The Cowboys Backfield Is Not A Puzzle, It Is A Warning

Friends, there is a specific type of August story that gets written every single year, and I would like to describe it to you so that you can identify it in the wild before it costs you a draft pick.

It goes like this. A young running back with good straight-line speed is reported to be pushing for reps. His ADP moves. Someone writes the word "explosive." Someone else notes that the veteran ahead of him has an injury history. By the third week of August the young back has been assigned a nickname by a local beat reporter and half of your league has decided he is a league winner.

Then the season starts and he gets six touches.

What Is Actually True In Dallas

Jaydon Blue is fighting it out with Phil Mafah for number two running back duties. The Cowboys re-signed Javonte Williams and added nobody else of consequence.

Sit with the structure of that sentence for a moment. Blue's ADP is rising because he might win the backup job. Not the job. The backup job. Behind a healthy veteran the team just chose to bring back on purpose.

He has tremendous upside, which is fantasy-football terminology for has not done it yet.

I understand the counterargument, and it is not a stupid one. Williams has carried a real injury history. Backup running backs are one hamstring away from twenty touches. If you are going to speculate anywhere, the position where speculation actually pays is running back, because the job transfers whole. That is all true and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

No. I have written three paragraphs to arrive at a price.

The Difference Between A Dart And A Mistake

There is a version of Jaydon Blue that I will happily own. It is the version where he is free. Where he goes in the fourteenth round, or off waivers in September, or as the last pick of a best-ball roster where I have already built something functional.

The version I will not own is the one that is currently being sold to you: Blue as a rising ADP target, moving up the board on the strength of maybe becoming the second-best running back on a team that has three of them.

• A rising ADP built on a training-camp rep battle is the least durable kind of ADP there is. It moves on rumor and it reverses on one depth chart.
• Two young backs splitting the same reserve role is not a competition, it is a committee inside a committee. Whoever wins gets half of a backup job.
• The team told you what it thinks. It re-signed the veteran. Teams that plan to hand a job to a young back do not go re-sign the incumbent first.

What I Would Do Instead

If you want a late-round running back with a path, take one where the path already exists rather than one where the path requires a subtraction. Carolina left an actual lane open. Green Bay's number two job is genuinely there for the taking. Those are backs whose value goes up if nothing happens. Blue's value only goes up if something bad happens to someone else.

That is not a strategy. That is a wish with a jersey on.