Why Austin Ekeler Will Win Fantasy Titles In 2020
Austin Ekeler started 2019 as the pass-catching number-two back in the Chargers backfield, drafted in the 6th round of re-draft leagues (per fantasy football calculator) with an added bonus that Melvin Gordon was sitting out to start the season.
Fast forward a year and, with his RB4 finish in PPR under his belt, he has become the subject of much debate. One of the seemingly popular reactions has been that his 2019 performance is not sustainable—check-down Rivers isn’t there any more and Ekeler can’t carry an every down workload.
Let’s dig in shall we?
Receiving Role
I’ll start with the easy bit. Ekeler’s primary role for the Chargers has been catching passes and he’s been damn good at it so that isn’t going to change. However, there is a question mark about the volume.
In 2019, Ekeler got 92 receptions. That’s 10th out of all players in the league and 2nd in Running Back targets to McCaffrey. It’s a lot and whilst it’s clearly in his range of outcomes, it’s wise to expect this to come down. Here’s where a lot of people start touting ‘check-down Rivers’ as the reason for this enormous receiving volume and now that he’s gone from LA, the regression in this area is going to be huge.
The question here then is What Will Tyrod Do (WWTD)? Well, in his last three full seasons for Buffalo, he targeted his running back (LeSean McCoy) 14%, 13% and 16% of the time. Ekeler’s 2019 target share was 18% so it would be fair to reduce this expectation in line with Tyrod’s history. I’m projecting Ekeler with 14% of the targets.
Then there’s the question of yards per reception. Ekeler has consistenly been over 10 yards per reception since he joined the NFL but we do again need to ask WWTD? Well McCoy had 9.1, 7.1, and 7.6 yards per reception during his time with Tyrod. So again, let’s be conservative with our Ekeler expectations and bring him down to 8.9.
Seems fair, right? We’ve taken account of our WWTD metric and regressed Ekeler in to the range of Tyrod’s previous history throwing to his running back.
What about Rushing?
This is where the debate really starts to open up.
In the red corner, Ekeler is the RB1 and they haven’t invested in a significant supporting cast back there.
In the blue corner, Ekeler has never shouldered a big rushing workload and he’s not made for it. I’ll be honest, when I started my research for this piece, I was in the blue corner.
In the first four games of 2019, when Gordon was holding out, Ekeler was on pace for 224 carries, 880 yards and 12 touchdowns. I know, small sample size. But if we look at the percentage of carries that he got during those games he got 60-percent, 71-percent, 64-percent and 64-percent. So the coaching staff is happy to use Ekeler for a 60-percent plus rushing workload, but can Ekeler hold up to that over the course of a full season? His 132 carries in 2019 is the highest of his NFL career to date, but it’s unfair to judge his workload when he’s sharing a backfield with Melvin Gordon.
So I looked back at his college production to see if this would shed any light on whether Ekeler has ever really carried a significant workload, and I found some very interesting data.
See Where Austin Ekeler Lands In Our 2020 Fantasy Football Rankings!
As a true freshman, Ekeler started nine games and led his team with 1,049 rushing yards on 182 carries (16 game pace of 324 carries). In his next three years, he carried the ball 298, 227, and 232 times, all without missing time. He can carry a workload and he doesn’t break down when he does.
That was an average of 235 carries per year. For context, here are some other running backs and their college workloads:
Now, it’s worth noting that Ekeler played in a Division 2 conference, whereas these other players played against better competition. That’s why I’m not going to compare yards-per-carry and other performance metrics, it wouldn’t be a fair comparison. But it does show that Ekeler has carried the ball more than a lot of the backs going in his range of drafts, and a LOT more then some of them – He. Can. Carry. A. Workload.
Does Size Matter?
Steady. This is not the kind of article. Anyway…
Ekeler is only 5’9″ and 199 lbs, that’s small for a running back. As a yardsper colleague of mine (@LeightonFFL) recently pointed out on Twitter, since 1990 only 13 players under 200 pounds have been able to have a season with over 200 fantasy points. One of them was Austin Ekeler. Some other notable inclusions were Jamaal Charles and Chris Johnson. I think we’d all agree that they were pretty handy to have on your fantasy teams when they were around.
Jamaal Charles in particular is a good comparison in terms of size and athleticism. He’s two inches taller than Ekeler but the same weight. Charles’ 40-yard dash was lightning (99th-percentile) but Ekeler was still 83rd-percentile. Ekeler had a better Burst Score (95th-percentile) and a similar Agility Score (89th-percentile for Charles, 86th-percentile for Ekeler).
So we have an example of a player of a similar size to Ekeler and comparable athleticism that proved they could handle a workload and produce for fantasy year after year. We do not need to worry about Ekeler’s ability to handle a workload.
Interesting side-note: Ekeler’s Burst Score is better than Kamara, Chubb, Aaron Jones, Chris Johnson, McCaffrey, Sanders, Melvin Gordon, Hunt, Mixon, McCoy and many, many others. His College Dominator is only beaten by McCaffrey, Jones, Gordon and McCoy from that group – that’s excellent company to find yourself in.
The Competition
Those still in the blue corner are yelling “Justin Jackson” and “Joshua Kelley” right now, so let’s look at them.
Justin Jackson
In 2018, when Melvin Gordon missed weeks 13-15, Justin Jackson saw 8, 7 & 16 carries. In fact, in the first two of these games Ekeler saw 59-percent and 65-percent of the carries. Only without Ekeler did Jackson get the 16 carries – that was his first real opportunity to lead the backfield. And what did he do? He ran for 58 yards (3.6 Yards per carry) and a touchdown. Not terrible. But more indicative were the two games prior where despite Gordon being out, Ekeler was still used as the primary workhorse back.
In the first four games of 2019, when Gordon was out, Jackson again had an opportunity to dominate carries. The first three of those weeks he got 6, 7 and 5 carries. And then got injured in practice.
He came. He tried. And he failed. He is clearly not going to garner much attention in this backfield and you should not be worried about him taking significant touches away from Ekeler.
What about the Rookie?
Joshua Kelley is a fourth round pick out of UCLA. Here’s what the draft network had to say about him:
“While his ability to attack the line of scrimmage with urgency and forward lean with square shoulders and physicality, his skill set is pedestrian. His elusiveness, agility and receiving skills fail to stand out and he doesn’t provide much value as a prospect”
Not exactly a ringing endorsement. And his pass-protection has been called in to question, so that’s going to limit his opportunities to get on the field.
He’s a grinder and one that I’m sure the Chargers will use to kill the clock. With such a good defense, it’s not hard to imagine that LA will look to get ahead in games and then use Kelley to grind away in the 4th quarter. That’s important, that’s workload. But it’s not scary and it’s not something that should significantly impact Ekeler’s workload. What it could do, is vulture away some touchdowns.
Related | Joshua Kelley: 2020 Dynasty Rookie Profile
Austin Ekeler: 2020 Fantasy League Winner
I’ve established above that, without Gordon, Ekeler gets at least 60-percent of the carries. That’s been with Jackson on the field and Kelley clearly isn’t a guy who is going to take a large portion of work. 60-percent is Ekeler’s floor. I also established that 14-percent target share was more than reasonable in a Tyrod Taylor offense.
I project him to get nine total touchdowns. He got 11 last year with Melvin Gordon playing 12 games, and six in 2018 when he was only a bit-part player. Nine is more than reasonable. That’s RB1 numbers on a conservative projection. He easily hits return on his draft price with arguably a more stable floor than others in that range (for example, I love Drake this year but we’re trusting him to repeat from a smaller sample size).
With his athleticism and proven ability to shoulder a workload, a slight uptick in any of those projections could again propel Austin Ekeler to a repeat top-5 fantasy performance in 2020.
Is there room in the red corner for one more?!
