Welcome to another edition of Thunderdome! Hand-to-hand, no jury, no appeal, no parole: two men enter, one man leaves. Or at least something like that.

By nearly any measure, the Philadelphia Eagles had one of the best rushing attacks in the NFL last season. They were twelfth in the league in yards per carry, fifth in total yards, second in first downs, first in touchdowns (by a whopping disparity of eight over the second-place Dallas Cowboys), first in DVOA (with a mark more than twice as good as that of the fourth-place Cincinnati Bengals), first in EPA per play (with a 0.072 mark that more than doubled the 0.034 of the second-place Baltimore Ravens and bested the EPA per dropback of all but nine offenses), and first in Success Rate (their 50.7% mark made them the only team in the league who succeeded more often than they failed when running the ball). Much of that success came courtesy of a dominant offensive line that Pro Football Focus graded out as the third-best in the league in run-blocking and that ranked sixth, seventh, and seventh, respectively, in Football Outsiders’ Adjusted Line Yards, Power Success Rate, and Stuffed Rate metrics.

Behind that group -- which included three Pro Bowlers and two first-team All Pros among four starters returning in 2023 -- Miles Sanders ran for nearly 1300 yards, gained an average of 4.9 on his attempts (his fourth straight season of at least 4.6 yards per carry, a 70th-percentile mark), produced more fantasy points per game on carries alone than David Montgomery, Antonio Gibson, Javonte Williams, JK Dobbins, or Tyler Allgeier did with the aid of points from receptions, and scored more total points as a rusher than all but Josh Jacobs, Derrick Henry, Nick Chubb, and Jamaal Williams among running backs league-wide. Sanders, obviously, is now in Carolina, leaving both the RB1 chair and 200-some touches up for grabs in what should continue to be a smash spot for whoever can claim them.

The recently-departed Miles Sanders enjoyed a career year behind the Eagles dominant offensive line in 2022.

Enter the newly-acquired duo of Rashaad Penny and D’Andre Swift, both talented players coming in as reclamation projects after the former failed to stay healthy over the course of five years in Seattle and the latter fell out of favor in Detroit due to a combination of inconsistent play and some health issues of his own. Each of them should have an opportunity here to earn high-value work in an elite offense, and while doling out backfield touches isn’t as simple as “two men enter, one man leaves,” it’s worth exploring their respective fits in the Eagles attack and their corresponding chances to provide meaningful contributions to fantasy lineups going forward. Let’s get into it.

To start, you could make a decent argument that, at least on a per-carry basis, Penny has been the best runner in the league since being drafted in 2018. Other than during the 2020 campaign in which he ran the ball only 11 times, his seasonal marks in the team-relative rushing efficiency metrics that I like to look at have been excellent, and increasingly so in recent years:

That 2021 Box-Adjusted Efficiency Rating lands in the 99th-percentile among all backs with at least 10 carries in a single season since 2016 and is the fourth-highest mark among all backs with at least 100 carries in a season in that time-frame (behind only rookie Kareem Hunt, 2018 Ezekiel Elliott, and 2016 Carlos Hyde), while the number Penny posted last year was the fourth-highest among all runners with 50 or more attempts (behind Dameon Pierce, Khalil Herbert, and Breece Hall). He’s often been a bit of a boom/bust runner during his career, but (again, save for the 11-carry 2020 season) not prohibitively so since he was a rookie, and last season saw Penny churn out positive outcomes on his carries at a 71st-percentile rate relative to what other Seattle runners were producing.

Swift also has a reputation for all-or-nothing output given his tendency to bail on structure and homing-pigeon his way toward ill-advised bounce opportunities, but his on-field results have really only lined up with that characterization in one of his three NFL seasons:

I don’t want to pushback too hard on the generally-accepted notion that Swift is a serial run-bouncer, but I think it’s worth considering whether a putrid sophomore performance and some untimely decisions of that sort have pitted our collective vividness bias against him. Regardless of what his tendencies on the field are, though, the actual outcomes he’s produced have been objectively good in the context of the offenses he’s been a part of.

Several of the more self-contained metrics over at playerprofiler.com also indicate that Swift has been a quality ball-carrier, as his respective marks in True Yards Per Carry (which removes the impact of long runs from a player’s per-carry average), Juke Rate (which measures a runner’s evaded tackles per touch), and Yards Created Per Touch (which counts all yards gained beyond what the offensive line blocked and following the first evaded tackle) ranked 8th, 16th, and 2nd in the league last season.

On top of the run-bouncing thing, Swift likely suffers in the minds of coaches (and, therefore, in the earning of opportunities) due to a perceived inability to contribute in short-yardage and obvious running situations. During his time in Detroit, he was deployed against box counts that were 0.29 defenders lighter than those his teammates faced, a disparity in the 17th percentile among pro runners in the last seven years. However, his career Success Rate with three-or-fewer yards to go and against heavy fronts (8- and 9-man boxes) is nearly identical to what other Lions runners have produced in the last three years (it was actually 0.2% higher), as well as 6.8% higher than the league-wide mean. We’re working with increasingly small samples as we try to isolate performance in specific areas here, but Swift has largely not been as bad in his allegedly weak areas as the liberal media would have you believe.

Nonetheless, his reputation is what it is and I can’t imagine the Philadelphia coaching staff plans to deploy Swift as their primary short-yardage runner. Jalen Hurts handled 52 of the team’s 123 rushes in those situations last season (Sanders led the running backs with 45), and with the Tush Push still legal, I see no reason they would go away from a strategy that saw them convert 90.5% of their quarterback sneak attempts a year ago. The bulk of the short-yardage leftovers will likely go to Penny, a bigger and more bruising runner than Swift (who has actually converted just 37.5% out of a small sample of such attempts in his career).

Even on a normal, down-to-down basis, I think Penny stands to benefit more from this change of scenery than Swift does. He’s already coming off two straight 6+ yards-per-carry seasons, but the Eagles have the excellent offensive line we discussed earlier as well as a schematic lean that seems to fit what he’s done well so far in his career.

Penny performed nicely in a Seattle offense that had zone concept runs make-up 72.4% of his total rushing attempts over the course of his five seasons, but while he posted a YPC+ mark of 0.48 on those carries, his YPC+ on gap runs was an otherworldly 3.27. Nick Sirianni’s offense also leans zone-heavy, but to a less extreme degree, as 63.7% of rushing attempts by Eagles running backs have come on zone concepts in the last two seasons, including just 55.2% of them in 2022 (and while Frank Reich called plays during Sirianni’s time as the offensive coordinator in Indianapolis, those offenses maxed out at 58.5% zone). A little more gap in his diet could mean fun things for Penny, as he’s averaged 7.80 yards per carry on such runs in his career.

Swift isn’t a bad fit in this offense, but he’s been better on zone runs than on gap plays to date (0.53 YPC+ to 0.11, respectively), and his 57.2% zone rate with the Lions is roughly equivalent to what we can probably expect from him in the Sirianni offense anyway. Further, much of Swift’s value (in real life as well as in fantasy football) comes from his skill as a pass-catcher, and while Jared Goff was checking down to running backs like his life depended on it in the last two years (his per-route target rates to running backs have been 20.9% and 42.1% higher than league-wide averages on basic and advanced route types, respectively, during his time in Detroit), Philadelphia operates a run-heavy attack led by a scrambling quarterback (Hurts’ 7.5% per-dropback scramble rate was well above the league-wide average of 4.6% last season) who has targeted running backs 16.4% and 5.6% less often than the NFL mean on basic and advanced route types, respectively, so far in his career.

Jalen Hurts is just as likely to tuck it and run as he is to dump the ball off to a running back in the flat.

All that considered, I view the Philadelphia landing spot as a welcome change of scenery for both Penny and Swift, but as a schematic improvement for the former and a wash in the same regard for the latter. With cap hits that rank 51st and 37th, respectively, among running backs across the league, there’s not much financial incentive to feed one of these guys over the other, so in a vacuum, I prefer Penny for fantasy football purposes given a seemingly-cleaner fit in this offense on top of what I believe to be better pure running ability (though I also think Swift has become underrated in that area). It’s true, though, that even fantasy football is not played in a vacuum, and we have value- and health-related considerations to make with both of these players. Swift is currently priced as the RB16 in dynasty over at KeepTradeCut, while Penny is the RB43, which does make some sense considering the benefit of the doubt that we simply cannot give the former Seahawk in terms of availability.

As the eternal optimist, I kinda like both of these guys at cost. You’re not taking on much risk for the lead-runner-and-goal-line-back-on-a-dominant-offense upside you get at RB43 prices with Penny, and Swift is a dented can asset with perhaps nothing but a perennially-injured placeholder between him and a similar role that could vault him back into the top-ten at the position. Perhaps I’m being a wishy-washy coward, but in this particular Thunderdome situation (at least as long as current price-points hold, which, to be fair, feels less likely for Swift than it does for Penny), “two men enter, one man leaves” doesn’t have to be our approach.