Fantasy Minute: All it takes is three

This might not qualify as advice to help your fantasy team, but I thought that with this being Thanksgiving week, I'd do a "food for thought" type of article.

I've always been intrigued about how fine the line is between good and poor performances when it comes to fantasy football and how difficult it is to forecast things with great accuracy. I saw it again last week when Laveranues Coles (one of my guys) gets tackled on the one-yard line after making a 56-yard catch. Of course, the next play is a one-yard TD toss to the tight end and to rub salt in the wound, Coles was injured on the play. He finished the day with that one catch for those 56 yards and the difference between the 12 points he could have gotten me and the six he did was a measly three feet!

Stuff like this happens to all us each week – whether we know it our not. But this is why it's so tough to truly figure out fantasy. I'm not saying everything is haphazard and you can just pick your starting lineup from a hat with a bunch of names in it, but we can't get upset when don't go the way we expect.

I've tracked rushing performances for a long time now and I've come up with my "Three Play Postulate". I know this sounds a little too over the top, but bear with me.

I think the difference between a big yardage game for a back and a mediocre one boils down to just three plays and whether he makes those three "special" plays. What we react to (either positively or negatively) each week is the runner's final numbers. If he ran for 72 yards we say he didn’t do well. If it's 144 we say he did great. But, you'd be surprised to see how often the difference between those two performances is often very slight.

I'll take a few examples from last week to illustrate.

Tampa Bay's Earnest Graham has been running fairly well since taking over for Cadillac Williams a few weeks ago and he ran for 102 yards on just 17 carries last week against Atlanta. Not bad and when you do the math, his day seems even more impressive since he averaged 6 yards on his 17 carries. However, he really didn't get six yards every time he ran the ball. In fact, about one-third of his rushes went for no more than three yards.  However, 56 of his yards (55 percent) came on just three plays – runs of 9, 11 and 26 yards. He scored on that 26-yarder and it was his last run of the game. Take out these runs and Graham had a 3.2 yards per rush average on his other 14 attempts.

The Vikings' Chester Taylor had the week's best rushing performance – 164 yards against Oakland. However, had it not been for three runs – a 17-yarder, a 29-yarder and a 38-yarder, he would have ended up with a very modest 80 yards disappointing many fantasy owners. Fifty-one percent of his yardage came on just those three plays.

I'll be the first to admit that I didn't expect the Jets' Thomas Jones to have much success against Pittsburgh last week. The Steelers have been very tough to run on, but New York grabbed an early lead and hammered away with Jones who got 117 yards. Pittsburgh actually did a pretty good job on him limiting Jones to 22 yards on 19 of his carries – just 1.2 yards per rush. But Jones tallied 55 yards (47 percent) on three runs of 11, 18 and 26 yards. I'm pressed to say that the usually stout Steelers' defense had a bad day. 

The bottom line is that any back has a shot to post strong rushing stats in any game – even against the best defenses. While I'd rather take my chances with a guy going against a weak run defense, it only takes is a good block or a missed tackle for him to do well against a tough one. And it only has to happen three times!

Happy Thanksgiving!

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