In calibrating my sense of Kenneth Walker’s fantasy upside following the Seahawks’ selection of Zach Charbonnet in the second round of last month’s NFL Draft, I’ve landed on the yearly output of Nick Chubb as an anchoring point that makes a lot of sense to me. Like Walker will now presumably experience with Charbonnet on his team, Chubb has had his fantasy ceiling capped for much of his career by the presence of a talented three-down back in Kareem Hunt behind him on the depth chart as well as by his own relative weakness in the receiving game, and a result of those factors, Chubb has never produced more than 17.3 PPR points per game or finished higher than the RB7 in PPR points per game over the course of a single season -- that’s all despite the fact that Chubb is one of the best pure runners we’ve ever seen, as evidenced by a career yards-per-carry average of 5.24 that ranks third on the all-time leaderboard for running backs (among guys with at least 750 career carries; behind only Marion Motley and Jamaal Charles). That’s not to say that 17.3 points per game or an RB7 finish is bad, because they’re obviously not, but if that represents the upper tier of production that can reasonably (or even unreasonably) be expected of a great two-down back who doesn’t catch many passes and whose volume is subdued by another competent runner on his own team (meaning guys like Derrick Henry or Jonathan Taylor aren’t really good points of comparison here, as they haven’t shared touches with anyone who’s close to a comparable talent), then drafting a guy like Walker as the RB7 or RB8 in dynasty (as resources like at bulletproofff.com and KeepTradeCut would indicate is still happening) is a risky proposition with not a lot of room for error, even if he turns out to be as good of a ball-carrier as we think he can be.

For Chubb, however, the winds might be changing a bit as he enters his age-27 season.

We’ll get to the direction of those winds in a second, but Chubb’s potential to capitalize on a change in circumstances depends on his ability to maintain a high level of play as he crests the age apex, and we don’t have much indication that he’s slowing down. The following are his yearly marks in Box-Adjusted Efficiency Rating and Relative Success Rate from his rookie season to last:

That three-season stretch of low marks in RSR generally align with Hunt’s presence on the Browns as a low-ceiling chain-mover to contrast with Chubb’s superior big-play dynamism, but Chubb showed last year that he can still be a do-it-all runner, and his yearly marks in Rushing Yards Over Expected per Attempt have never dipped below the 0.28 mark that saw him rank 21st in the league (among backs with at least 50 carries) in 2020. Whether you look at raw efficiency measures (he’s never averaged fewer than five yards per carry in a season), team-relative metrics, or expectation-derived stats, dude has been and still is a beast on the ground.

Considering that, Chubb should be in position to benefit from improved situational circumstances, and I believe those are on the way for him this season, firstly in the form of expanded opportunity. Starting with the 2019 season in which Hunt joined the Browns active roster midyear, Chubb’s seasonal numbers in snap share and opportunity share have ranked as follows relative to all other backs in the league:

So with Hunt on the team, Chubb has routinely played as little and received as little work as would be expected from a below-average starting running back in the NFL. Encouragingly, Hunt is now gone (as is the perennially underused and underrated D’Ernest Johnson) and has not been replaced in any meaningful capacity: Cleveland drafted zero runners last month, and the only other backs on the roster are Jerome Ford, a fifth-round pick from last offseason who gained only 12 yards on 8 carries as a rookie, Nate McCrary, a UDFA from 2021 whose career rushing yardage total is below zero (it’s -1), John Kelly, a soon-to-be 27-year old himself with just 32 career carries, and Hassan Hall, a rookie with an interesting athletic profile and some decent rushing efficiency numbers but who weighs 196 pounds and enters the league as a fifth-year UDFA.

Ford is clearly the guy out of that group who is most capable of contributing breather-back touches, but I don’t think he’s some sort of world-beater who we should expect to eat into Chubb’s role to nearly the same degree that Hunt did in the last few years. Ford spent his first two years in college not getting on the field at Alabama before transferring to Cincinnati and backing up Gerrid Doaks as a junior, and his one productive season as lead back with the Bearcats saw him post BAE Rating and RSR marks in the 53rd and 23rd percentiles, respectively, among eventual NFL draftees, while also catching 21 balls on a repertoire of pass patterns boasting 22nd-percentile Route Diversity that doesn’t really inspire a lot of confidence is in his ability to fill the receiving specialist role that Hunt recently occupied. That’s not to say he won’t be tasked with doing both of those things -- spelling Chubb and playing on third downs -- but I think we’re looking at a replacement-level backup rather than a we-gotta-get-this-guy-more-touches scenario here.

If that’s the case, then Chubb would be in line for the heaviest work he’s shouldered since the 2019 season when he had top-ten marks in both snap share and opportunity share while averaging 18.6 carries per contest (the highest mark of his career) and enjoying sizable usage in the screen game (he had 29 targets on screens that year, the ninth-highest single-season total among all NFL runners going back to 2016). In games prior to the arrival of Hunt in that season, Chubb played at a 17-game pace that would’ve seen him gain 1706 rushing yards, score 13 touchdowns, catch 53 passes, and produce enough in fantasy -- 19.8 points per game -- to make him the RB3 behind only Christian McCaffrey and Dalvin Cook. All of those numbers would be career-highs, and they were posted on a 6-10 Browns team that ranked 22nd in the league in both total points scored and total yards gained on offense.

The only time we’ve seen Nick Chubb receive a large workload for a significant stretch of time, he outproduced top-level fantasy backs like Austin Ekeler, Ezekiel Elliott, and Derrick Henry while playing on a bad Browns offense.

The second weather pattern that could vault Chubb into the next level of fantasy production is an improvement in the overall offensive environment he plays in in Cleveland, specifically fueled by a hypothetical return to something resembling MVP form from Deshaun Watson. We all know Watson is a predatory dickhead, but he also wasn’t a very good football player in the six games he played with the Browns in 2022. If he took enough snaps to qualify, his marks in touchdown rate, interception rate, QBR, adjusted net yards per attempt, and sack rate would’ve ranked 19th, 28th, 28th, 31st, and 33rd, respectively, among the league’s starting quarterbacks. If we assume that Watson just can’t play anymore, then Chubb will be the dude he’s always been -- a great per-carry runner playing on bad teams led by bad quarterbacks -- but now with more volume with Hunt out of the picture, and if we assume that Watson just wasn’t able to find his groove in six games with a new team after not having played football for 23 months, then Chubb will be in line for heavy volume in a quality offensive environment led by the best quarterback he’s ever played with.

I think it’s reasonable to expect Watson to bounce back at least to the point of providing above-average quarterback play, but Vegas also expects the Browns to be a solid team in 2023 with him under center: their projected win total is 9.5, tying them with squads with good offenses like Baltimore, Dallas, Detroit, Jacksonville, Miami, the Jets, and the Chargers as having the sixth-highest record expectations among pro teams. At either 9-8 or 10-7, the Browns would finish above .500 for just the second time in the Chubb era (and the first time came in 2020, when Hunt touched the ball 236 times and Chubb ranked 27th in the NFL in opportunity share).

With a solid stable of weapons -- including Amari Cooper, Donovan Peoples-Jones, and David Njoku along with a collection of young and potentially dynamic wideouts in guys like Elijah Moore, David Bell, and Cedric Tillman -- to go with an offensive line that returns all five starters from a group that boasted two Pro Bowlers, a first-team All Pro player, and a collective 69.2 run-blocking grade from Pro Football Focus that ranked 8th in the league last season, there’s reason to believe that a no-longer-rusty Watson could take this offense from decent to good, and Chubb with it from good to great in fantasy football. He’s been unfortunately capped by external factors to this point in his career, but I think 2023 is the year when Chubb finally produces in fantasy like the elite player he is.