The regular season is over and everything is different now. A quick perusal of the first page of the dynasty running back rankings over at KeepTradeCut reveals names of fake players like “Jaleel McLaughlin”, “Keaton Mitchell”, and “Ty Chandler”, while the top-24 and even top-12 of that list contains players who weren’t considered anything more than RB3 types back in August. The desolate state of the positional landscape contributes substantially to this shake-up phenomenon, but I want to examine the profiles of the players whose spots in the rankings are most jarring in order to determine how we should feel about their valuations. We’ll cover a batch of interesting names in another piece in the next couple days, but I want to do a deeper dive in this article on probably the most interesting running back in the dynasty player pool.

That would be Kyren Williams, who as the position’s biggest riser, is currently the RB6 over at KTC after having been valued as the RB77 as recently as mid-August. I was not a huge fan of Williams’ during his pre-draft process and thought very little of his NFL potential following a rookie season in which he gained 215 yards from scrimmage and wasn’t notably efficient as either a runner or receiver, but his performance in 2023 obviously begs reevaluation by myself and the other non-believers.

Despite an under-the-radar slow start at the beginning of his fantasy-scoring bonanza, Williams was awesome this year, and from pretty much any angle. He averaged over five yards per carry and succeeded on 51.8% of his attempts, marks in the 85th and 94th percentiles, respectively, among all NFL runners in the last eight years (minimum ten carries to qualify). Relative to what the other backs on the Rams were producing on a per-carry basis, Williams’ numbers produced a Box-Adjusted Efficiency Rating of 151.8% and a Relative Success Rate of 13.7%, marks in the 96th and 95th percentiles, respectively. According to NFL Next Gen Stats, Williams gained 0.45 yards over expected per rushing attempt and produced positive yards over expectation on 39.7% of those attempts, marks in the 79th and 67th percentiles, respectively. And according to Pro Football Focus, Williams forced 0.22 missed tackles and gained 3.34 yards after contact per carry, marks in the 75th and 85th percentiles, respectively.

In other words, Williams was dominant from a raw efficiency standpoint, from a team-relative and box count-adjusted standpoint, from a versus-expectation standpoint through the lens of player tracking technology, from a through-contact standpoint, and all under the burden of a 228-carry workload and a league-leading snap share of 83.9% (according to playerprofiler.com). I’m not sure what else we’d want our running backs to do in order to prove that they can play at a high level in the NFL. I suppose “contribute well in the passing game” would qualify, and Williams’ poor numbers in targets per route run (a sixth-percentile mark!), yards per target, and yards per reception certainly represent opportunities for improvement on that front. Still, his high snap and opportunity shares indicate how trusted he is by the Rams coaching staff with a three-down role, and despite a middling PFF grade from this season, Williams’ reputation going back to Notre Dame is as a pass-protection stalwart:

Williams’ undeniable smash performance in 2023 presents an interesting evaluative conundrum. I’ve expressed before that I wish I had been watching and charting film back during his pre-draft process, because reconciling the season we just saw with the resumé we’d been presented with prior to it is not easy, and I therefore wish I had a more varied perspective from which to approach Williams’ profile in hindsight. In lieu of my own film-charting results, the scouting report drawn up by Lance Zierlein – who the fantasy community has identified as the best running back evaluator on offer – can help fill in some of the gaps. According to Zierlein, Williams’ strengths as a prospect (in terms of his ability to run the ball) were:

The weaknesses that Zierlein identified in Williams’ ball-carrying bag were:

Lining up the pros and cons lists next to each other obviously isn’t the most scientific way of judging a prospect, but I think the exercise here is both revealing in itself and more broadly indicative of Zierlein’s overall thoughts on Williams’ potential to contribute in the league: he ultimately concluded that Williams had the traits and talent to be an above-average professional backup and pointed to the usage of James White, Dion Lewis, and Brandon Bolden in New England as “the blueprint for how to utilize Williams in the NFL.” Bolden put together a nice career as a role player and both white and Lewis had productive seasons with the Patriots, but not primarily via their ability to add value on the ground (especially so in the case of White).

I don’t want to paint the picture that it was somehow unreasonable to be optimistic about Williams’ potential as a rusher in the NFL back in the spring of 2022, and there were evaluators who disagreed with Zierlein’s stance and positioned themselves as fans of the Notre Dame back at the time (Ray Garvin and David Willsey among them). Still, it was Zierlein’s evaluation that matched with the on-field evidence we had of Williams being a relatively ineffective collegiate runner. Again from a raw perspective and while playing behind offensive lines that ranked second and then 18th in the country in PFF’s run-blocking grade, Williams averaged 5.13 yards per carry and succeeded on 44.3% of his 415 attempts during two productive seasons in 2020 and 2021. Among 83 Power Five runners with at least 100 attempts in 2023, those numbers would have ranked 44th and 45th, respectively. Relative to the per-carry output of the other Notre Dame runners and given the defensive attention paid to the relevant players at the line of scrimmage, such numbers produced career-end marks in BAE Rating and RSR that capped out at the 35th percentile among historical draftees. Jerrick Backous’ RYOE tool over at campus2canton.com also reveals that Williams was relatively ineffective on a per-carry basis when considering the micro-circumstances of his rushing attempts:

So what to make of Williams? He entered the league with a Mark Walton-esque profile (Zeirlein comped Walton to James White as well) and then put together one of the most impressive single-season rushing performances of the last almost-decade: the only 200+ carry runner since 2015 to post a higher raw Success Rate than Williams’ 51.8% from this season is 2018 Todd Gurley, and Williams averaged a little bit more yardage per carry than Gurley did. Is he just this guy now?

According to my method for comparing historical seasons (which essentially uses an average of the difference between players’ marks in the various metrics that I’ve referenced in this article), among the 20 most similar single-year rushing performances to Williams’ 2023 posted in the last eight seasons are names like Spencer Ware (2016), Jay Ajayi (2016), Dameon Pierce (2022), and James Robinson (2020), all of whom failed to double-down on unexpectedly great campaigns. Their precedent means we can’t just mark Williams down for another RB1-level season in 2024, but I’m also not comfortable predicting one-year wonderhood for him. He has greater three-down utility than most (all?) of those short-lived studs had, a fact that distinguishes his replaceability from theirs: considering his ridiculous snap share and the glowing fashion in which Sean McVay has spoken about Williams, it’s hard to classify the Ram as belonging to the same genre of two-down-grinder-who-fell-into-opportunity-for-a-season that the above players can generally be associated with.

Jay Ajayi had a dominant season for the Dolphins back in 2016.

That said, I do think Williams carries some fragility as a fantasy asset. I don’t think he’s too small to play, but at 194 pounds and with an increasingly extensive injury history just from the two years he’s been in the league, it wouldn’t shock me if McVay believed it wise to scale back Williams’ sky-high workload as a preventative measure going forward (there’s not much room to go anywhere but down with his opportunities anyway). I also believe there’s some risk that the clock strikes midnight and Williams cools down on the ground, as after all, not adding value as a rusher was par for the course of his career until the middle of October (one way this could happen: some sort of structural deterioration in the Rams offense results in Williams no longer enjoying some of the lightest defensive fronts and most advantageous rushing situations of any high-volume runner in the league). There aren’t many obvious factors to point to that would cause Williams to flop in year two, but the same could have been said of countless Mackinaw Peach running backs from years past. You just never know.

As you can see from my recently updated dynasty running back rankings, I’ve moved Williams way up and am very open to the possibility that he’s taking the torch from Austin Ekeler as an undersized niche-filler who never needs to come off the field and can create the occasional explosive play. I don’t love the idea of taking on risk by acquiring Williams right now, but his 2023 season and the state of the positional landscape means I have no real qualms with those who want to make that move or with his price on the dynasty market in general.