Currently the RB53 over at bulletproofff.com and the RB51 over at KeepTradeCut, Samaje Perine is perhaps the most undervalued win-now running back outside the ranks of the top-36 in dynasty.

We can roughly approximate the expectations that the crowds currently have for Perine’s immediate future by looking at his ADP in recent best ball drafts: according to the Underdog ADP over at 4for4, Perine is currently being drafted as the RB37, in the middle of a group of runners who mostly profile either as committee backs with weekly potential via touchdowns and big-play juice or as handcuff backs who could pop for weeks at a time in the event of injury to their team’s RB1s:

Truthfully, Perine doesn’t really fit in either of those strict archetypes. He’s not an Antonio Gibson-type committee back who relies on big plays to make up for a lack of steady production or a goal-line vulture in the Jamaal Williams mold, and I don’t think it’s particularly likely that he’ll be operating as a pure handcuff in Denver. We’ll get to Javonte Williams’ injury in a bit, but with or without it it’s true that Williams has never operated as his team’s undisputed lead back, even going back to college: he probably would have last season but was unable to for obvious reasons, and he split the backfield work essentially 50/50 with Melvin Gordon as a rookie after doing the same with Michael Carter during his sophomore and junior seasons at North Carolina (and he was the Tarheels’ RB4 as a freshman). Considering new head coach Sean Payton’s history of using multiple running backs (a near constant throughout his NFL career regardless of the talent-level of the individual players in his backfields) and Perine’s admission that his decision to join the Broncos in free agency “came down to … how up front Denver was with me as far as playing time and what coach Payton wants to do with me personally … The thing he really emphasized was his history of using multiple backs” -- I don’t see why we wouldn’t expect Perine to be a large part of this backfield whether Williams is healthy or not.

Having said that, with the possible exception of Mattison (given the smoke around Dalvin Cook potentially finding his way out of Minnesota), I’d argue that Perine is the player on this list who has the greatest chance of being his team’s undisputed week one starter. Considering that his team’s incumbent RB1 already suffered the injury necessary for such a chain of events to transpire, it might even be likely.

On October 2nd of last year, Williams tore the ACL, LCL, and PLC in his right knee on the first play of the second half against the Raiders, a brutal and unfortunate injury for a young and exciting player who the community has high hopes for. While Denver reporters said the day afterwards that “the ultimate timetable” for the “extremely long recovery ahead of him … feels impossible to forecast,” it’s now been over seven months and we have approximately the same degree of clarity regarding when Williams might be able to return to the field as we did back then. After milling around with franchise and league personnel at the Combine earlier this offseason, Matthew Berry mentioned that he was told “there is a very wide range of possibilities regarding [Williams’] return,” that “there is a chance he is healthy to start the year, there is a chance he misses multiple games, and there is actually a chance he misses all of next year,” adding that “the Broncos are secretly nervous” and Williams “is currently a lot more hurt than the team is letting on publicly.” On April 20th, general manager George Paton said that the team still didn’t “have a date” regarding Williams’ return but felt “good that [he’d] be back this season.” At the same time, Payton dismissed the notion that the Broncos needed to select a running back in the draft by noting the “flexibility” they gained as “one of the plusses with Samaje being available in free agency.”

I have no crystal ball, medical degree, or direct observations of Williams’ rehabilitation process, and while I hope for a full and speedy recovery for any injured player, that series of quotes inspires the opposite of confidence in my mind that the young runner will be available by the time week one rolls around, if he even is so by week eight (Payton has since told reporters that “[Williams] is doing extremely well” and that they “expect him to be ready for the start of training camp,” before mentioning that he’s “hopeful that [Williams] is someone that might not have to go to [the Physically Unable to Perform list],” marking either legitimate progress in Williams’ recovery or the coach-speak version of JK Dobbins-style offseason optimism). If he’s not, Perine will start the season competing for touches with arguably the weakest backfield depth in the NFL in a group of players made up of Tony Jones, Damarea Crockett, Tyler Badie, and Tyreik McAllister, a foursome that boasts one sixth-round pick (Badie), three UDFAs, and a combined 82 career touches among them.

While I sense that Perine still suffers some reputational damage from an early-career flameout with the Washington team that originally selected him in the fourth round as a member of the stacked 2017 running back class, the odds that his talent allows him to capitalize on short-term opportunity are higher than that lack of respect would indicate. Partial evidence of that comes via the solid rushing efficiency numbers he posted during the mini-resurgence he experienced during the last three years as Joe Mixon’s backup in Cincinnati:

Despite Relative Success Rate marks floating between the 40th and 48th percentiles during his time as a Bengal, Perine provided value on his breather-back touches by outperforming on aggregate the per-carry output of a group of “other” Cincinnati backs whose contributions largely came from a Pro Bowl-caliber runner in Mixon. The only other backs in the league who’ve run the ball at least 50 times and posted a Box-Adjusted Efficiency Rating above the 100% threshold in each of the last three seasons are Nick Chubb, Dalvin Cook, Austin Ekeler, Damien Harris, Derrick Henry, Aaron Jones, Alvin Kamara, Tony Pollard, Miles Sanders, Jonathan Taylor, and Jeff Wilson. He goes under the radar, but Perine has been one of the best backups in the NFL in recent years, and while Denver’s offense as a whole wasn’t great last season, they added $78.5 million worth of guaranteed money to free agent acquisitions (in Mike McGlinchey and Ben Powers) this offseason to an offensive line that was already at least a league-average unit a year ago (they ranked 15th according to Pro Football Focus’ run-blocking grades and helped a patchwork group of running backs to a collective 4.21 yards per carry, a mark in the 53rd-percentile going back to 2016) on top of swapping out a coach in Nathaniel Hackett who was clearly in over his head for one of the best offensive minds and play-callers in recent NFL history in Sean Payton. Perine should enjoy solid efficiency as a Bronco.

In addition to providing per-carry excellence when called upon, Perine also allowed the Bengals to rest a high-touch back in Mixon due to the former’s competence as both a blocker and receiver in passing situations. Perine has earned just one season-long pass-blocking grade below the 58.3 mark from Pro Football Focus in his career, and the 73.8 grade he earned last year made him the fourth-best pass-protector in the league among backs with at least 30 blocking reps. He hasn’t been tasked with doing exotic things as a route-runner (his seasonal marks in Route Diversity have capped out at the 30th percentile since he ran a tree with 51st-percentile variety as a rookie), but he’s been pretty reliable as a pass-catcher throughout his career, with a cumulative catch rate of 82.8% that matches Josh Jacobs’ 22nd-ranked rate from last season (Perine actually suffered a case of the drops that saw his catch rate dip to 74.5% last season, but he had never dropped more than a single pass in a given season prior and caught 88.4% of the balls thrown his way over the course of 2020 and 2021). Given that three-down ability combined with the rate at which Payton-coached and Russell Wilson-led offenses have targeted running backs in the past -- Wilson historically checks down to backs at a RATE 7.4% higher than the league average, while runners in Payton’s offenses have been targeted on dumpoff-type routes 18.6% more often on a per-route basis than the league mean (even the non-Kamara types: Mark Ingram was targeted 14.4% more often the NFL-wide average on those routes during his time in New Orleans from 2016-2022) -- Perine could be in line for decent target totals as a proven third-down specialist. He already had 51 while backing up Mixon on a team with tons of receiving weapons last season.

The particulars of a sans-Williams role for Perine in the early part of the 2023 season are not yet completely clear, but we have some idea of what he could do with a decent workload based on his history as a de facto lead runner in both Washington and Cincinnati: in 10 career games with at least a 50% snap share across those two situations, Perine has averaged 16.7 carries, 3.4 receptions, 93 yards, 0.6 touchdowns, and 16.3 PPR points per contest, numbers that would make him an easy RB2 in a given week. It’s possible that Denver bolsters their backfield depth by bringing in another veteran running back in the (seemingly likely) event that Williams’ availability hasn’t changed by the time training camp, preseason games, or week one roll around, but given their decision to not select a running back in last month’s draft, Payton’s apparent confidence in Perine to hold down the fort (he said of Perine earlier this offseason: “He’s big, he’s physical, he’s smart, he’s tough. He’s built to last. That was an important piece for us knowing the injury that we’re dealing with. He was really important”), and the lack of available talent in the free agent pool (the biggest names are probably Ezekiel Elliott, Leonard Fournette, Kareem Hunt, and Ingram, none of whom provided value on the ground last season according to either BAE Rating or Rushing Yards Over Expected), Perine feels relatively safe as an all-purpose JAG in line for three-down work to open the year. You won’t find a 15th-round startup pick with a better shot at contributing legitimate value to your starting lineup this season.