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

The New Orleans Saints are entering 2023 with three running backs of note on their roster: one of them is a two-down grinder entering his age-28 season, one of them is a transcendent talent multiple years deep into a decline on the back nine of his career, and one of them is a third-round rookie with exciting but unclear potential. While the particulars surrounding Jamaal Williams, Alvin Kamara, and Kendre Miller preclude the current iteration of this backfield from true déja vu status, it does kind of feel like we’ve been here before with the Saints. Just six years ago, this franchise entered an NFL season with three running backs of note on their roster, one of them a two-down grinder entering his age-28 season in Mark Ingram, one of them a transcendent talent multiple years deep into a decline on the back nine of his career in Adrian Peterson, and one of them a third-round rookie with exciting but unclear potential in a younger version of Kamara.

We know how things turned out back then: Peterson lasted four weeks before being released, Kamara posted one of the greatest rookie seasons in NFL history, and Ingram managed to coexist with his first-year running mate well enough to gain over 1500 yards and score 12 touchdowns of his own. I will eat a box of crayons f that’s how things shake out in New Orleans this year, but assuming that such an outcome is not a foregone conclusion, we have a conundrum on our hands: what the hell are we supposed to do in fantasy with a backfield in which one of the players is a newly-acquired free agent in his first year with the team, another is a (fading?) superstar facing a (possible) suspension of unclear length, and the last is a guy who is both currently on the non-football injury list (though this is reportedly not an actual concern) and will be taking a big step up in level of competition whenever he ends up healthy enough to strap pads on?

I don’t know the answer to that question, but I’m here to try, and I think the first step to that end is identifying which roles each of the relevant players are candidates for in this offense. Sean Payton is no longer in charge in New Orleans as of last season, but Pete Carmichael is still the offensive coordinator (a position he’s held since 2009), and we know that the Payton- and Carmichael-era Saints offenses have often employed committee backfields. That trend waned as Kamara asserted himself as a player deserving of a larger opportunity share in recent years, but it wasn’t until 2021 that any running back under this regime commanded even 60% of the backfield touches in a single year, and the team’s RB1 has accounted for fewer than half of all running back touches in six of 14 seasons going back to 2009. Further, the team’s RB2 has never accounted for fewer than 18.4% of touches in a given season in that time-frame, and has accounted for over a quarter of them in eight of those seasons. Even the Saints’ RB3 has accounted for 20% or more of total backfield touches in three seasons under Carmichael, and in 2010, 2011, 2013, and 2014, New Orleans went four deep with running backs each earning at least 10% of backfield touches (and they actually went five deep in that area in 2010). For reference, Ameer Abdullah accounted for 6.2% of all running back touches in Las Vegas last season, and he was the team’s RB2. The RB3 in New Orleans doubled that touch share as recently as 2021, so especially given that Kamara is facing potential disciplinary action while also being on the wrong side of the age apex, there are touches up for grabs in the Saints backfield for whoever can claim them.

Particularly in the Ingram-Kamara era, opportunity in this running back room has frequently seen significant overlap beyond the traditional two-down-grinder-and-third-down-receiver-duo mold, with Kamara’s annually high pass-catching marks accompanied by at least 10 carries per game in each season since 2018 and Ingram’s steady early-down work supplemented multiple times by double-digit Target Shares landing in at least the 85th percentile (on a per-game basis). Now with Derek Carr at quarterback -- a guy who has targeted running backs at per-route RATEs 28% higher than the league average since 2016 -- such history could indicate an increase in receiving opportunity for all runners in this backfield in 2023 after even Kamara’s usage has seen a huge decrease in that area in the two post-Drew Brees seasons.

It’s been four years since Williams posted his career-high of just 39 receptions, and his 2021 and 2022 marks in per-target efficiency ranked 67th and 50th, respectively, among league-wide backs with at least 10 targets in those seasons (a group of approximately 90 in both years). Miller caught just 29 passes in 33 games at TCU, and while he’s confident in his three-down ability, his collegiate marks in Target Share, catch rate, yards per target, and yards per reception each fall short of even the 33rd percentile among recent NFL draftees, and his RATE and Route Diversity numbers landed in the 47th and 27th percentiles, respectively, among all college backs. It’s unlikely that either of these guys are going to snatch up a bunch of receiving work.

Kamara has seen his per-target numbers slip in each of the last two seasons as well, to the point that he was bookended by Mike Boone and Kyren Williams on that leaderboard in 2022. We should obviously expect him to win the pass-catching stage of this meticulously contrived Thunderdome scenario, and he still is running a diverse route tree and commanding targets at a high per-route rate, but with decreasing efficiency on top of a recent trend of low team-level play volume (not to mention the legitimate possibility that he misses a significant chunk of the season), we may have seen the last of Kamara as a 500+ receiving yards player. The 2023 Saints offense is a hypothetically juicy environment for a pass-catching running back to thrive in, but I think there’s a good chance that nobody materializes to take full advantage of it.

Conversely, this offense does not appear to represent a hypothetically juicy environment for running the football. New Orleans has fielded one of the worst rushing attacks in the league in recent seasons, posting bottom-six and bottom-four marks in yards per carry in 2022 and 2021, respectively, and finishing second-to-last in both of those seasons in touchdown rate on the ground. Significant improvement in 2023 seems hard to bet on as well, as the Saints did little to bolster an offensive line group that ranked 26th in Pro Football Focus’ run-blocking grade last season -- their only addition to the unit came via their selection of Old Dominion tackle Nick Saldiveri in the fourth round of the draft. The group now holds an average rank of 22 in a survey of preseason line rankings from national publications, and their success might be heavily contingent upon last season’s first-round pick -- Trevor Penning -- assimilating quickly and playing well in what will be his first season as a full-time starter at left tackle.

Nonetheless, ground-based opportunity is there for the taking in what feels like a transitionary season in the Saints backfield, so let’s examine the merits of the players competing for it. Kamara’s disciplinary situation muddies season-long projections here a bit, but let’s pretend we’re doling out work for a random game or stretch of games in which all three of he, Williams, and Miller are healthy and active. To inform our expectations, here are the team-relative efficiency metrics posted by all three of those players in recent seasons, from 2022 and 2021 for Kamara and Williams and from his entire college career for Miller (and color-coded based on where those numbers rank among either current NFL backs -- for our two vets -- or historical draft prospects -- for Miller):

From this angle, Kamara is still a 60th-percentile professional performer, but in addition to the sub-4.0 raw yards per carry numbers he’s posted in back-to-back seasons, many ancillary measures of his on-field performance suggest he’s not quite as effective as the degree to which he outperforms an abysmal New Orleans running game would suggest. In a recent examination of the likelihood that various 26+ year-old running backs fall off the age cliff this season, his nose-diving per-attempt marks in Rushing Yards Over Expected, missed tackles forced, and yards after contact forced me to conclude not that Kamara is at high risk of being washed soon, but that he has already been performing like a washed runner for multiple seasons now. I anticipate that he’ll still receive the biggest piece of the rushing pie whenever he’s able to suit up in 2023, but Kamara is susceptible to being supplanted.

Williams’ numbers don’t look particularly impressive, either, and it’s true that he’s not a very efficient runner at this point in his career. Relative Success Rate is the number we want to hone in on here, though, as Williams was presumably brought onto this team to do exactly what he’s done in Detroit in recent seasons: absorb punishment, grind out tough yards against heavy defensive fronts (his Box Count+ was a 97th-percentile mark in 2022), punch in short-yardage opportunities, and keep this offense on schedule. A cumulative RSR that lands in the 73rd percentile in those years indicates that the low-ceiling Williams can still add value in that way.

Miller is a big, bruising runner who feels like he should be able to fill the same sort of grinder role that Williams is well-suited for, but his collegiate RSR marks indicate that -- even with Zach Evans off the team in 2022 -- he wasn’t producing positive outcomes at a rate that was impressive relative to his amateur teammates at TCU. Even his Box-Adjusted Efficiency Rating is a pretty average number, and the mark he posted in that area in 2022 -- his only college season either as a starter or with more than 100 carries -- landed in the 25th percentile among NFL prospects. It’s not just the team-relative stuff that’s sour on Miller, either, as the 0.15 mark in RYOE per Attempt that he posted on a nationally contending Horned Frogs squad last year ranked tenth among final-season marks for the 18 runners selected in this year’s draft. I know Miller has his supporters, but he wasn’t an especially effective ball-carrier in college and has no athletic testing data from which to draw conclusions, so it’s tough for me to assume that he’ll command work in this backfield on merit alone.

Still, Williams is a role player and Kamara is on the downhill slope of his career, so third-round draft capital and a viscerally exciting running style could see Miller assert himself as a peer to the veterans in this running back group before 2023 is over. As of now, I’m assuming that Kamara misses six games to start the year, during which Williams will initially handle 70% of backfield carries to Miller’s 30%, a split that I see reversing itself (fueled by the contrast between Miller’s youthful energy and Williams’ ho-hum output) by the time Kamara is able to return. From there, I have Kamara receiving a 50% carry share, with Miller earning close to two-thirds of the leftover opportunity at Williams’ expense. At the end of the season, those numbers produce a very evenly distributed load of ground-based work, with Kamara running the ball 125 times, Williams 123, and Miller leading the way with 138. In this edition of Thunderdome, it’s less “two men enter, one man leaves”, and more “two men enter, are joined mid-battle by a third, and then nobody leaves”.