I made a point throughout much of the early season to preach a let’s-not-get-ahead-of-ourselves approach with Kyren Williams in dynasty, based on the dual factors of not having liked him much as a prospect and his actively bad efficiency profile from the first couple months of the year:

By the time I’d published this article in late October, however, Williams was coming off what was then his best game of the season, a 20-158-1 rushing performance versus the Cardinals that brought his RYOE numbers close to respectability and launched his raw efficiency marks toward the top of league leaderboards. Now, since missing four games and then returning to put up 204 yards and two touchdowns in his first appearance back in the lineup, Williams’ numbers look very good:

The above categorical scores are calculated using the process described in this article and indicate that Williams has been approximately an 80th-percentile runner in terms of gaining yards, churning out positive plays, and running through contact so far this season. So is he just good then?

Sort of, I think. In addition to the very nice efficiency numbers shown above, it’s clear that Williams is doing the non-box score things well enough to earn the trust of his coaching staff, which I think says a lot (especially considering how untrusting that coaching staff tends to be). He seems to just be a completely dependable guy, a quality that has elongated the careers and boosted the on-field roles of guys like Samaje Perine, Jerick McKinnon, Devin Singletary, Austin Ekeler, and Devonta Freeman beyond the levels that their talent (whatever that means) would have enabled them to reach on its own merits. Because of that dependability, I view Williams as having a relatively high floor (I would expect him to be a Perine- or McKinnon-level contributor at the very least for the next few seasons), but what he’s able to do with the ball in his hands will determine his ceiling.

In deducing how good he’s been with the ball in his hands, it’s impossible to not notice that Williams’ two blow-up games have both come against the Arizona Cardinals. I would like to preface this part of the article by saying two things:

Having said those things, I will once again say that it’s impossible to not notice that Williams’ two blow-up games have both come against the Arizona Cardinals. Considering that he’s only played seven games in total, and considering that the Cardinals possess the worst rushing defense in the league -- according to Pro Football Focus, though they also allow the fourth-most touchdowns, third-most yards, and most first downs per game, as well as the fourth-highest success rate and sixth-highest per-carry average of any team in the league -- such an opponent-specific phenomenon struck me as -- if not meaningful -- at least notable. Here is how Williams’ in-split versus out-of-split numbers compare:

We know he didn’t look good through an RYOE lens before his couple explosions versus Arizona, but I would classify Williams’ early-season rushing performance as more solid than straight-up bad. 3.87 yards per carry isn’t great, but pairing it with a nearly-50% Success Rate means Williams was in the same efficiency-versus-consistency territory as guys like Alvin Kamara, Ezekiel Elliott, and D’Onta Foreman early on in the year.

Against the Cardinals, though, Williams literally looks like the best running back in the league. His yards per game, yards per carry, Success Rate, and yards after contact per attempt numbers in those games would all be easily tops in the NFL if they were someone’s season-long marks. The fact that those two games represent a relatively large portion of Williams’ total appearances this year means that his Cardinal-shredding performances have been responsible for a disproportionate share of his overall efficiency and production. His only other 100-yard rushing game (and one of just two other games in which he gained more than four yards per carry) came against the Colts, who PFF rates as having the eighth-worst rushing defense in the league.

The final thing I’d like to point out is that Williams’ in-split and out-of-split raw numbers have both been aided by defensive fronts that are among the lightest any runner has seen in recent seasons. He has faced an average of 6.63 defenders in the box on his attempts, easily the lowest mark in the league for any back with even 50 carries as well as lower than the fronts faced by all but five 100+ carry backs in the last two years (the 2021 versions of Singletary, Darrel Williams, Chase Edmonds, Clyde Edwards-Helaire, and James Conner). It’s a positive thing (in both real life and fantasy) that Williams’ three-down utility puts him in position to receive handoffs into light boxes, but it’s also relevant in evaluating his ability to note that his carries have come in far easier circumstances than those of the vast majority of backs in the NFL:

Let’s take a slight pivot. Because efficiency and productivity at the position are so intrinsically tied to the circumstances in which players operate, it’s relatively difficult to determine how good running backs are. It’s pretty easy to tell that someone like (young) Alvin Kamara is good or that someone like Deon Jackson is bad, but evaluating the players in the fat part of the bell curve relative to each other is complicated. Emari Demercado running more efficiently than Javonte Williams does not necessarily mean he’s the better player, Jerome Ford’s starting-level workload and good explosive play output don’t necessarily mean that he’s better than guys like Izzy Abanikanda or Zach Evans who profile similarly but aren’t getting on the field right now, and Raheem Mostert’s elite numbers across the board don’t necessarily mean that he leveled up into being the best running back in the NFL this September.

Box-Adjusted Efficiency Rating, positive RYOE rate, and other stats like them are useful tools because they provide situational context to results, and a different form of situational context can be helpful when evaluating outcomes from a bird’s eye view. Consider this graph and the theoretical conclusions we could draw when considering the opportunities that a player is given in tandem with the quality of his career outcomes and on-field performance (graphic design is my passion):

By “opportunity”, I don’t simply mean carries or touches but rather the combined factors of draft capital, contract, preseason depth chart status, etc. (including carries and touches) that together represent the chance a player has been given to prove if he can play or not. By “outcomes”, I don’t just mean volume stats, fantasy points, and efficiency numbers (though those things factor in), but rather a general measure of how much a player has accomplished or proven with his opportunities.

Generally speaking, the greater opportunity a player receives, the more confidence we can have in his outcomes being representative of his inherent abilities. Conversely, the less opportunity a player receives, the less confidence we can feel in those outcomes being representative. There’s obviously some talent-related signal in opportunity given that it doesn’t get handed out randomly, but just because I (hypothetically) thought Abram Smith wasn’t a contributing-level NFL talent, the fact that he went undrafted and has never been on a regular season roster isn’t necessarily proof that I was right. Who’s to say he isn’t as good as Salvon Ahmed or Rico Dowdle or Patrick Taylor or Phillip Lindsay, and that the cookie just didn’t crumble his way in regards to culture fit or scheme fit or depth chart status or whatever in the same way that it happened to for those other guys (and he was pretty good in the XFL, for whatever that’s worth)? He might just be another UDFA who can’t play in the league, but we can’t reasonably claim to be sure of that.

Players like Smith -- low opportunity, poor outcomes -- belong in the bottom left quadrant of our graph. Opposite them, in the top right, are the quality players who received legitimate opportunity. The northeasternmost of these guys are no-brainers: Christian McCaffrey was a top-ten pick who has been awesome, Jonathan Taylor has been rock-solid after going in the second round, et cetera. Even within this quadrant, however, it can be difficult to feel confident in some of your individual evaluations. Joe Mixon is a second-rounder who’s been a Pro Bowler and has multiple 1000-yard rushing seasons on his resume, but depending on to what you attribute his relatively low efficiency and his lack of passing game usage, and depending on how you weigh those things versus his down-to-down dependability and jack-of-all-trades utility, he could be anything from a plodding compiler to a legitimate bellcow. JK Dobbins also went in the second round and eventually proved to be one of the most efficient runners of all time, but it’s not easy to deduce how much of his success should be attributed to the seamless scheme fit and wide-open running lanes he enjoyed while playing next to Lamar Jackson. Ezekiel Elliott was a first-round pick who has a higher per-carry rushing average and more touchdowns and yards from scrimmage in his career than many players in the Hall of Fame, and football Twitter has spent most of his career arguing about whether he actually sucks or not.

He gets no respect, I tell ya

To the northwest lies the bust zone, the quadrant in which we can be perhaps the most confident in our evaluations. This is where Trent Richardson, Clyde Edwards-Helaire, and post-holdout Le’Veon Bell live, guys who we can be sure were not good because they a) were heavily invested in, b) received on-field opportunity commensurate with that investment, and then c) performed poorly over a large sample spanning multiple years.

Last is the southeast quadrant, containing runners who produced above-average outcomes despite below-average opportunity. Our evaluations of players in this class can’t be quite as definitive as they would be for those in the bust zone, but given the barriers to entry these guys have to overcome, I think we can be more certain that, say, Raheem Mostert is good than we can be that Javonte Williams is good (which is not the same as saying Mostert is better than Williams) or that Khalan Laborn is bad. There’s certainly some luck involved in a low-opportunity player turning into Gus Edwards rather than Damarea Crockett, but a UDFA like Edwards doesn’t trip and fall into a five-year career as a legitimate NFL contributor. Because of the additional obstacles they had to navigate, the accomplishments of low-investment runners are much easier to take at face value and as reflections of their actual abilities than they often are for other players.

As a fifth-round pick who has earned his way into an every-down role, Kyren Williams probably lands somewhere slightly left of center in that southeastern quadrant, at least as of today. I add such a caveat because an element of the quality of your career outcomes is longevity. Our estimation of Jerry Rice is obviously enhanced by the length of his time as a quality player in the NFL, but even on a much smaller scale, the confidence you can have in the ability of a one-hit wonder is almost necessarily less than for a player who sustained success for multiple seasons. The former type of player is one that I’ve compared to Mackinaw peaches, the ones from Oregon that are only ripe for two weeks a year:

Because of the realities made clear to us by the #RBsDon’tMatter brigade, it is possible for a replacement- or even sub-replacement-level talent to perform like a starting-quality runner for weeks or months at a time. Damien Williams, Jerick McKinnon, Thomas Rawls, Peyton Hillis, and Alex Collins all broke out of relative obscurity to post lineup-worthy fantasy numbers for stretches spanning multiple games, just as Austin Ekeler, Khalil Herbert, Isiah Pacheco, Aaron Jones, and Dion Lewis did. Keeping your faculties about you enough to accurately identify which of those players are Mackinaw peaches versus which of them have the talent required for establishing staying power is an important part of making optimal use of the roster-building assets available to your dynasty team. Based on my pre-draft evaluation (though I will say about that evaluation: a) I wish I had been watching film when Williams was a prospect and am curious how he would have charted out for me in that area, and b) one lesson learned through this experience is that I should be more scrupulous with players whose final-season efficiency numbers represent a stark improvement over their career marks, as Williams’ did) and on Williams’ performance as a three-down glue guy this season, I believe he is a Mackinaw peach. I don’t mean that in the sense that he’s bad, because he can clearly play, but rather in the sense that his current level of fantasy production -- he’s scoring more PPR points per game than Derrick Henry did in his 2000-yard rushing season -- and dynasty value -- he’s the RB11 on KeepTradeCut -- remains above the hypothetical ceiling that his inherent abilities could justifiably maintain into the near future (which I would classify as a 4 on the scale in the above linked article), and therefore in the sense that you’re incentivized to take advantage of that value by trading him for a more sound long-term asset, except in the scenario in which his production is essential to a current-season title run. He’s not destined for fantasy irrelevance, but it seems irresponsible to not cash out on Kyrensanity at RB11 prices.