Depending on your individual league settings, Zero RB may be the way to crush your leagues in 2024. The term “Zero RB” was coined by Shawn Siegele in a 2013 article that remains one of the more evergreen fantasy football strategy articles to this day. The purpose of Zero RB is to draft a team that gets stronger as the season goes on, or “antifragile.”
We’ll delve into some strategies about Zero RB and provide some tips on roster construction and drafting strategy specific to this upcoming NFL season.
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Zero RB Draft Strategy & Roster Construction
What Do I Need to Employ Zero RB in My League?
Just because you’re in a fantasy football draft doesn’t mean Zero RB is an optimal strategy. There are certain conditions which when combined with others, create as close to a perfect environment for using this draft strategy, like:
- Full PPR scoring
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- Standard and half-PPR formats are less optimal as those scoring formats benefit running backs more
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- Either three starting wide receiver spots, multiple flex positions, or a combination of both
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- Multiple flex positions mean more roster spots to put higher-scoring wide receivers in your lineup
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- Free Agent Acquisition Budgets (FAAB) or Waivers, though FAAB is preferred
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- If you’re in a season-long league, you can continue to add valuable running backs who find themselves in key roles with teams during the season
Full PPR scoring gives you the benefit of getting the full point per reception and stacking wide receivers. Being able to use all three wide receiver spots and/or multiple flex spots to slot as many of those receivers into your starting lineup spots. Using FAAB allows the ability to weight your bids to the running back position and stock your roster with a starter should one come up through the chaos of the NFL season, which will assuredly happen.
How Should I Build My Zero-RB Roster in 2024?
When deciding to draft a Zero RB team in fantasy football, your strategy must be very intentional and without “middling” it. Selecting running backs too early will not get you enough wide receiver firepower to dominate your league. Selecting running backs too late is actually better for the team you’re drafting because it should give you ample opportunity to grab an elite quarterback, elite tight end and the wide receiver firepower necessary to lap the field and make your team stronger. It is, however, risky. But if you have a pocket of running backs that you have strong convictions on for 2024, then pushing running back to where you’re comfortable is perfectly fine. Typically, once you get into the ninth round and deeper into drafts, running back is usually the best pick in terms of value. That pocket of the draft to get a stable of running back upside plays that still have standalone value and aren’t lottery tickets is one we want to attack as your leaguemates are scrambling for other positions that they didn’t fill previously.
How does that factor in for 2024? Well, wide receivers are being drafted higher than ever and running backs are being pushed down draft boards en masse besides the top-four backs which include Christian McCaffrey, Bijan Robinson, Breece Hall and Jahmyr Gibbs. While the receivers are being drafted higher across the board and in record numbers, you still don’t want to miss out on the position because each pick in a Zero RB build has a hefty opportunity cost. Drafting an anchor running back in any round before the seventh round drastically reduces the amount of elite, league-winning wide receivers I can add to my roster. Getting as many wide receivers before the massive receiver tier break (think Courtland Sutton, Jameson Williams and Tyler Lockett) while getting an elite tight end and elite quarterback sets my team up to clean up at running back.
Why Are Running Backs So Volatile?
There are lots of ways we can answer this question, but the most important things that make the running back position so volatile are:
- Injury risk
- Projection error
- Change in league-wide offensive philosophies
The injury risk for running backs in the top-24 average draft position (ADP) is higher than for the same cohort of wide receivers.
Josh Hermsmeyer from RotoViz did a seven-season study several years ago about the injury rates of position groups and found that running backs selected in the top-24 are 200-360% more likely to suffer a “serious injury”, which is defined here as any injury that causes a player to miss four or more weeks of a season.
In seasons past when running backs were being taken as almost a rite of passing with about eight or nine picks in the first round devoted to the position, you’d have shaky running back profiles being drafted in the late-second round into the third round. We’ve gotten away from that as running backs with 300+ carries are going the way of the dodo: extinct. Derrick Henry led the NFL last season with 280 carries. Throw it back to 2003 and a whopping 13 backs notched over 300 carries in a season. Committee backfields are the norm and those ambiguous backfields are also pushing the prices of running backs further down draft boards, which makes it very advantageous to snap up several backs with great profiles where the touches are not favoring one back or another. Think backfields like Washington with Brian Robinson/Austin Ekeler, the Pittsburgh Steelers with Najee Harris/Jaylen Warren and the Cincinnati Bengals with Zack Moss/Chase Brown; all backfields with questions about workloads and both backs going within a round or two of each other.
Even just a few seasons ago, you would have top-six wide receivers lasting into the third round on occasion. Now, WR6 (A.J. Brown) is being drafted in the first round! That is one of the main reasons why drafting RB-RB to start a draft puts you behind, because you have to play catch-up with lesser wide receiver profiles and you’ve used up a lot of the opportunity cost where you can still get excellent running back profiles later.
Because of the running backs falling deeper in drafts, their current average draft position (ADP) allows backs to become huge buying opportunities. Elite RB profiles that years ago would be late-first-round picks and into the second round of fantasy drafts now routinely drop into the third and fourth rounds. We can keep this going further down in drafts to where we can get David Montgomery, James Conner, Zamir White, and other running backs I love starting Zero RB builds with. Those are backs being drafted on average in the seventh or eighth round where those backs would be fourth-round picks in previous seasons. The opportunity cost is much lower for those backs this season because you can spend outside of the main wide receiver rounds to get them.
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Kevin Tompkins is a featured writer for FantasyPros. For more from Kevin, check out his profile and follow him @ktompkinsii