Frank Gore has been taking up backfield touches for well beyond what many would consider his “prime” years as his tour of the AFC East brings him to his third team in three seasons. He will be entering his age 37 season with the New York Jets after spending 2019 vulturing touches from a promising Bills backfield that eventually featured rookie running back Devin Singletary.

Gore’s exit from Buffalo couldn’t be more welcomed. The Bills drafted running back Zack Moss in the third-round of the 2020 NFL Draft to pair with Singletary, and there’s now reason to believe that RBBC touches in Buffalo could lead to more production this upcoming season. This spells good news for best-ball players who may be looking for late-round RB upside that could feature useable weeks from an RB2 independent of the running back ahead of him.

Before getting further into the article, if you enjoy pieces such as this that break down running backs and opportunities for fantasy success, check out Samuel Wallace’s work on decoding team backfields. His most recent piece, Decoding the Dolphins Backfield: How Will Jordan Howard and Matt Breida Share the Load?, is up now.

Blood and Gore – The Worst of the Worst

Pardon the graphic headline, but Gore’s 2019 season is one you truly want to look away from, so I thought it was fitting.

Last season, Gore scored 38 fantasy points below expectation. This is unsurprisingly on par for Gore, as the RotoViz NFL Weekly Stat Explorer tool will show you that since 2010 (Weeks 1-16), no running back with a minimum of 100 games played has had a total FPOE as low as Gore’s (-117.7). In fact, no running back over that span has a combined total lower than -72.0 FPOE (Bilal Powell).

In 2019, Gore garnered 170 touches and produced a whopping 87.7 fantasy points on a 36% rushing market share (ruATTMS). What’s worse, he failed to post a double-digit scoring performance after Week 4, but still managed to find his way onto the field despite amassing just 48.8 fantasy points the rest of the way.

Surely not everyone could be as bad as Frank Gore, right?