10 Players You Should Be Avoiding in Fantasy Football Drafts
Kenyan Drake, RB, Miami Dolphins
One of the toughest players to project this season -- at least in my eyes -- is Kenyan Drake. Why? Because he might be really good. Of the backs with 100 or more carries last year, only Kareem Hunt and Alvin Kamara had a larger difference in yards per carry versus their running back teammates' yards per carry.
The downside is that our Kenyan Drake sample size is really small, the Dolphins don't have the most advantageous offense in the world, and there's always a chance that the team decides to run with some sort of committee in 2018.
Basically, Kenyan Drake scares the living you know what out of me.
To the point about sample size, Drake carried the ball just 133 times last year and has just 166 totes during his two years in the league. In college, he carried the ball just 233 times in four seasons. Yes, he played behind Derrick Henry at Alabama, but collegiate volume share is still a decent indicator of future NFL success. We don't know for sure how good Kenyan Drake really is.
Even if he is good, that unfortunately doesn't always translate to fantasy football success.
The Miami running back group scored the second-fewest fantasy points in the league last year, beating out only Seattle. Much of that had to do with obnoxious goal-line play-calling -- the Dolphins ran only six rushing plays within the opponent's five-yard line, which was by far the lowest in the league. They had a 2.67 pass-to-rush attempt ratio in that area of the field, when the next-closest team's ratio was 1.45.
Adam Gase has been the team's head coach for two years now, and in 2016, that ratio was actually one of the lowest in football at 0.37. So, sure, we're running into a sample size problem here.
The real issue is just sheer volume. Miami has only run 48 goal-line plays since Gase took over, which is last in the NFL. They've also run the second-fewest overall plays in football during this time.
The Dolphins also signed Frank Gore and drafted Kalen Ballage this offseason. No, I don't see either of those players as better runners than Kenyan Drake. Gore is aged, and Ballage had usage concerns in college. I do, however, think that there's a chance that they dig into Drake's workload, and that's a workload that could be somewhat limited given the offense he's in.
Really, if Drake were in a better offense, he probably wouldn't be on this list. But the potential for a committee compounded with a mediocre offense that doesn't run a lot of plays makes me nervous about selecting him in the fourth round of drafts.
