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The National Football League Draft is an annual event that takes place at the end of April and was watched on ESPN by over seven million viewers in 2010. Once the draft is completed, the analysis begins as to which teams won or lost the draft and which players will have the biggest impact with their new team for the upcoming season. In terms of fantasy analysis, rookie players are amongst the hardest to analyze because all we have are college statistics which are often flawed by the varying quality of opponents, the system of play or the talent surrounding the players. I was curious to find out whether rookie players were overrated or underrated by the average manager in fantasy drafts. In this article, I will compare the average draft position for rookie running backs with their ranking in fantasy points (in a points per reception scoring system) to try and determine whether or not rookie running backs are worth drafting.

For this analysis I decided to look at running backs drafted in the first four rounds of the NFL Draft since the year 2000. To be part of this analysis, the running backs had to have been drafted in at least 5% of fantasy drafts according to data from myfantasyleague.com and had to play in at least one NFL game in their rookie season. This left us with 74 rookie running backs to analyze. As mentioned in my introduction, in order to determine if rookie running backs are generally overrated or underrated, I am comparing their ranking amongst other running backs before the season (average draft position) and after the season (fantasy points). Of the 74 rookie running backs since 2000, only 24 of them performed better than their average draft position which is equal to only 32.4%. However, only 38.2% of the non-rookie running backs performed better than their average draft position since 2000 which isn’t a huge difference. As you can see, by drafting a rookie running back, your chances to make a good pick are 5.8% lower than by drafting a non-rookie running back.