Which early running back performances do we believe in and which ones are going to change?

That's what we're talking about today.

On stealing bananas. I'm

Gretch. You can find stealing signals newsletter at ben gretch.substack.com with me, as always,

is Sean Segal. You can find all of his great work over at Rodeviz. Sean, in one of my

previews this week over at Stealing Signals, I did a little digging in the Rodevis screener,

which is a great research tool for anyone who isn't using that to query, query,

like past databases and things. So I set it to the first three weeks of last year,

fantasy scoring, you know, a couple basic stats and look at where we were at this point last

season and then compared to where we finished in a lot of cases.

And there was some wild stuff.

I mentioned some receivers, some quarterback stuff, some things that shifted, some that you

probably remember, stuff like Justin Field starting slow and then coming on big

stuff that you know i maybe had forgotten a little bit the position that was the most striking

was running back and we know that to be the case generally i didn't want to make that whole point

just be about running backs but james robinson was the ppr running back three glad i was learerleur was the RB4. DeAndre Swift was the RB5. Corderole Patterson was the RB7. None of those four guys who were in the top seven through three games last year finished in the top 20 of earning back points despite getting out to those sizable early leads. None of them also finished the top scoring running back on their own teams. They were all passed.

James Robinson ends up getting traded.

Obviously, it gets passed by ETN. Cloud I would say Lear gets passed by McKinnon, I think, was the top scoring. She's back by the end of the year, DeAndre Swift by obviously Jamal Williams has all those touchdowns. And Corderole Patterson gets passed by Tyler Algier by the end of the season. You also had a lot of players that found themselves in the top eight towards the end, had been off to slow starts. And I think there's a decent case that as these offenses are trying to figure out who they are early in the year, that these first three weeks are probably the ones that matter the least. For Josh Jacobs, 8.3 points, 9.1 points, 14.7 in his first three games.

Weeks four to six, he had three straight 30-point games.

He would eventually finish as the RB3.

Austin Echler, 11.2, 18.4, 13.3 in his first three games.

These are all PPR totals.

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