surviving draft weekend with Houston having selected zero running backs, last year’s RB19 is being valued as the RB17 over at KeepTradeCut and in a region of the running back landscape that has you choosing between injury question marks like JK Dobbins and Javonte Williams and guys entering uncharted career territory in Derrick Henry, Alexander Mattison, and Miles Sanders. Pierce has the best mix of youth, proven ability, and health among players in that range, but he’s also a former fourth-round pick on a bad team, and as a result, it’s not easy to know what to do with him in dynasty.

Last season, Pierce answered questions about his subdued collegiate role and subsequent mediocre draft capital by handling the sixth-highest per-game carry load in the league, gaining over 1100 yards from scrimmage, and finishing as a top-24 fantasy running back while playing on a three-win Houston team that ranked in the bottom-three in both total points scored and total yards gained on offense. As a day three pick who was that productive as a first-year player, Pierce joined a cohort of just 11 other late-drafted runners who put up at least 1000 scrimmage yards and 12.0 fantasy points per game (the approximate threshold for RB2-level production in recent seasons) since the turn of the century. If we include in our historical sample the guys who accomplished such a feat as second-year backs, we’re left with a sample of 21 players (including Pierce) from the last 22 years who outproduced traditional, investment-based performance expectations during their first seasons in the league to at least the degree that Pierce did last season:

While he survived his first post-rookie season NFL Draft without having been replaced (a fate not avoided by classmate and fellow day-three stud Tyler Allgeier), Pierce isn’t necessarily in the clear in terms of long-term value, so I think it’s worth examining these historical peers and applying insights gained from their situations to how we can approach Pierce as a dynasty asset.

To start, we can probably toss aside guys like Mike Anderson and Dominic Rhodes from our sample of Pierce parallels due to the fact that both of those players enjoyed productive rookie seasons in the injury-related absence of incumbent starters and therefore didn’t have legitimate opportunities to build upon that success in subsequent years. Terrell Davis ran for over 2000 yards and was the league’s MVP as a 26-year old in 1998 before suffering a string of injuries beginning in 1999, a season in which rookie Olandis Gary stepped up as the Broncos’ lead back and scored 16.2 fantasy points per game (Gary was himself a fourth-round pick whose production that season would’ve qualified him for this list if we hadn’t established 2000 as our cutoff date) in his absence. The next season, both Davis and Gary missed significant time with injuries, opening the door for the newly-drafted Anderson to have his own coming out party. In 2001, all three backs suited up in at least 8 games, and Anderson spent the next few years playing fullback and fighting through his own injuries before finally posting another 1000-yard rushing campaign as a 32-year old in 2005. As a guy who battled two productive incumbents and didn’t have the chance to lead his backfield in even his second season, Anderson’s situation is not really analogous to Pierce’s.

Similarly, Rhodes had a productive rookie season in the absence of Edgerrin James, who was coming off back-to-back rushing titles prior to tearing his ACL in October of 2001. James returned to post four straight seasons of at least 1300 scrimmage yards beginning in 2002, and Rhodes didn’t touch the ball more than 55 times in a season until James left for Arizona in 2006. There’s no James equivalent on the Texans, so this situation isn’t analogous to Pierce’s either.

Of the remaining 18 players in this group, four of them were ostensibly replaced via substantial investment in other running backs in the seasons following their early breakouts: Tarik Cohen (who, as a pure satellite back, isn’t cleanly applicable precedent for Pierce anyway) was supplanted by third-rounder David Montgomery starting in 2019, Elijah Mitchell got nuked by the midseason addition of Christian McCaffrey in 2022, James Robinson was rewarded for his 1400-yard, 10-touchdown rookie season by the Jaguars’ selecting Travis Etienne in the first round of the following draft (though Etienne’s preseason Lisfranc injury in 2021 postponed the backfield takeover until 2022), and Zac Stacy had his starting job stolen by third-round rookie Tre Mason in 2014 before Mason was himself eviscerated by Todd Gurley in the top-10 of the 2015 draft.

The Texans didn’t draft any running backs this offseason, but they did sign Devin Singletary, an unspectacular but solid player whose role in this backfield could turn out to be anything between breather back and 1B runner in something close to a 50/50 split with Pierce. I don’t want to dismiss the potential that Singletary has to eat into Pierce’s workload (and I’ll talk more about how their respective skill-sets fit into this offense later), but I think it’s clear that Singletary was not brought in to completely leapfrog him in the same way that Montgomery, McCaffrey, Etienne, and Stacy were brought in to supplant the young breakout runners mentioned above. If I’m right, that means Pierce’s situation is most analogous to the circumstances surrounding the remaining backs in our sample group, guys who were surprisingly productive as low-investment runners early on in their careers and without the obstacles to future production represented by returning incumbents or shiny new toys. That group includes CJ Anderson, Chris Carson, Arian Foster, Devonta Freeman, Tim Hightower, Jordan Howard, Phillip Lindsay, Marlon Mack, Alfred Morris, Latavius Murray, Willie Parker, Marcel Shipp, Rhamondre Stevenson, and Domanick Williams.

Devonta Freeman represents the upside case for day three picks like Dameon Pierce producing high-end fantasy numbers for several seasons at a time.

Because we know Pierce wasn’t replaced this offseason, it doesn’t help us much to look at what the above group of backs did in the seasons immediately following their year one or year two breakouts -- none of them were replaced either, so their fluctuations in production were just due to whatever random factors happen to influence players of any type in a given season. Pierce has two years remaining on his rookie contract after 2023 is up, however, and the possibility that he gets supplanted in free agency or the draft exists for that time even as he made it relatively unscathed through his first NFL offseason. As the same possibility existed for each of the players in our refined sample group, let’s examine how their situations evolved in the years following their first post-breakout seasons.

The odds that Pierce gets replaced in next year’s draft or free agency period are represented in our sample group by Lindsay’s getting rewarded for two straight 1000-yard rushing seasons by Denver’s addition of Melvin Gordon to the backfield prior to Lindsay’s third year in the league, and by Indianapolis’ selection of Jonathan Taylor in the second round of the 2020 draft serving as a slap in the face to Mack, who was coming off seasons of 14.8 and 13.0 PPR points per game, respectively, in his second and third years with the Colts. Outside of those guys, we don’t have a strong history of these surprisingly productive backs being actively replaced in the subsequent seasons, and of the 14 players left in our sample, only five of them -- Hightower, Howard, Lindsay, Morris, and Murray -- did not end up signing new contracts with their original teams after (or before) their rookie contracts expired (technically, Williams didn’t either, but he suffered a career-ending injury before his rookie deal was up, and Stevenson isn’t yet at that point in his career).

In total, these fourteen guys continued producing at at least an RB2 level in 16 of 26 collective rookie contract seasons following their original breakouts, and just three of them -- Hightower, Morris, and Shipp -- failed to do so at least once in that timeframe. Among them, only Hightower failed to produce at least one more season of 1000 or more yards from scrimmage, and they collectively averaged 1.5 such seasons after their initial year of out-of-nowhere productivity.

Given that historical precedent, I think it’s more likely than not that Pierce ends up resigning with Houston after his rookie contract is up in 2025 (though that’s certainly not a foregone conclusion), but I also think it’s appropriate to treat him as if his utility as a dynasty asset ends at that same cutoff point. Similarly-producing rookies with more substantial team investment -- like Nick Chubb, Miles Sanders, Giovani Bernard, and Kenneth Walker -- are not immune to being moved on from after their rookie contracts are up (as in the case of Sanders) or to their teams adding talent to their backfields in the middle of those contracts (as Kareem Hunt, Jeremy Hill, and Zach Charbonnet were brought in to supplement Chubb, Bernard, and Walker, respectively), and the leash is likely to be shorter with the later-drafted Pierce. Assuming he can hold off Singletary (and stay healthy) in 2023, he should have another opportunity to be productive in 2024, but I prefer to get out early rather than late and would be looking to jump ship at that point. The respective career arcs of Freeman and Foster (both of whom re-signed with their original teams and produced at RB1 or near-RB1 levels during their second contracts) exemplify the (ironic) risk associated with such a risk-averse approach, but I’m treating Pierce’s 2023 season like year two of a three-year rental.

In the meantime, it’s worth considering how Pierce is likely to progress as a player, how Singletary might eat into his workload, and how all the moving parts in this offense might affect the main pieces of the backfield given the presence of new offensive coordinator Bobby Slowik and the selection of a new franchise quarterback in CJ Stroud.

All of those things are interrelated, so let’s first look at the most consequential element at play: how good is Pierce relative to Singletary? Based on the rushing efficiency numbers posted by each of them in recent seasons, I’d say somewhere between “slightly better” and “much better”:

In his first year in the league, Pierce posted the highest Box-Adjusted Efficiency Rating among all lead backs in 2022 (by a whopping 25.3% over the second-place Austin Ekeler), a mark that also ranks as the sixth-highest among lead backs since 2016 and lands in the 98th-percentile among all backs with at least 10 carries in a single season in that timeframe. Additionally, the only RB1s who produced greater Relative Success Rate numbers last season than the 84th-percentile mark that Pierce posted are Josh Jacobs and Travis Etienne (at 8.2% and 8.8%, respectively). In some ways, Pierce’s rookie season mirrors Najee Harris’ from a team-relative efficiency standpoint, as they each smashed the collective per-carry numbers of backfields that were otherwise bereft of talent, but while Harris managed just 3.91 raw yards per carry (a 40th-percentile mark) behind the 27th-ranked run-blocking offensive line (according to Pro Football Focus) in 2021, Pierce averaged a respectable 4.27 (56th percentile) despite a unit that PFF ranked 29th in the league in run-blocking (and whose 47.9 grade in that area would have made them the stone worst run-blocking line in 2021). Considering the success he achieved even without attention paid to the context surrounding his numbers, we should be more confident that Pierce’s impressive team-relative metrics represent legitimately high-end rushing ability than we were for Harris’, and they also place Pierce in a really nice cohort of historical backs: since 2016, the only other lead runners who’ve posted a BAE Rating above the 150% threshold and an RSR above the 5% threshold while also handling 200 or more carries and producing a raw per-carry average of at least four yards in a single season are (in descending order based on BAE Rating) rookie Kareem Hunt, prime Ezekiel Elliott in 2018, Carlos Hyde as the RB12 in 2016, Joe Mixon and Derrick Henry in 2018, and Jay Ajayi, Jordan Howard, and Spencer Ware in 2016 (when Ware was the RB16 and Ajayi and Howard finished 4th and 2nd, respectively, in the entire league in rushing yards). All that after Pierce entered the league with a 92nd-percentile RSR and a 57th-percentile BAE Rating that combined to portend top-end between-the-tackles ability despite a subdued college workload, so I don’t think we should view the success he experienced as a rookie as some sort of fluke.

On the other hand, Singletary has been a fine but unexciting lead runner ever since he entered the league: he’s never been actively bad as a rusher but has also never put together a single season with greater-than-50th-percentile marks in both BAE Rating and RSR, he’s always led his teams in carries (save for his rookie season, when Frank Gore out-attempted him by 15 while playing in four more games than Singletary did) but never established himself as a clear lead dog in backfields otherwise populated by league-average rushing talents like Zack Moss, James Cook, and an aging Gore, and he’s always been fantasy relevant without ever being an actual difference maker (he’s averaged between 9.0 and 12.3 points per game in every season of his career). He was an effective grinder in 2022, but his 86.2% BAE Rating ranked 27th among league-wide lead runners.

Pierce is a better runner than Singletary is (he also posted better marks than the former Bill in each of missed tackles forced per attempt, yards after contact per attempt, Juke Rate, and yards created per touch last season), and I also think he profiles as a better fit in Houston’s new-look offense. Slowik was an offensive assistant for Kyle Shanahan in San Francisco from 2019 to 2022, a stretch in which the 49ers executed zone concept runs at an above-average rate in every season and at a 62% clip overall (a rate in the 65th percentile among NFL teams in the last seven years). I’m not confident in claiming that Pierce is better suited to either a zone- or gap-heavy running scheme -- he averaged 0.75 more yards per carry on gap than zone runs during a college career in which his workload skewed slightly zone-heavy, and then averaged 0.10 more yards per carry on zone while seeing a near-perfect 50/50 split in gap and zone with Houston last season -- but 672 carries’ worth of evidence of Singletary in the NFL indicates that he’s a much stronger gap than zone runner, as he’s averaged 5.32 yards per carry on the former concept and just 4.18 on the latter. More zone under Slowik would seem to benefit Pierce more (or at least hurt him less) than it would Singletary.

What should benefit both of them is an increase in creative passing-game usage: the 49er offenses that Slowik has had a hand in architecting in recent years (as a Passing Game Specialist and the Passing Game Coordinator in the last two, respectively) have entrusted their running backs with the greatest Route Diversity of any team in the league. Further, quarterbacks in San Francisco in those seasons have targeted running backs at higher-than-average per-route rates on both checkdown-type pass patterns and advanced downfield concepts. It’s often difficult to determine whether the target tendencies in a given offense are primarily the result of quarterback decision-making or schematic design, but the 49ers had a revolving door of replacement-level game managers under center during Slowik’s tenure with the team, so I’m willing to lean toward the latter explanation in this case. Pierce is already coming off a rookie season in which he posted basic and advanced RATE numbers in the 67th and 93rd percentiles, respectively, as a follow-up to a college career during which he posted Route Diversity numbers above the 79th percentile in each of his last two seasons, put up 77th-percentile yards per target marks, and, based on his 1.7-yard aDOT and the 24.1% of snaps that he spent lined up either in the slot or out wide (numbers in the 75th and 89th percentiles, respectively, among historical prospects), was used more dynamically as a receiver than anyone in his draft class not named James Cook. He has untapped receiving potential that could be unlocked by a more expansive and more fantasy-friendly role in that phase of the game.

Dameon Pierce was moved around the formation and was thrown the ball downfield at Florida at rates that rivaled the way James Cook was used at Georgia.

Singletary is a quality utility player who I wouldn’t be shocked to see play some third downs, but the Bills also just spent the last few offseasons trying to find anyone but him (they drafted Cook while also trading for Nyheim Hines and signing Duke Johnson) to serve as a go-to receiving option out of the backfield. I’d imagine the Texans don’t envision any sort of pure satellite back role for him, so the door should still be open for Pierce to seize significant work in that area. Reports out of Houston are encouraging on that front: Pierce says he’s been watching film of Christian McCaffrey in anticipation of an increased receiving role under Slowik, and running backs coach Danny Barrett has spoken of a “night and day” improvement in the young runner’s pass protection ability, a skill that was one of Pierce’s strengths as a prospect before some growing pains as he acclimated to the faster NFL game.

Beyond those things -- more passing-game responsibilities and a transition to a zone-heavier running scheme -- the Texans offense is liable to improve from their status as one of the worst offenses in the league last season just based on much-needed talent improvements across the board. Rookie quarterbacks are never a sure thing, but Stroud’s ceiling is much higher than Davis Mills’, and he’ll have retooled offensive line (Houston added veterans Greg Little and Michael Deiter in free agency, drafted Penn State center Juice Skruggs in the second round of the draft, and only lost reserve guard Justin McCray from last year’s group) and pass-catching (Dalton Schultz and Robert Woods signed with Houston in free agency, the team drafted Houston receiver Tank Dell in the third round, and they get John Metchie back after he battled leukemia as a rookie) units with more talent than what Mills had to work with. We’re hoping for incremental improvements here, but there’s not much room to do anything but progress from where this team was a year ago.

Ultimately, I think this will be a telling season for Pierce, particularly in regards to how much he lets Singletary eat into the 73.8% opportunity share that he enjoyed a year ago. If he can maintain 15 carries per game (he averaged nearly 17 as a rookie) while catching closer to 50 passes on a slightly-improved offense that offers him the opportunity to score more than the five touchdowns he punched in in 2022, I think Pierce could flirt with low-end RB1 numbers in 2023. If Singletary asserts himself as more of a 1B in this backfield, Pierce could be virtually useless in fantasy football. I think the talent disparity between the two backs points to the former scenario being more likely, so I’m a believer in Pierce as a borderline top-12 running back in dynasty until the timer runs out on his rookie contract.