Veteran high stakes fantasy football player Monty Phan chronicles his season.

I can officially say things didn’t work out this season like we’d hoped.

For the first time since 2014, none of the FFPC high-stakes teams I run with three friends are likely to advance to the league playoffs or compete for the big money. The breaks we’ve benefitted from the past few seasons didn’t materialize this year, and it’s easy to see where we went wrong:

Running backs.

The strategy on which we’ve based our success – take a stud running back early, grab a top tight end and load up on receivers – didn’t work this season, mostly because our approach also relies on a key factor: that starting running backs get hurt, so it makes sense to grab a bunch of their backups and hope one of them hits. Except, this year, that didn’t really happen.

The above table is the FFPC ADP from drafts that took place leading up to the first Sunday of the season. What’s amazing about that list? If you look at the top 32 RBs by ADP – or those most likely to be taken in the first six rounds – almost all of them were healthy in Week 10. Sure, some missed a few games, but only Kerryon Johnson and Derrius Guice ended up on injured reserve, and the latter should play again this season after being activated by Washington last week. Moreover, their backups – Ty Johnson, Tre Carson and J.D. McKissic for Detroit, and Adrian Peterson and Chris Thompson for Washington – failed to impress.

We ended up with a few of the same backups on multiple teams, and their inability to ascend to either starter-level or timeshare status was a huge reason for our mediocrity. To wit:

• Rashaad Penny. Heading into Week 10, Seattle starter Chris Carson was the overall RB8 after being drafted as the 16th RB. Two factors were at work here: that Carson has had a near stranglehold on the starting role, and that Penny has done almost nothing to challenge him. This one hurt.
• Nyheim Hines. The Colts faced a ton of question marks after the sudden retirement of Andrew Luck, and that uncertainty – would the downgrade to Jacoby Brissett mean that Indianapolis would face negative game scripts, necessitating that its passing-down RB would see the field consistently? – was the basis for taking Hines. But starter Marlon Mack has remained healthy all season and has performed pretty much exactly according to his ADP, while Brissett had capably led the offense before his Week 9 injury. Hines has barely factored at all.
• Jalen Richard. The logic here seemed pretty sound: What if Raiders rookie Josh Jacobs belly-flopped, or Oakland were forced to play from behind? Enter pass-catching specialist Richard. Of course, that hasn’t happened. Like Carson, Jacobs has vastly outperformed his ADP while handling the load of a workhorse. Richard has remained an afterthought.
• Justice Hill. Again, the preseason narrative that made this pick seemed sound never panned out. Lamar Jackson has proven to be an elite quarterback who can run and throw, and Mark Ingram has remained healthy and productive, leaving nothing for Hill to do.
• Ronald Jones. Hit! Jones finally grabbed starting duties from Peyton Barber, except that it took until the third month of the season to do so. Although he’s been productive of late, it unfortunately sums up the rest of our season: too little, too late.

Image Credit: Christopher Mast/Icon Sportswire. Pictured: Rashaad Penny.