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 talked at length about Kyren Williams on Sunday, but there are three other rank-risers that struck me as particularly notable, with all slotting somewhere between RB14 and RB12 at the time of this writing.

The first of those is Rachaad White, who was the RB31 as recently as October 27th but now ranks as KTC’s RB12 after he posted nearly 16 PPR points per game in his first season as a full-time starter. He’s one of just 31 players in the last decade to reach such fantasy-scoring heights by the time his second year as a pro ended, though White is also unique regarding the means by which he came by that production.

There have been 82 single-season performances in the post-2014 timeframe that saw running backs produce at least 15 PPR points per game (the approximate yearly threshold for RB1-level numbers) while also carrying the ball at least 200 times, essentially representing the RB1 scorers who handled sizable workloads as rushers. While backs in that group have had points from receptions account for an average of 37% of their total fantasy output during the seasons in question, White in 2023 became one of just ten runners in this group to have points from receptions account for more than half of his total. That’s not necessarily a good or bad thing – after all, RB1-type production is RB1-type production, and Christian McCaffrey, Austin Ekeler, Alvin Kamara, and Matt Forte are fine company for White in this area – but what does seem bad is White’s unmatched reliance on receiving volume for his fantasy scoring: among that same group (of 82), his per-game average of 7.7 non-receiving points per game ranks dead last. If we zoom out and include all 200+ carry, 15+ PPR points-per-game seasons since the 1970 merger, White’s 7.7 non-receiving points per game ranks 458th out of 467 qualifiers. Despite the fact that his 272 rushing attempts represent 95% of the average ground-based workload handled by these runners (285 attempts), those 7.7 points that White earned as a rusher on a per-game basis represent just 64% of the average per-game numbers put up by those 467 backs on the ground alone (12.1 points).

In other words, White was historically inefficient for a high-volume rusher this season:

The best thing you can say about White’s 2023 rushing performance is that he was more effective on a per-carry basis than was the Chase Edmonds-Ke’Shawn Vaughn-Sean Tucker triumvirate getting scrap carries behind him. That doesn’t seem impressive, but does it count for nothing? After all, the Buccaneers offensive line ranked 29th in Pro Football Focus’ run-blocking grade this season, a reality that could easily sabotage both White’s raw efficiency numbers and RYOE metrics (I know RYOE is supposed to more or less separate offensive line performance from running back play, and on the aggregate I think it does a fine job of that, but given that play-level expectations are generated at the time of handoff, it’s not difficult to imagine a scenario in which the post-handoff actions of blockers negatively impact the relative-to-expectation outcomes of running plays that, by this measure, get fully attributed to the running back). Indeed, the most comparable single-season rushing performances to White’s 2023 (going back to 2016) include several campaigns from players widely considered to be good: Travis Etienne (2023), Saquon Barkley (2023), Alvin Kamara (2021), and Joe Mixon (2019) are all represented (all among the 16 closest comps and with at least 89.7% similarity), each with above-baseline marks in Box-Adjusted Efficiency Rating and Relative Success Rate posted behind offensive lines that ranked no higher than eighth in PFF run-blocking grade during the relevant seasons.

So has White just been the victim of poor offensive infrastructure? Does he deserve the same grace for his inefficiency that we have extended to guys like Mixon and Kamara? I’m not convinced. For one, Tampa Bay’s blocking woes are almost counter-weighted in this instance by the fact that White ran into incredibly light defensive fronts in 2023: the 6.77 men he faced in the box on his average rushing attempt represent 22nd-percentile attention paid to him at the line of scrimmage, while Etienne, Barkley, and Kamara each faced defensive fronts between the 47th and 57th percentiles during their relevant seasons (and Mixon’s were in the 38th percentile). While those guys’ carries came mostly against normal levels of defensive pressure, White ran into lighter boxes this season than Keaton Mitchell or De’Von Achane did.

Further, those other players added value on the margins in ways that White did not. Etienne’s through-contact numbers were good this year, with above-average marks in yards after contact per attempt and near-elite marks in missed tackles forced per attempt. Barkley was better after contact than Etienne was while also adding 0.39 RYOE per carry. Kamara’s YAC and MTF numbers were both above the league mean back in 2021, and Mixon was above the 70th percentile in both of those categories while also averaging more than four yards per carry during his season in question (a mark just shy of the league’s historical average of 4.13 and despite the 2019 Bengals trotting out the NFL’s second-worst run-blocking unit). By contrast, White performed well below the league mean both against contact and relative to tracking data-based expectations in 2023.

As a result, I believe the most relevant points of comparison to the season White just put together are David Johnson in 2018 and Kenyan Drake in 2020: high volume, low efficiency seasons from runners who added little to no through-contact value on teams with bad offensive lines (both of those campaigns carry at least 90.3% similarity to White’s 2023). We thought we might be getting the next Drake or Johnson when we selected White in rookie drafts two years ago, we just didn’t realize we were getting the last-gasp version of them when doing so. I ended up in on White in redraft this year and would not be shocked to see him produce another useful fantasy season in 2024, but I’m not eager to invest in such a fragile and volume-reliant asset that a bad runner of the football – which is what White has been thus far in his NFL career – represents at RB1 prices in a long-term format like dynasty.