Balance is good. Balance is the natural state of things. We must do what it takes to achieve balance in every facet of life.
Your doctor preaches a balanced diet: No more microwave dinners and saturated fats. You are to strike a balance with your physical fitness — regular exercise at the gym, three days a week. Enjoy a drink now and then. We strive for work-life balance: Work hard, but don’t forget to live. Don’t live too much though. We teach our kids to strike a balance with school work and play time; too much of either, we tell them, is suboptimal. We must optimize.
Balance, as it has been explained to us, is the ultimate goal for which to strive, the perfect equilibrium we must achieve if we are to be fitter, happier, more productive.
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Maybe you’ve seen fantasy football nerds on the internet droning on about the myriad benefits of stocking up on the NFL’s best pass catchers and fading the game’s elite running backs. And maybe this analytically-driven discourse has intrigued you, an avid fantasy manager who has been conditioned to create — at all costs — a balanced fantasy roster.
We want good running backs, but not too many good running backs. Because we must have some good wide receivers. Not too many though. Sprinkle in some good-but-not-great tight ends and a quarterback or two and you have a respectable fantasy roster — one that, at worst, will elicit polite smiles from your league mates and fantasy-playing friends and family. At best, they’ll nod and compliment your team, saying something like, “Your squad has no glaring weaknesses,” or, “You look solid all around.” This releases the dopamine; it makes you feel like a real life NFL general manager.
This, we think, is vindication. It feels nice: A reward for a job well done. You have assembled a fantasy football roster that commands the respect of other fantasy gamers. Your preparation and numbers crunching and meandering shower thoughts have birthed a perfectly balanced team, unimpeachable in its steadiness, in its unshakable stability.
But you hear on podcasts and read in fantasy columns about this Zero RB thing, or some variation of it, in which a fantasy manager would use most — if not all — of their early-round draft capital on non-running backs positions, particularly wideout and tight end, spitting in the face of balance. And if you can overcome the horror of someone advocating for a (severely) unbalanced fantasy squad, maybe you consider it. This makes you Zero RB-curious, and I’d like to satiate your curiosity — to offer the Zero RB red pill, if you will.
Zero RB: The Concept
A clean-cut salesman comes to your front door on a summer afternoon, smiling through the sweat beads forming on his face. He appears eager. Too eager. He greets you with an exuberant hello and launches into his sales pitch.
“How would you like a fantasy football team with the best receivers and the best running backs?” he asks, his voice rising with every word. He appears crazed. Unwell.
You slam the door shut because you know this is impossible. How dare this young man try to sell such snake oil. One cannot have the best running backs and wide receivers. Everyone knows this. The gall of this salesman fills your cheeks with a rush of hot blood. You’d like to give this young man a piece of your mind. But he’s on to the next house, extolling the virtues of Zero RB.
Probably you won’t end up with fantasy studs at every roster spot even if you execute a Zero RB draft to perfection. But you’ll have a chance, which is more than you could say for a balanced draft approach. Rotating between wideouts and running backs in the early rounds could give your fantasy team a nice, safe weekly floor. It could very well deliver a fantasy postseason berth if you avoid the injury reaper and dodge various buzzsaws through the NFL season’s first three months.
If you want a team that can shred your league mates week after week, a team with a ceiling, a team that can pour on the points and overcome the bad luck (variance, as the nerds say) we all face, you should consider Zero RB. A Zero RB squad is what we call antifragile, a concept best explained by Rotoviz’s Shawn Siegele in his seminal piece on the Zero RB strategy. In short, we are creating a team that won’t fall apart with injuries and other strokes of bad luck. Rather, our team will get stronger. It can benefit from the predictable chaos of the NFL season.
How, you might ask, can a team improve from chaos. First thing’s first: Top-end receivers are not replaceable. No one is going to step into that wideout’s role and produce at his level, even if that receiver is pelted with targets. That’s not to say this replacement wideout wouldn’t be fantasy relevant; he would be, very much so. It’s just that he would not replicate the production of the sidelined superstar receiver.
The running back position is inherently different, as the league’s best backs have so rudely discovered in contract talks with their various teams over the past year. A position that relies so heavily on game script, on offensive line play, and on defensive scheming, is going to prove more replaceable than the wideout position. I promised myself I would not inundate you with numbers, so I won’t. Suffice it to say running backs who step into the starting role following a starter’s injury can and have replicated most — sometimes all — of their production if they see a similar three-down role with all its high-value touches.
I’ll hand it off to Shawn Siegele to explain the immense downside of a robust RB draft strategy.
Meanwhile, the Zero RB drafter is gobbling up backs in the round 8-11 range, picking up unheralded runners in the final rounds — guys who could find themselves with a fantasy-relevant workload if things break right (or wrong, depending on how one looks at it). This delivers the Zero RB dream come true: A lineup teeming with elite WR1s and running backs taking on hugely valuable workloads that (vitally) include pass catching and goal line usage. It’s the best of all worlds, and it’s only achievable through willful roster unbalance.
A Zero RB team is probably going to be an ugly duckling as Week 1 approaches. Your league mates will sneer and tease and say, hey buddy, I love your receivers, I’m not so sure about your running backs. Your only choice is to smile and nod, knowing that early-season volume remains one of the most exploitable competitive edges in our dorky little game.
I may not have a top-24 running back on my opening day roster, you say, but just you wait, buddy. Just you wait.
When (And When Not) To Use Zero RB
An all-out Zero RB roster build doesn’t work in every league format. It makes no sense, for instance, to start a draft with four or five or six pass catchers when you can start a maximum of three receivers. You’re filling your bench with fantasy-viable receivers and tight ends who will never see the light of day in your weekly lineups. So yes, for card-carrying members of Not In My League Twitter (or X, whatever): There’s no reason to deploy a Zero RB approach in leagues with restrictive and unimaginative roster requirements. You’re right about that. You’ve always been right about that.
(For folks in eight and ten team leagues: Just play the best plays. Don’t get bogged down with ideologically-driven drafting. Don’t overthink it. In fact, don’t think at all. Just point and click on the best players available. This game doesn’t have to be hard.)
Scoring settings also matter quite a bit. If you’re a loincloth-wearing cave person playing in a standard scoring league as some sort of nostalgia trip for the unremembered aughts, just take your dang running backs and be done with it. Touchdowns are all that matter in standard scoring. You can safely keep the Zero RB strategy on the shelf, collecting dust, if you’re getting no points for receptions. I hope the nostalgia hit is worth it. I’m upset.
Going Zero RB — or Hero RB, in which you take one running back in the first couple rounds and fade the position until the late rounds — can and probably should be used in half-PPR leagues in which you can start up to four receivers in a given week. High-end pass-catching backs are naturally devalued in half-PPR, if only slightly, since they can’t transform into a full-blown point per reception scam. That doesn’t mean you’re fading Christian McCaffrey or Austin Ekeler. But it does mean Nick Chubb (yes, I’ve heard he’ll be more involved in the passing game in 2023) and Derrick Henry aren’t at such a disadvantage compared to their fellow elite backs.
It’s when we get into 12 and 14-team PPR formats that we can let our inner Zero RB wolf howl at the moon (I once did this after getting Keenan Allen as my WR4 and now my neighbors don’t look me in the eye). Especially in PPR leagues with multiple flex spots, you can let it rip with a pure Zero RB approach, waiting until the latter half of the draft to finally, at long last, start filling your RB spots. If this makes you queasy — and it will — just remember you are punishing your league mates with every wideout selection while they create a balanced or RB-heavy squad. You’re making it harder for them to compensate for their early-round receiver fading by hogging wideouts at every turn. They’re the ones losing out, not you.
Zero RB can be used perfectly well in superflex leagues too. You can play it safe with quarterbacks, ensuring you have two or three viable starters, while forgoing the game’s best running backs and piling up wideouts and/or elite tight ends. Make sure, as always, you get your league mater’s running back insurance options.
You can’t turn squishy if you’re going with a real Zero RB build in these sorts of formats. Don’t fold. Don’t go halfway. Don’t abandon the concept as your roster looks weirder and weirder. Zero RB requires an almost religious commitment. It’s why Zero RB advocates frighten people on the internet every summer, for we are the zealous door-to-door salesman using our own product.
This fantasy draft season, get weird. Get uncomfortable. Reject balance and embrace antifragility. You will be fitter, happier, more productive.