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 already covered Kyren Williams and Rachaad White, while today I want to discuss another rank-riser who finds himself just outside the RB1 tier in KTC’s dynasty valuations.

That player is Tyjae Spears, who was the crowd-sourced RB43 as recently as mid-August and the RB25 as recently as mid-December, and who currently finds himself valued as the RB14 according to the wisdom of the people. Spears is also somewhat unique among the backs I’m exploring in this little article series in that, unlike Williams and White (as well as other rank-risers like James Cook and Isiah Pacheco), Spears’ ascension did not follow from a corresponding increase in his fantasy output. He did improve from one half of the year to the next, but the 10.2 PPR points that Spears averaged in the last eight games of the season were just shy of the kind of production that Ezekiel Elliott offered over the course of the whole year, certainly not enough to justify (on its own) such a vault up the rankings. Indeed, no other back in the dynasty player pool (at least among those in the top-40 per-game PPR scorers from last season) has as extreme a disparity between his fantasy finish in 2023 and his current rank over at KTC as Spears does: the 24-spot difference between his RB38 finish and his RB14 rank is 50% greater than the next-biggest gap (the 16-spot disparity between Bijan Robinson’s RB17 finish and his RB1 rank). I say all of that not to say that Spears doesn’t deserve to be valued as highly as he is, but that his valuation warrants special attention given that it necessarily depends on a disproportionate level of projection beyond the type of fantasy production we’ve yet seen from him.

That projection is largely being made, of course, because the Derrick Henry era in Tennessee appears to be at an end. If that’s true, and if Spears is good enough to be a lead back (or close to it) in the NFL, then the former Tulane runner’s dynasty valuation is perhaps appropriate. If either of our two conditions end up unmet, however, then Spears is probably overrated in dynasty. I’m willing to take the first condition for granted at this point (though I acknowledge it’s not a completely foregone conclusion), leaving us to speculate only on the ability of Spears to step into a larger workload and convert it into useful fantasy output. The rest of this article will look at his performance as a first-year pro in tandem with his scouting report as a prospect in order to shed some light on that potential. To that end, let’s examine Spears’ marks in the various rushing efficiency metrics that I’ve found to paint a holistic picture of how a given running back performed on the ground:

We know that Spears’ macro-level fantasy production as a first-year player does not match his current dynasty valuation, and the above numbers seem to show that the more micro-level on-field results from his rookie season do not match the enthusiasm many have expressed about his future either (see: 1, 2, 3, 4). So is he just overrated at RB14? Let’s look closer.

I first want to point out that Spears was not “inefficient” through any traditional lens this season. His raw per-carry average ranked 17th out of 49 backs with 100+ attempts, and his raw Success Rate ranked 16th among the same group. However, Spears faced an average of just 6.91 defenders in the box on his carries, a 39th-percentile mark. That’s not crazy low or anything, but it’s in the same ballpark as the defensive fronts seen by guys like Jahmyr Gibbs and James Cook. These are relatively advantageous circumstances in which to run the ball, so even a league-average talent would be expected to perform slightly above the league median (the Titans’ offensive line was also a fairly average run-blocking unit in 2023, ranking 18th according to Pro Football Focus’ grades). Spears was effective by the most basic statistical measures in 2023, but the circumstances surrounding his opportunities mean it doesn’t necessarily follow from that evidence that he is an inherently good player (or, rather, that he played well “in a vacuum” last season).

The more contextualized efficiency metrics are less kind to Spears. Relative Success Rate shows that he essentially duplicated the per-carry consistency exhibited by the 29-year old Henry, while tracking technology marks him down as having gained positive yards over expectation on a lower percentage of his runs than all but five of the other 48 qualifying runners (Dameon Pierce, Kenneth Walker, Joshua Kelley, Jamaal Williams, and Miles Sanders are the only backs he beat in this area). Similarly, the -0.15 yards he gained “over” expectation on a per-carry basis is a mark that ranks in the 34th percentile among qualifiers in the last six years. It would be more difficult to reconcile Spears’ quality raw rushing average with his 25th-percentile Box-Adjusted Efficiency Rating if we didn’t have those RYOE numbers, but with them, the scale tilts in favor of concluding that Spears just didn’t add much value on the ground as a rookie.

So why does everyone think he’s good? The obvious answer is that he looks good when you watch him play, and there are numbers that back up that subjective take. Among backs with 100+ attempts in a single season in the last eight years (there have been nearly 400 such seasons), only De’Von Achane, Michael Carter (2021), Nick Chubb (2020, 2022), James Conner (2023), Josh Jacobs (2019, 2022), Dameon Pierce (2020), Jaylen Warren (2023), and Javonte Williams (2021) have forced more missed tackles on a per-attempt basis than the 0.26 that Spears evaded this season. If you take into account the rate at which he gained yards after contact on a per-attempt basis, the success that Spears enjoyed in his dealings with contact as a rookie compares closely to how well Travis Etienne, Aaron Jones, Alvin Kamara, tackle-breaking machine Zack Moss, and Bijan Robinson have dealt with it in recent seasons:

Remarkably, Spears is that good at evading tacklers and creating yardage through contact while also being one of the most movement-efficient runners in the league. NFL Next Gen Stats also keeps track of something they simply call “efficiency”, which is the ratio between the amount of yards a ball-carrier physically traveled on his rushing attempts and the amount of yards he gained on them. Spears ranked 14th among the 49 qualifying runners in that metric. I’m frankly not convinced that this “efficiency” stat actually measures what it purports to measure – “the lower the number, the more of a North/South runner” – given that the “efficiency” of runners who create a lot of big plays would be, as far as I can tell, artificially lowered (if you’re interested in a tangent on why I think this, read the little blurb below), but it’s not exactly bad news that Spears ripped off enough chunk and breakaway runs to trick such a stat this season.

Consider the example of two touchdowns scored by two different running backs, let’s call them Kenneth Walker and Zach Charbonnet. Walker gets the ball at the Seahawks’ own ten-yard line on an outside zone run to the right. He follows the structure of the play out to the numbers, doesn’t like what he sees, reverses course, makes a man miss, finds an opening, and cuts upfield for a 90-yard score. His winding journey on the play might have taken him as far as 150 total yards (the field is 53.3 yards wide, so if he did a full back-and-forth on one half while adding a slight detour for an exaggerated juke, we’re not far off from an admittedly-far-fetched-but-for-illustrative-purposes-only 150 yards traveled), at which point his “efficiency” on the play would be 1.67 yards traveled per yard gained. Charbonnet also gets the ball at the Seahawks’ own ten-yard line and on an outside zone run to the right. He follows the structure of the play nearly out to the numbers, at which point he identifies a viable crease, makes a hard vertical cut, and rumbles for a gain of three yards. His straightforward path on this play involved no deviation from the design, no extracurricular juking or other evasive maneuvers, and yet Charbonnet probably traveled three times as far as the yardage he technically gained on the run. The hashes are only three yards from the middle of the field, so even if Charbonnet got north/south right at the hash mark, his “efficiency” on this play would be 2.0 yards traveled per yard gained. Next Gen Stats says “the lower the number, the more of a North/South runner”, but I’d hardly say Walker exhibited more north/south running in these example plays than Charbonnet did. Because of the influence of long runs, this stat might be as much a measure of big-play production as it is of movement efficiency or north/south running. Indeed, the top five in this metric for 2023 – De’Von Achane, Kyren Williams, Zack Moss, Jonathan Taylor, and David Montgomery – all ranked near the top of the league in both explosive run rate and percentage of total yards gained in the open field (among backs with 50+ attempts, Achane ranked first in both of those metrics and in Next Gen Stats’ “efficiency” metric).

On a per-attempt basis, Spears was one of the most explosive runners in the league last year. Among nearly 70 backs with at least 50 attempts, he finished 12th in raw Chunk Rate, 14th in Chunk Rate+, and – despite the fact that his Breakaway Conversion Rate was only slightly above average – 25th in percentage of total yards gained in the open field. This element of his game was also present back at Tulane:

Spears ended his college career with a 71st-percentile CR+ and a 95th-percentile BCR, while his career mark of 4.18 yards after contact per attempt was bested by only Ashton Jeanty, Audric Estime, and Omarion Hampton among 200+ carry runners in college football this season (with the next closest guy being Makhi Hughes – also of Tulane – at a distant 3.75). The efficiency numbers don’t exactly match up (and given the massive difference in level of competition, surrounding talent, offensive infrastructure, and Spears’ own role, why should they?), but the stylistic elements of Spears’ pre-draft profile are clearly reflected in the on-field resume he put together as an NFL rookie. He was a big-play runner who broke a ton of tackles but didn’t churn out positive outcomes at a high rate while playing in the American Athletic Conference from 2019 to 2022, and he was the same thing while playing in the AFC South in 2023.

Basically, I think we should not have changed our opinions of Spears much from a year ago to now. I concluded last offseason that he would “likely never be an NFL team’s preferred early-down option” (a take based on his subpar RSR and relatively poor decision-making grades from my charting of his film), but I also came away from his tape very impressed by his contact balance and unique brand of coordination-heavy athletic skill. After his first NFL season, I think my stance on him comes down to a few bullet points:

My guess for how those factors will end up interacting with each other is as good as yours, but I don’t disagree with the crowd’s apparent assumption that Spears will be operating in a fantasy-friendly role next season. He’s undeniably dynamic, and the league is close to dominated by players who are closely related to the branch of the running back family tree that the 201-pound Spears sprouts from: Christian McCaffrey, Rachaad White, Tony Pollard, James Cook, D’Andre Swift, Kyren Williams, Alvin Kamara, Devin Singletary, Jahmyr Gibbs, Raheem Mostert, Austin Ekeler, and Jaylen Warren all share either stylistic or size-based similarities with Spears (many of them both), and all touched the ball at least 200 times this year. It’s not really the case that undersized runners or satellite-adjacent backs won’t be given large workloads in the current NFL meta, and even if someone else is brought in to Tennessee to serve in a more traditional two-down role, such an addition doesn’t have to be more than complementary (both Gibbs and Warren shared backfields with other 200+ carry runners in 2023). I’ll need to do much more research before I’m comfortable basing actual expectations around the traits and tendencies of coaches going into next year, but new head coach Brian Callahan has consistently been part of offenses that feed a primary runner. Even the lightest per-game touch load given to any Callahan-associated RB1 since his NFL career started back in 2010 would translate to 231 touches over the course of 17 games:

Ultimately, I say knock yourselves out with Spears at almost-RB1 prices in dynasty. I think my hesitations with his game are unlikely to matter beyond the margins, and I don’t have any real qualms with his ability to play on all three downs and operate in a snap-heavy role. Any price you jump in at will end up looking like a value if he’s able to score fantasy points commensurate with his current dynasty valuation during the upcoming season, but I almost wonder if it would be worth waiting until the Titans bring in Zack Moss or draft Audric Estime so you can take advantage of any workload panic. That’s probably too cute a strategy, but the overall point is that Spears is probably good enough to start for an NFL team and be good in fantasy even if his softer skills as a two-down runner lag behind his unique athleticism and dynamic ability out in space, and I therefore have no issue with the RB14 price tag.