My intellectual journey with Travis Etienne has been a strange and winding one. You’ll have to take my word for some of these past takes given that they’ve been lost to time with my old and long-deleted Twitter account, but I started out as an Etienne hater back in his Clemson days based on his Ronald Jones-ian profile as an explosive but undersized runner with no receiving chops to speak of. I jumped fully on board -- saying he “might be the best running back in the country” and declaring him “a future RB1-level fantasy producer in the NFL” in this article from March of 2020 -- after he bulked up to 210 pounds and turned 37 receptions into 432 yards during his junior season, became a staunch Etienne defender when the threshold worshippers wanted to bury him for returning to school for a fourth season, and then regarded him ahead of Najee Harris and Javonte Williams as RB1 in the 2021 draft.

Despite missing his entire rookie year with a Lisfranc injury, I was still very much in on Etienne in the lead-up to the 2022 season, aggressively situating him as my dynasty RB5 in this video from last June that contains a horribly conceived top-10 running backs list. Then at some point during the 2022 season, I lost my way.

Despite the fact that Etienne played objectively well in his first year of NFL action -- he gained over 1400 yards from scrimmage while finishing 15th (out of 89 qualifiers) in yards per target and posting marks above the 85th percentile in each of raw yards per carry, Box-Adjusted Efficiency Rating, Relative Success Rate, RYOE per attempt, and rate of runs gaining positive RYOE -- I (perhaps emboldened by the introduction of film study into my evaluation process) allowed my estimation of his capabilities to be too much swayed by the (very real) inconsistencies that he showed both at the catch-point and as a decision-maker behind the line of scrimmage:

Another piece of the puzzle is that, fueled by insights gleaned from the Route Diversity and RATE metrics that I developed during the summer of 2022, my estimation of his receiving chops swung too far toward the negative as I reversed course on earlier proclamations that Etienne “became a great receiver during his time at Clemson” (as I said in that top-ten dynasty running backs video I linked earlier). I still think such proclamations -- as well as the Alvin Kamara comp that was widely used for Etienne during his time as a prospect -- were misguided, as he was almost exclusively a screen-catcher during his college career and therefore had receiving production and efficiency numbers that obfuscated his limited skill-set in the passing game. Those limitations showed up last year, as (despite being hyped as a Deebo Samuel-type weapon who was going to line up at wide receiver) Etienne ran exactly three routes from somewhere other than the backfield throughout the entire season, was used on basic, checkdown-type pass patterns on an 88th-percentile portion of his total routes, was targeted 46.4% less often on a per-route basis than would be expected based on league-wide targets-per-route-run numbers and given the makeup of his particular route tree, and -- as the clap-attack videos indicate -- struggled with catch-point technique enough to haul in less than 80% of his targets despite elementary usage.

Acknowledging all of that, I say that my estimation of Etienne’s receiving skills “swung too far toward the negative” because I passed over the middle ground that exists somewhere between the Kamara comps and needing to pull Etienne off the field on third down. He’s running those basic routes at an even higher rate so far this season (he’s actually on pace to smash the post-2015 record for basic routes as a percentage of total routes run among backs with even 60 routes run in a single season), but his aDOT is lower, his catch rate is higher, and his performance in pass protection is improved (according to Pro Football Focus), so it seems like he and the Jacksonville coaching staff may have found the sweet spot in keeping their most explosive playmaker on the field while not asking him to take on too many responsibilities in an area where he doesn’t have a ton of natural ability. As a result, Etienne is currently pacing to greatly improve upon his usage numbers in pretty much every relevant category from last season:

For my money, the deployment described above is exactly how Etienne should be used in the passing game, and I should have known that his explosive traits coupled with even marginal improvement in the technique-heavy areas in which he has struggled in the past (though he’s not completely free of the fighting-the-football problems that have plagued him) could result in the sort of expanded role that he is now enjoying, especially when the alternative for this Jaguars team was Tank Bigsby, who I knew was not the pass-catching supplement to Etienne’s two-down bona fides that the beat reporters were making him out to be. Even if that improvement wasn’t going to take place, though, I should have anticipated that a young player could build upon his first season as a pro by getting on the field more often, scoring more fantasy points, or both, and each by virtue of the things that he already does really well (like make explosive plays with the ball in his hands). Two-down backs have earned larger all-phases roles via just being stud runners in the past, and I should have stepped back from the median-focused mindset required for building out projections, pulled my head out of my ass in regards to the weight I was giving a player’s peccadillos in relation to his strengths in assessing his overall ability, and generally taken a much more bullish approach with a guy who I somehow convinced myself wasn’t as good as I once thought him to be (even if the specific reasons for which I became bearish weren’t technically inaccurate). I already learned this sort of lesson once with Breece Hall, and I forgot it with Etienne. As a preventative measure, I’m going to do a better job of keeping this in mind going forward:

When changes to my dynasty rankings (as well as to both my rookie and devy rankings) go live tomorrow morning, you’ll find that Etienne is one of the biggest movers (his placement in version 1.0 of using the new process is the only one I’d describe as egregious). That’s happening due to the change of heart I’ve expressed in this article, but is directly reflected in my new rankings process by tweaks to Etienne’s categorization in both the rest-of-season production and sustainable ceiling classes that I described in last week’s rankings methodology explainer. I now have him rated as a solid RB1 for the remainder of the 2023 season and as a guy who can justifiably maintain standing as a top-ten running back in the league over the course of the next few years (in spite of his flaws!). To add to his expanded pass-catching role as justification for the latter of those tweaks, I’ll also point out that Etienne is still an above-average runner according to both RYOE per attempt and rate of runs gaining positive RYOE (despite an offensive line that PFF rates among the league’s ten worst run-blocking units), and has a ridiculous BAE Rating of 211.2%.

To finish things out, I want to quickly address a question that has occupied my mind while writing this piece (and that some of you may have wondered to yourself while reading it): doesn’t this same thought process apply to Kenneth Walker? I think it does, but with some key distinctions between his situation and Etienne’s in regards to my thoughts on their respective skill-sets, team circumstances, and corresponding dynasty valuations.

The first of those distinctions is the fact that while Etienne doesn’t have the cleanest receiving skill-set, Walker has not shown anything close to even that level of passing-game chops. His collegiate receiving profile was defined by low volume, abysmal efficiency, and even more basic usage than Etienne experienced, his rookie season in the NFL saw him finish 64th among qualifying backs in yards per target and catch fewer than 80% of his passes despite the second-lowest aDOT of any runner in the league, and his second season has not come with nearly the same sort of ramp up in role that Etienne is enjoying:

The second distinction is that while Etienne legitimized his collegiate success as a high-efficiency runner almost immediately upon stepping on an NFL field, Walker is still a projection in that area. After his rushing profile at Michigan State was arguably better than the one Etienne put together at Clemson, Walker was dubiously efficient on aggregate while being one of the most volatile runners in the league last season. A charitable treatment of his performance would defer to his 75th-percentile RYOE per attempt over his 39th-percentile BAE Rating, but his 24th-percentile rate of runs gaining positive RYOE and his 25th-percentile RSR are in clear agreement over his having been an all-or-nothing ball-carrier as a rookie. It’s been much of the same for him in 2023, with an 83rd-percentile RYOE per attempt mark offset by a 37th-percentile positive RYOE rate, and his box count-adjusted numbers again below the baselines with a 38th-percentile BAE Rating and 17th-percentile RSR.

Nonetheless, I do subscribe to the idea that the “fast rb go brrr” axiom means Walker could justifiably maintain top-ten standing among league-wide backs over the course of his rookie contract (though, again, such a position probably involves projection beyond his current level of play, particularly in the area of carry-to-carry consistency), and he’s certainly producing like that in fantasy football right now. The third key distinction between he and Etienne, however, is that Walker is contending with a better, more highly-drafted, and more suitable supplementary back in Zach Charbonnet than Bigsby represents for Etienne. The UCLA product has looked good on his own touches and should earn more work as the season progresses, especially since he profiles as a steadier presence in the passing game than Walker does. The fact that his rookie contract overlaps with the entirety of Walker’s means the dynamic former Spartan might not be able to sustain the level of touch share dominance required to deliver on his current valuation in the wider dynasty market. It’s for that and the other reasons I just outlined that I believe I’m justified in being lower than consensus on Walker despite some similarities between his profile and Etienne’s.