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, Rachaad White, and Tyjae Spears in the last couple weeks, and today I want to discuss another rank-riser who finds himself just outside the RB1 tier in KTC’s dynasty valuations.

That player is Isiah Pacheco, who scored the go-ahead touchdown over the Ravens in this weekend’s AFC Championship Game and currently ranks as the community’s RB13 after being valued as the RB31 as recently as September 22nd. Unlike Spears, who is shooting up the rankings despite not having offered starting lineup-worthy fantasy output in 2023, Pacheco finds himself in uncharted territory and among some elite names (as easy examples, Saquon Barkley is the RB12 and Josh Jacobs is the RB15 right now) because he did score a lot of fantasy points this season, finishing as the per-game RB14 in PPR leagues. Still, whether it’s because he runs like he bites people or because he has the residual stink of having been selected in the seventh round back in 2022, Pacheco doesn’t quite feel like a fully respected member (in terms of perceptions of his real-life abilities) of the fringe-RB1 contingent that also includes guys like Kenneth Walker and Javonte Williams (who have never scored as many fantasy points per game as Pacheco did this season). Is it reasonable that his success has not translated into lay prestige, or should Pacheco be given more respect? Is his current dynasty valuation too high, too low, or just right?

Pacheco’s rushing efficiency numbers from this breakout season are worth close examination if we are to effectively answer those questions:

As you can see, Pacheco was fantastic from pretty much any angle this year, something that was nearly true of him as a rookie as well:

There are only minor differences between these two single-season performances, but I think they have some instructive value. The most obvious distinction we can draw between them is Pacheco’s improvement in missed tackles forced per attempt, where he went from a 32nd-percentile mark in 2022 to one in the 66th percentile in 2023. Perhaps surprisingly given his reputation for hard-running, Pacheco left Rutgers having forced just 0.11 missed tackles per attempt over the course of his four years, the lowest rate for any running back drafted since Pro Football Focus started keeping track of the stat back around 2015. He also ended his collegiate career having gained 3.00 yards after contact per attempt, a mark that would have ranked 106th out of the 167 runners at the FBS level who carried the ball 100+ times in 2023. Basically and despite his Tasmanian devil running style, Pacheco was never really a great through-contact runner (or even an average one!) until he reached the NFL.

Rather than being absent until he magically improved as a pro, I propose that such an element of his game was always percolating beneath the surface but did not fully materialize given the adverse circumstances in which Pacheco was being asked to run the ball at Rutgers. Consider where the Scarlet Knight offensive line ranked out of 130ish FBS teams in PFF run-blocking grade during Pacheco’s career:

In hindsight, it’s abundantly clear that my evaluation of the guy playing behind those units could not have been more wrong. I wrote back in March of 2022 that Pacheco “is just not that good at running the football”, “was invited to the Combine for reasons beyond my comprehension”, and presented “no reason to spend a rookie pick on him”. I cringe at the definiteness of those statements, which were made largely based on Pacheco’s bottom-dwelling efficiency metrics. He ranked 94th out of 170 backs with 100+ attempts by averaging just under five yards per carry as a freshman, saw his per-carry average drop below the 4.5 mark as a sophomore and junior, and then finished up his career with an abysmal 3.87-yard average as a senior. I knew at the time that the Rutgers offensive line was bad, but I did not care: Pacheco left school with a 44th-percentile Box-Adjusted Efficiency Rating of 115.5% and a 20th-percentile Relative Success Rate of -3.1%, so if he wasn’t outperforming the ho-hum talents in his college backfield to any impressive degree, why should I expect him to add value on an NFL field? After all, the other backs at Rutgers were playing behind the same shitty offensive line that Pacheco was, and they churned out positive outcomes at a notably higher rate than he did.

The mistake I made then is one that I don’t believe I would make today (in light of more thought given to situational factors and their varying impacts on different types of runners, a more holistic approach with the metrics I use to evaluate running backs, and the addition of tape study to my process), but sound film-based analysis was leading smart evaluators in the right direction even at the time. Matt Waldman’s scouting report on Pacheco from the 2022 offseason (which is worth reading in its entirety) was particularly prescient. Waldman wrote of Rutgers’ “slow and porous” offensive line and of Pacheco’s “high effort” and “promising contact balance”, and his elevator pitch for the player sounds like it was written by a time-traveler:

“At first glance, it appears that Pacheco makes errors based on the theory of setting up blockers and creases. However, the offensive line is a porous unit that allows a lot of penetration and lacks the athletic ability or wherewithal to execute slow-developing plays that the coaches called in the game plan. Pacheco was often forced to either wait for his teammates to reach a spot late and hope for the best or sometimes spot the open area and hit it ahead of blockers to get what he could … I believe Pacheco will prove that he’s capable of patient running and will acclimate to a higher level of line play within a year of being in the league. Once he does, his athletic ability, strength, and receiving skills should come to the fore as a legitimate contributor in a committee and eventually a lead back.”

Acclimating to a higher level of offensive line play seems like exactly the thing Pacheco has done since entering the NFL, enough so that the impatience and decision-making errors that Waldman noticed in his college film – and that no doubt contributed to poor raw efficiency and a negative RSR – are no longer weighing down his per-carry output. The competence of the Chiefs’ offensive line – they ranked sixth in PFF’s run-blocking grade in 2022 and 17th in 2023 – has provided Pacheco with a much more traditional and peaceful arena within which to run the ball than he had at Rutgers, allowing the destructive tendencies that he developed in a war zone of defensive pressure to subside and thereby maximizing the impact of his previously-wasted strengths: size, speed, power, and balance.

I say all of that to say that I think Pacheco “became good” at powering through contact and making defenders miss upon his arrival to the NFL not because he simply became good at those things, but because he’d always been good at them (or rather, always had the capacity to be good at them) and just hadn’t operated in an on-field environment conducive to them manifesting. Similar things are obviously true of his overall efficiency as a ball-carrier: Pacheco was a sub-four YPC guy during his final college season and then immediately contributed at a near-five YPC level as an NFL rookie, not because he drank a bunch of Michael’s secret stuff but because the traits that make him a good player were neutralized in his college offense. You can much more effectively point and shoot a 216-pounder who runs a 4.37 forty and plays like he’s mad at the world when you have a proficient group of professional linemen blocking for him rather than when you ask him to fight for his life on every play.

Back to the issue at hand: is Pacheco reasonably valued at RB13 in dynasty? Relevant is the fact that, in addition to now playing on a team with a capable offensive line, he also operates alongside the best quarterback anyone has ever seen. Pacheco is presumably tied to Patrick Mahomes for the next two years (at which point his rookie contract ends and he enters free agency), which is probably good for his fantasy value insofar as Mahomes’ simple presence makes things easier on the Chiefs’ running backs. Of the 23 guys who ran the ball 200+ times this season, only Rachaad White, Joe Mixon, Saquon Barkley, James Cook, D’Andre Swift, Kyren Williams, Bijan Robinson, and Raheem Mostert joined Pacheco in facing fewer than seven defenders in the box on their average rushing attempt, and among those guys, Pacheco – despite a middle-of-the-road receptions total – was probably the least involved in the passing game. Here are each of those players’ route participation rates, target shares, and snap shares in long down and distance situations:

The point here is that the light defensive fronts Pacheco has enjoyed in the last couple years do not seem to be something that would hypothetically follow him through situational changes. There are many different factors that determine the amount of defenders in the box on a given play and certainly on an entire season’s worth of plays, but I think generally the same thing cannot be said of guys like White, Cook, or Williams. Those players come ready-made with three-down (and especially third down) utility that almost necessarily decreases their average box count by simply reapportioning many of their total snaps and carries to run-friendly situations; in other words, being a guy with a receiving skill-set can make things easier on you as a runner by enabling you to play (and therefore to carry the ball) in more situations where the defense is expecting pass. The great fantasy seasons put together by our White, Cook, and Williams trio serve as examples of that, while, on the other hand, the great fantasy season put together by Pacheco serves more as an example of the similar benefit that playing with a transcendently great quarterback can have on a back’s rushing opportunities.

Waldman also anticipated that Pacheco had more to offer as a receiver than his circumstances allowed him to show at Rutgers, but I’m not sure that allegedly hidden aspect of his game has come to light in the NFL in the same way that his rushing talents have. Having caught 95% of his catchable targets in the last two years (compared to an 88.6% rate for league-wide backs), he seems completely capable of the basic contributions in that area, but with a 58th-ranked (out of 79) yards-per-catchable-target average to go along with ninth-percentile Route Diversity and a 36th-percentile Route-Adjusted Target Earnings mark (as well as a 20th-percentile Advanced RATE), I don’t see a ton of evidence for Pacheco having above-replacement level skills in the receiving game (though this play from the weekend’s game was pretty nice).

Basically, then, Pacheco is a (mostly) two-down player who benefits from light defensive fronts via the backdoor influence of Mahomes (and Andy Reid, etc.) in the same way that three-down players do via the inherent nature of their own skill-sets. I’m not predicting big changes in the environmental factors that swirl around the Chiefs offense and contribute to those advantageous rushing situations for Pacheco, but I do think hypothetical changes to those factors (a Mahomes injury, a Reid or Travis Kelce retirement, deterioration of the offensive line, etc.) stand to influence Pacheco’s rushing efficiency and fantasy output to a greater degree than is true for other similarly-ranked runners. Barkley is KTC’s RB12 because he pretty much does his thing in fantasy no matter what else is going on with the Giants offense, which is as much true because the Giants already stink as it is because Barkley has a skill-set that makes him (as nearly) immune (as a running back can be) to things crumbling around him.

We obviously can’t demand that every running back be as immune to random negative events as Barkley is, but these things exist on spectrums and can apply to particular aspects of a given running back’s role or means of opportunity: if Christian McCaffrey’s uniquely comprehensive talents make him the running back least likely to be majorly affected by unpredictable bad luck, and if James Cook’s receiving skills in specific make him unlikely to be shit-happens-ed out of a high target share and light box counts (though he’s still vulnerable to losing out on rushing volume), I think it’s fair to point out that changes in the wind could more readily restrict the access of a less versatile player like Pacheco to the kinds of easy-money rushing opportunities that he has enjoyed through two seasons in the league.

The most comparable historical seasons (going back to 2015) to the one Pacheco just put together also reveal his performance to have been more straightforwardly good than it was evaluation-shatteringly awesome. The top-five such seasons belong to Austin Ekeler (in 2022), Spencer Ware (2016), Carlos Hyde (2016), Lamar Miller (2018), and again Ekeler (in 2021), and going down through the 30-or-so seasons that match Pacheco’s by 90% or greater, we see more 2021 Melvin Gordons, 2017 Alex Collinses, and 2019 Adrian Petersons than we do 2017 Derrick Henrys and 2020 Jonathan Taylors. In other words, Pacheco’s 2023 campaign was good but not incredibly so, and certainly not to the extent that we should now consider him as something greater than the juiced-up two-down maniac getting lead back touches on a good (and sometimes great) offense that we know him as. Ware, Hyde, and Collins all put together similar seasons at similar junctions of their careers, and while the Mahomes connection reasonably gives Pacheco a value boost relative to how the dynasty community might have thought about those guys at the time of their quality campaigns, I think the Kansas City runner (in a vacuum and therefore independent of that Mahomes connection) is more or less one of them.