Introduction to these player comments
Index of player comments
Glossary of terms
Charlie Garner career statistics
He's listed at 5'10" and 190 pounds, which probably explains why he's had a hard time convincing people that he's a legitimate every-down back. Every time I see him on TV, though, I'm struck by how big he looks. He looks like he's about 225. Maybe he wears huge shoulder pads, or maybe it's just the fact that he plays bigger than he is, but he sure doesn't look 190 to me.
Anyway, Garner's comment is probably a good place to talk about the situation that sends more fantasy owners to the loony bin than any other: running back by committee, or RBBC for short.
The fact is: any way you want to look at it, the use of RBBC has been decreasing for about three decades. In 2000, RBBC was at an all-time (since 1970) low. In 2001, it was back up slightly, but was still lower than it has ever been.
Let's define a team as an "RBBC team" if their top running back scored less than half of the team's total RB fantasy points. Given that definition, there were 9 RBBC teams in the NFL last year, including Garner's Raiders. The following table shows how many RBBC teams there have been each year since 1970:
Year # of RBBC teams ------------------------ 1970 20 1971 21 1972 18 1973 19 1974 18 1975 18 1976 21 1977 21 1978 23 1979 19 1980 21 1981 14 1982 11 1983 15 1984 16 1985 13 1986 17 * 1988 18 1989 16 1990 13 1991 15 1992 12 1993 15 1994 10 1995 10 1996 13 1997 9 1998 10 1999 11 2000 4 2001 9 * - strike-tainted 1987 data removed
In 1978, for example, there were a whopping 23 committees! That's 23 out of 28 teams, which means there were only 5 non-RBBC teams. Think how valuable the stud running back was back then. As recently as 1993, over half the league was RBBC.
As fantasy footballers in 2002, we've got it easy. We can complain about bye weeks. We can complain about Mike Shanahan. But we cannot complain about RBBC.