10 PPR Running Backs to Target in Your 2017 Fantasy Football Draft
Outside of traditional, standard-scoring leagues, PPR (point-per-reception) leagues are the most common league format in fantasy football. In fact, ESPN fantasy leagues will now default to PPR scoring. And, like any non-standard league, you should be cognizant of how a change in scoring should affect changes on your personal draft board.
It's critically important to know your league settings -- word to the The Late-Round Podcast on this topic -- because you may need to shuffle around your position rankings depending on the scoring format. That's particularly true with running backs in PPR leagues.
If a wide receiver has value in a standard league with traditional scoring settings, he'll have a similar value in a PPR league, relative to his peers. Sure, possession receivers get a bump when contrasted with Ted Ginn Jr. types, who may only see their number called on one deep pass in an entire game, and a PPR format naturally shifts the importance of the different fantasy positions relative to each other.
But for wide receivers (and tight ends) there's rarely a player who flies up or down the rankings at his position based on how many points come with a catch. And, well, quarterbacks don't catch passes.
That brings us to running backs. High-volume pass-catching backs all of a sudden hold value, and rushers who aren't used out of the backfield get dinged.
With that in mind, we want you to be prepared for your PPR league draft. Since you probably know that David Johnson and Le'Veon Bell should be top picks in just about any format (and, given their involvement in the passing game, that holds especially true in PPR) we've instead dug deeper to find 10 players going outside the first three rounds of fantasy drafts that you can target as PPR values in 2017.
Our Draft Kit is set to standard scoring as a default, but you can input your league's settings and update the rankings overall or at each position. The rankings listed on each slide reflect what happens when you change the league settings on our preseason rankings to one full point per reception and then look at running backs in terms of FireFactor, our internal method of ranking players according to overall production and value over replacement.
For context, we've also included our preseason ranking for each player in standard leagues this season, as well as average draft position (ADP) from Fantasy Football Calculator's 12-team PPR drafts.
