Perhaps the most difficult position to project over the course of an entire football season is the running back position. Guys get hurt, underperform, and otherwise fall short of lofty preseason expectations. Others seize opportunity or show a skill that was underestimated by most to grab hold of a starting job from obscurity. Some rise up depth charts while others tumble down.

Determining who those players will be in 2018 is a difficult task, but it's not impossible if we first seek to specifically identify the question of, “How does a running back take over in a backfield?”

By examining the highest performing running back in each backfield on a weekly basis in 2017, I was able to identify which teams experienced a "takeover" at some point in the year. Each takeover proved to fall into one of the seven paths to climbing the running back depth chart.