Devil on my shoulder, the Lord as my witness
So on my Libra scale I’m weighing sins and forgiveness
What goes around comes around like a hula hoop
Karma is a bitch? Well, just make sure that bitch is beautiful

Such were the words spoken by Dwayne Carter, one of the great poets of our generation, back in 2011, and such is the sentiment that I feel today, in 2023, when thinking about Rachaad White.

On one hand (or shoulder), it seems like a gift that a 215-pound, sub-4.5 runner who was selected in the third round of the NFL Draft after being efficient as a ball-carrier and dynamic as a pass-catcher in college is falling outside the top-20 running backs in dynasty value (according to KeepTradeCut) despite presumably stepping into undisputed lead back work in his sophomore season. On the other, it’s pretty unpalatable that a third-round pick who failed to finish higher than RB43 in per-game PPR scoring as a rookie despite competing with the sallow, sub-replacement-level husk of an over-the-hill Leonard Fournette still commands RB2-level prices in dynasty.

As a former White cultist, I’m very sympathetic to that former line of reasoning, but as a Bayesian, I’m also forced to update my expectations for White’s career arc based on his underwhelming performance as a first-year player. In some ways, projecting him forward feels like a Schrodinger’s cat situation: he either sucks and is being overdrafted, or he’s good and is not, and we won’t know until we know. That’s not helpful or satisfactory analysis, however, and I want to use this article as a means of exploring the relevant data points and hopefully thereby come to some sort of hard, actionable stance on White’s future. To that end, we’ll first hear from the devil:

Rachaad White was not an effective runner of the football as a rookie: he averaged 3.73 yards per carry, a mark that ranked 60th out of 67 backs with at least 50 carries in 2022. Since 2008 (a cutoff point that doesn’t really mean anything other than being as far back as Tej Seth’s Rushing Yards Over Expected tool has data for NFL runners), there have been 35 running backs to be selected between rounds two and four of the NFL Draft who went on to average fewer than four yards per carry as rookies (with a minimum of 50 carries). A few of those guys, like Le’Veon Bell and Devonta Freeman, turned out to be studs, while others, like Bishop Sankey and Benny Snell, either flamed out of the league or never amounted to much beyond making a roster (and, of course, many of them ended up somewhere in between).

To better calibrate our sense for which one of those buckets White is likely to fall into going forward, let’s put his first-year rushing numbers in context with how those historical players performed as rookies:

Oof. While his raw per-carry numbers are decent among this group (which, again, includes only players that had bad per-carry numbers), White handled slightly below-average volume and was especially horrific when adjusting for the situational factors that determine the expected outcomes of running plays according to RYOE. White’s performance in that metric lands in the 9th percentile in the context of all professional runners going back to 2016, and only three runners in this group of inefficient rookie backs -- Charles Sims, Delone Carter, and Glen Coffee -- posted lower RYOE per attempt numbers during their respective NFL debuts. Matt Jones and Chase Edmonds, with marks of -1.06 and -1.09, respectively, are the other two players in this cohort who gained a full yard less than expected on a per-carry basis as rookies.

So, even among the worst rookie running backs in the last 15 years, White was especially bad as a runner in 2022, a frightening fact given that his collegiate rushing profile -- while good -- was not airtight. Last March, in a piece over at breakoutfinder.com that approached White pretty optimistically on aggregate, I wrote that the Arizona State product’s 44th-percentile mark in Relative Success Rate was “slightly concerning” and, despite an 86th-percentile Box-Adjusted Efficiency Rating, “could indicate a lack of consistency” on the ground. Such a divergence of performances in RSR and BAE Rating placed White highly on the Volatility Index (prior to adding the 2023 class to my database, White actually occupied the second-highest spot on that all-time “leaderboard”), which, along with his high-end athleticism and according to the Jeremy McNichols Corollary, frequently portends difficulty translating boom/bust collegiate efficiency to the less forgiving professional game. Another plot point along that same narrative was White’s age, as he came into the league after a five-year college career and debuted well into his 24th trip around the Sun: I wrote in a different breakoutfinder.com piece last offseason that White’s advanced age “should call into question how much of his success at ASU was due to his inherent ability and how much was due to physical advantages given to him by maturity.” White is certainly still athletic relative to NFL players, and we shouldn’t close the book on him yet, but it feels more likely now that his collegiate dominance was fueled by physical prowess that is simply harder to rely on when you’re playing against pros, especially when you perhaps don’t have the technical or cerebral nuance necessary to offset that diminishing physical advantage.

Jeremy McNichols was a beast at Boise State whose underlying metrics warned of bust risk at the next level.

Another component of the McNichols Corollary is that it identifies players whose efficiency may be unsustainably propped up by a relatively large amount of ultimately infrequent (and, again, often athleticism-fueled) big plays. White doesn’t fit completely cleanly into that category based on the shape of his rushing efficiency profile in college, but he’s not far off: his 44th-percentile Breakaway Conversion Rate shows that he wasn’t dominating in the open field, but his Chunk Rate+ was a 67th-percentile mark that indicated he was ripping off 10-yard gains at a significantly greater clip than other Sun Devil backs were.

That dynamic aspect of White’s game was not present last season. He created chunk gains at a lesser clip than did an apparently washed Fournette, and he was pretty bad in many other situationally-agnostic metrics: according to playerprofiler.com, White ranked 36th in the league in Juke Rate and 35th in yards created per touch, and according to Pro Football Focus, he ranked 64th in yards after contact per attempt and 57th in missed tackles forced per attempt. The Buccaneers offensive line was bad (PFF gave it the 25th-best run-blocking grade in the league), but White was not adding value in the areas you’d expect from a situationally-hampered stud. Even his 102.7% Box-Adjusted Efficiency Rating and 0.3% Relative Success Rate -- positive marks that slightly exceed the 50th percentiles -- aren’t very impressive considering that White’s main competition in the Tampa Bay backfield was a particularly ineffective version of Fournette (who hasn’t ever really been an efficient runner anyway). Sure he was outdoing the veteran on the ground, but should that be encouraging when it was barely so?

As a point of comparison: Joe Mixon was famously inefficient as a rookie, averaging just 3.52 yards per carry behind a Bengals offensive line that ranked 28th in run-blocking according to PFF that season. Mixon, however, posted 57th and 60th-percentile marks, respectively, in BAE Rating and RSR while also producing 0.39 RYOE per attempt, itself an 80th-percentile figure. It’s possible to slog through disadvantageous circumstances as a young running back while also managing to add value on the margins and offer glimmers of upside. Mixon did that, White did not, and as a result, the Alvin Kamara- and David Johnson-type outcomes we speculated on are probably not in the cards given that the talent required to reach them seems not to be present.

A satisfactory defense of Rachaad White’s dynasty value in light of his horrible rookie season will almost necessarily involve each of three things: a mulligan given for his abysmal performance on the ground, a focus on his upside as a receiver, and -- considering that volume is king in fantasy football -- particular attention paid to the opportunity that he has to step into heavy work in a Leonard Fournette-less backfield in 2023. Let’s rose-colored glasses our way through each of those points.

The first one is easy for me:

If we convince ourselves to throw White into the “obviously talented” category, then the confirmation bias-soaked (but perhaps nonetheless useful) logic employed in that tweet would necessitate giving him a do-over on a rough rookie season in which he was both throttled by adverse circumstances and had a hard time acclimating to the pro game. The Bucs offensive line doesn’t seem poised to improve much this season (they selected guard Cody Mauch in the second round of the Draft and added nondescript guard Matt Feiler in free agency while losing tackle Donovan Smith and guard Shaq Mason, both starters), but White could better himself and see significant boosts to his team-relative and situationally-agnostic rushing numbers.

That second point is also fairly easy, this time because White is a legitimately good pass-catcher. I won’t belabor over his collegiate receiving profile, but it was really nice: he entered the league after having earned a 97th-percentile Target Share at Arizona State while posting marks above the 90th-percentile in each of catch rate, YAC per reception, and yards per target. Further, his 87th-percentile mark in Route Diversity and 77th-percentile mark in Route-Adjusted Target Earnings combined to paint the picture of a versatile route-running threat who could hurt defenses over the middle of the field in the same way that many of the best receiving backs in the NFL are able to.

As a rookie, White caught an impressive 50 passes (top-15 among first-year backs since 2000) and made several nice plays as a receiver (see 1, 2, and 3). Even so, he was probably constrained a bit by the offensive environment in Tampa Bay: coordinator Byron Leftwich had him running a fairly limited route tree (48th-percentile Route Diversity) that had basic, checkdown-type routes make up 67% of his total repertoire (a greater portion than 90% of backs since 2016) and that barely included the valuable angle and dig routes that White made a living off of in college (8.2% of his total routes came on those patterns during his final season at Arizona State, while he ran them just 2.9% of the time last year with the Bucs). Despite that, White commanded targets at an above-average clip as a rookie, posting a 58th-percentile mark in RATE and a 69th-percentile mark in Advanced RATE. He’s capable of handling more advanced responsibilities in the passing game than he was given last season, and as a 50-catch guy who is now the last man standing on an offense that saw Leonard Fournette catch 69 and 73 passes, respectively, in 2021 and 2022, White could see massive receiving usage going forward.

Leonard Fournette vacuumed up a ton of dump-off passes on his way to high receiving volume in Tampa Bay.

Along those same lines, it would surprise me if a healthy White did not exceed the 200-carry threshold as a sophomore. Fournette never did so in Tampa Bay, but he averaged enough work on a per-game basis to do it in each of the last two years; jumping up from the 7.6 carries he averaged per-contest in 2022 to just 12 per-game in 2023 would give White a Fournette-like workload while putting him in the same season-long volume territory as guys like Austin Ekeler, David Montgomery, and Rhamondre Stevenson (and with a running back room otherwise made up of Chase Edmonds, Sean Tucker, Ke’Shawn Vaughn, and Patrick Laird, there’s not another guy in this backfield to point to as a significant threat to high-level volume). If he absorbs even a third of Fournette’s receiving work from a year ago, such a combination of carries and receptions (200+ and 70+) would align White with a cohort of running backs that has produced at an RB1-level (15+ PPR points per game) at a 97% rate since 2000 (Charlie Garner’s 14.2 points per game in 2001 is the worst output we’ve seen among 35 runners with that sort of volume in that time-frame).

That’s the case I’d make if I were trying to convince someone to invest in White as a dynasty asset right now, and I don’t think it’s a terrible argument. Still, I want to earnestly address some of the points I made above, but without the rose-colored glasses this time.

To start, I wouldn’t categorize White as an “obviously talented” running back necessarily deserving of patience in spite of a bad rookie season, and I don’t think I would have categorized him that way even a year ago. I had bought into him as a prospect and thought that he had an exciting ceiling, but the red flags were present and the speculative Kamara comps were always accompanied by reference to the James Starks and Kenyan Drake types that I viewed as occupying the lower-to-average levels of White’s range of outcomes. Given that we have to update our expectations as we receive new information, I now view those comps as speculative and optimistic themselves: Drake was way better than White as a rookie, as he averaged 4.96 raw yards per carry and posted BAE Rating and RSR marks between the 70th and 88th percentiles across his first two seasons in the league. His RYOE per attempt numbers were even better, landing in the 99th and 86th percentiles, respectively.

Kenyan Drake posted ridiculous per-carry numbers as a young player in Miami.

White’s case as a receiver is legitimately strong, but the situational factors surrounding his impressive rookie numbers have worsened in key areas. For one, he no longer has a checkdown machine (not to mention the greatest quarterback of all time) in Tom Brady throwing him passes. It will presumably be Baker Mayfield under center in Tampa Bay, a guy who has historically targeted running backs at rates 18.3% and 15.5%, respectively, lower than the league-wide mean on basic and advanced route types. Further, the suppressing effect that Leftwich had on White’s route tree seems unlikely to change under new offensive coordinator Dave Canales, who was the passing game coordinator (and/or quarterbacks coach) in Seattle in recent years and therefore helped construct passing games in which running backs enjoyed the sixth-lowest Route Diversity in the NFL and were targeted 6.7% and 56.3% (!!), respectively, less often than the league-wide mean overall and on advanced route types.

I also don’t believe we should expect White to garner 270+ touch volume just because there’s not much talent to speak of elsewhere in this backfield. White should be the lead back here, but I’d argue that he’s not so much more proven in the NFL than a guy like Edmonds that we should anticipate him dominating snap and opportunity shares. A healthy Tucker could even eat into his work, especially if White continues to struggle on the ground. That said, even that sort of volume wouldn’t guarantee RB1-level production in this case like it seemingly has for players historically receiving it. White garnered work at a 211-carry, 73-reception rate from weeks 10 through 16 last season and turned that opportunity into just 13.3 points per game, numbers that would have made him the RB19 in fantasy.

Ultimately, I don’t think White is quite as bad as he played as a rookie, but the RB1-type upside I initially hoped was possible for him feels like a pipe dream. Kenyan Drake (who did average an RB1-level 15.3 points per game in 2019) is the absolute ceiling, and Charles Sims (himself a 215-pound Speed Score hero who was a third-round selection by the Buccaneers and then a super inefficient rookie), Javorius Allen, and Bishop Sankey represent varying levels of realistic bummer scenarios for White’s career arc. I wouldn’t fault you for holding, but I’m certainly not looking to acquire in dynasty leagues.