Quote Originally Posted by thethinkingguy View Post
What you say is true, however it's not the point. The point is that there is not much drop off between the first through third round running backs (see the confidence interval chart), especially when you remove AP's stats. Shame on the franchise that reaches and overspends on a position where there is so much fungibility. Unless you can guarantee you're going to turn a back into Peterson, you should wait until the 2nd round to grab a back...and he'd better be good at receiving also.

You can't just look at the 8/20 fact, albeit it's tempting to. I can counterpoint it with these (which are qualitative in nature - not quantitative because I can't prove they're significant):
- 4 of the top 10 RBs (in terms of rushing yards) are on losing teams, including the team with the first overall pick this draft
- all 4 of the conference championship game teams (ATL, BAL, SF, NE) have starting RBs that are from the 2nd round or higher in the draft.
- Ray Rice is the highest drafted player of those 4 teams and he was 55th overall (almost 3rd round)
These are Chadman's favourite types of discussion- comments backed up with facts & theories. Nice stuff. Chadman, for the record- completely agrees that the drop-off from Round 1 to Round 2 or even 3 is nowhere near as significant as it may have been in the past- there are good players everywhere in a draft, and teams are doing better jobs finding them.

For what it's worth, Chadman prefers 2nd round RB's Ellington, Randle & Gillislee to Bernard & Lacy in this draft..