We haven’t really seen JK Dobbins much in the NFL, but the fleeting on-field views we have received of him have been fantastic. After being selected in the second round and as the RB5 in the 2020 draft class, Dobbins has played in barely half as many games in his career as classmates Antonio Gibson and AJ Dillon have (23 to 45) and has just the eighth-most rushing attempts among all backs drafted that year, a phenomenon attributable to his lack of availability as well as to a workload that hasn’t been very big even when he’s been healthy -- he averages fewer than 10 carries per game. On that relatively little work, though, Dobbins has been awesome, as he averages 5.86 yards per carry and has produced the following team-relative efficiency numbers during his two seasons of NFL action:

Despite being one of the best ball-carriers in the league on a per-touch basis pretty much every time we’ve seen him on the field, Dobbins’ light workload (along with some other factors that we’ll address later) has meant that he’s never finished higher than the RB29 in PPR points per game, with a career-best 11.23 per-game average that trails the rate at which Cordarrelle Patterson, Latavius Murray, and Jerick McKinnon each scored fantasy points last season. RB24 finishers (representing the bottom of the generally startable fantasy backs in 12-team leagues) in the last five years have scored an average of 12.3 points per game, a mark that Dobbins has hit in just 43% of his career games.

And yet, according to crowd-sourced valuations over at KeepTradeCut and recent ADP data from bulletproofff.com, Dobbins is priced somewhere in the RB16 to RB19 range in dynasty right now. His impressive return to the field last season after a brutal knee injury suffered in August of 2021 should inspire confidence that he can be the same explosive player going forward that we’ve come to know him as, but the cost of acquisition in dynasty requires him to produce as something more than that same guy in order to return value. With a lot changing around Dobbins in Baltimore, it’s worth exploring whether it’s reasonable to expect him to resume an upward trajectory in his career or whether the community is being too optimistic with a guy from whom we’ve never seen what we’re asking for.

In my opinion, the key to sussing out the legitimacy of Dobbins’ current dynasty valuation vis-à-vis his own ability in the context of a revamped offensive environment in Baltimore -- curated by new offensive coordinator Todd Monken -- is determining the reasons why he has so far been unable to produce high-end fantasy numbers and evaluating to what degree those shortcomings might manifest in these new circumstances. As I mentioned above, perhaps the biggest issue Dobbins has had thus far (other than health) is a lack of volume. The average RB1-level scorer (15+ PPR points per game) in the last ten years has carried the ball an average of 16.2 times per game, and of the 109 guys in that group, only eight managed RB1-type production while carrying the ball as little on a per-game basis as Dobbins has in his career (less than 10 times per game): Theo Riddick, Ahmad Bradshaw, Austin Ekeler, Alvin Kamara, Chris Thompson, Danny Woodhead, James White, and Shane Vereen. As you can probably guess, all of those guys supplemented a lack of high-end rushing volume with top-tier pass-catching production, as each of them averaged at least 3.8 receptions per contest in their RB1-quality seasons in question. Conversely, Dobbins has averaged fewer receptions per game for his career (1.1) than any running back has averaged in an RB1-level season in the last decade (Derrick Henry owns the lowest per-game receiving numbers of any of those 109 players, as he averaged 1.2 while finishing as the RB4 and RB3, respectively, in 2019 and 2020).

No RB1 in the last ten years has caught the ball as little as JK Dobbins has so far in his NFL career, but Derrick Henry comes close.

I’m not so sure that’s an issue that we should expect to correct itself now that Monken is in charge of this offense. From a basic level, the Ravens have finished first, third, and seventh in the league in rushing attempts in the three seasons since Dobbins was drafted, and the sample we have of Monken-led pro offenses are of the Buccaneers finishing eighth, 26th, and 22nd in rushing attempts from 2016 to 2018, and of the Browns finishing 22nd in 2019. According to rbsdm.com, Monken offenses ranked 12th, 28th, 29th, and 23rd, respectively, in the NFL in run rate in early-down and neutral game script situations in those same seasons. He’s historically been a chuck-the-ball-around-the-yard type of game-planner, and reports out of Ravens OTAs indicate that such a philosophy seems to be carrying over to Baltimore; Lamar Jackson has said he expects “less running and more throwing” on offense this season, and remarked that “running can only take you so far” while acknowledging that his own contributions on the ground will “absolutely” be scaled back going forward. With Odell Beckham, Nelson Agholor, and first-round wideout Zay Flowers brought in this offseason to supplement a group of pass-catchers that already includes a stud tight end in Mark Andrews and a hypothetically talented Rashod Bateman, the personnel moves the team has made in recent months make sense in the context of a philosophical shift toward throwing the ball. There almost certainly will not be as many carries up for grabs in Baltimore as there have been in the last few years.

An increase in rushing volume for Dobbins, then, will have to come via a larger share of whatever is left of this shrunken running game. Considering how effective he’s been on a per-carry basis, more work would certainly be warranted, but -- and Dobbins’ lack of volume is evidence of this -- this coaching staff (specifically John Harbaugh, who is still the Ravens’ head coach) has shown a desire to get other guys -- particularly Gus Edwards -- involved even in times when Dobbins has been healthy and running well. Edwards averaged more carries per game than Dobbins did back in 2020, and after Dobbins went 17-for-93 in last season’s week 17 game against the Steelers, Harbaugh said, “Gus should have played more, there’s no doubt about it. Really no excuse for that.”

Harbaugh has also provided us with insights into his general philosophy regarding running back workload splits before, saying the following after Dobbins’ knee injury in the 2021 offseason:

Then, earlier this spring, Harbaugh hyped up both Dobbins and Edwards as being ready to "come back and shock the world" after being a full season removed from their respective knee injuries. Considering that Dobbins has not been the pinnacle of health and availability so far in his pro career, it makes sense that Harbaugh would want to continue deploying him in a one-two punch with another effective runner, something the team-relative efficiency marks indicate that Edwards has been throughout his own career (while, by the way, adding a different, reliable pounder sort of dimension to the backfield that the smaller and more explosive Dobbins does not):

Because of that confluence of factors -- Dobbins’ injury history, Edwards’ effectiveness, Harbaugh’s inclination towards committee backfields -- I think any increase in ground-based opportunity share for Dobbins will not be extreme. I could see him cresting the 200-carry mark for the first time in his career, but even approaching the 275 threshold that represents the full-season pace for the average RB1-level producer in the last ten years seems lofty.

And there’s the issue of his receiving volume. The Ravens will almost certainly pass the ball more this season (and going forward with Monken) than they have since drafting Dobbins, but the Ohio State alum doesn’t seem to me to be in a particularly good position to benefit heavily from that increase in pass attempts. The first issue in that regard is that, even if Jackson is not carrying the ball as often as he has in recent years, he’s still a running quarterback who’s relatively more liable to scramble than he is to checkdown to backs in the flats: he scrambled on a per-dropback basis at the lowest rate of his career last season but was still well above the league-wide rate (6.6% to 4.6%), and he targets running backs 24% less often on a per-route basis than do quarterbacks across the NFL.

Betting on JK Dobbins to greatly increase his receiving productivity while Lamar Jackson is his quarterback seems like a losing proposition.

Monken-led offenses have also not targeted running backs at high rates: during his time with the Buccaneers and Browns, runners were targeted 15% less often than the league mean, and as the offensive coordinator for the Georgia Bulldogs from 2020 to 2022, a group of backs that included talented pass-catchers like James Cook and Kenny McIntosh were targeted 10% less often than runners across all of college football are.

We also don’t have much evidence that Dobbins should be considered an exception to those well-established rules. I already pointed out that he hasn’t been a high-volume receiver in the NFL, but even the production he has had as both a pro and an amateur has come largely on basic, checkdown-type stuff rather than via the creation of his own opportunity through beating linebackers in downfield coverage. In the three seasons for which I have route-based data for Dobbins (2018 and 2019 at Ohio State and 2020 with the Ravens), he ran those basic routes at higher-than-average rates in all three of them and was targeted at below-average per-route rates in two of them, including a debut NFL season in which he was targeted 47% less often than the league-average on a per-route basis (a mark in the 3rd percentile among all backs going back to 2016). Further, he averages just 5.1 yards per target for his career, a mark that would’ve tied Alexander Mattison for 51st in the NFL among runners with at least 10 targets in 2022. I don’t want to suggest that Dobbins is an actively bad pass-catcher, because I think he’s perfectly functional as a screen and swing pass guy who can make things happen with YAC, but he’s not a guy who we should expect to command the sort of high-end volume in the passing game that would offset his splitting touches in the running game.

To be fair, I think an increase in passing volume could lead to an increase in both overall offensive efficiency and overall offensive productivity in Baltimore, things that would benefit Dobbins in a rising-tide-lifts-all-boats sort of way, particularly in the sense that it would set him up for more layup touchdown opportunities. With a slight bump in rushing volume along with hypothetical maintenance of top-shelf rushing efficiency in a more high-octane offense, a healthy Dobbins should be able to creep into the solid RB2 range of fantasy production. With that in mind, I don’t think RB19 prices in dynasty are egregious, but Dobbins is also in the final year of his rookie contract and still has not established himself as a guy deserving of his own backfield. If he has a career year, he could end up treading the value waters as 2023’s version of Miles Sanders, but if he can’t make such an impression ahead of his free agency next offseason, he’s probably just an overpriced version of Khalil Herbert.