The Misunderstood Zero RB Strategy: An Open Letter (Fantasy Football)

People try to be discreet, but it isn’t like I don’t notice. I hear what they say; it always comes back around to me. I can feel their whispers in the grocery store aisles, at the bank, or in the dropoff lane at the preschool. It’s widely circulated in my otherwise peaceful neighborhood; smiling people relinquish their glee when they see me, and their expression transforms unwillingly to obvious dread. It recently spread around a wedding in New Jersey and, within 15 minutes, my family and I had to leave early; it was sweltering, and we had already abandoned the hotel, so we sat for forty-five minutes in a taqueria that didn’t even have free chips and salsa and waited for our Uber to the airport. We know we are not wanted. It follows us everywhere:

I am a Zero RB fantasy player. This is who I am.

But we are a misunderstood few – the real us. We aren’t punks; we don’t do it to shock people or be contrarian (okay, maybe a little, but that’s not the real point here). And no, it doesn’t count when someone waits until the third or fourth round to take their first running back. We go all the way to the sixth, seventh – even as late as the eighth. Yes, we’ve heard how valuable RBs are in fantasy; we are Americans, after all. And no, we aren’t arrogant; we are a humble people. No one ever believes this, but we are trying to build protections for what we don’t know, not showcase what we do. I hear people slander our ways of doing things all the time, but to quote the great philosopher, Costanza, “We are living in a society!”

So I’m writing this open letter to you and anyone who will listen. I want us to find compassion for one another, and the best way we can do that is to break apart the stigma. Let’s begin by laying ourselves bare, setting the record straight, and taking the fear out of the unknown. Together, we can live as one – value-based, robust RB, and Zero RB drafters, united in spirit and fantasy league (us, usually a little higher in the standings, of course). Let us begin this process of healing.

Zero RB Strategy in a Nutshell

Shawn Siegele is a fantasy legend; among his accomplishments, he composed one of the most famous articles in fantasy football history: Zero RB, Antifragility, and the Myth of Value-Based Drafting, written in 2013. This coined the phrase Zero RB, which, despite its impact, has been principally misunderstood ever since. I’ve had a chance to work with Shawn and know him well; I feel willing and able to stand up for what’s misconstrued and help shed light on this mysterious worldview.

In an attempt to clarify the intentions, let me back up and offer a quick summary of the original sacred doctrine of Zero RB.

• Why RBs are more “valuable” in fantasy: In NFL football, most lineups play one QB and one RB. Default lineups in fantasy football require one QB and two RBs. For easy math, say you are in an 8-team league; a quarter of the available starting QBs are starting in a fantasy lineup and roughly half of the starting RBs; if every team takes backups, all NFL starting RBs are absorbed while half the QBs remain available. The trend is exacerbated in 12-team leagues with traditional flexes, so RBs are scarcer than QBs or other “onesie positions.” It’s simple supply and demand.
• The problem with investing in RBs: RBs take frequent contact, often head-on (as opposed to a WR, where a tackler may be running parallel). They touch the ball more, and even when they don’t, collisions in blitz pickup are quite violent. They are also frequently tackled low around the knees. As such, they are prone to injury.
• The upside of backup RBs: When backup RBs receive clarified starts, they score roughly 70-80% of the starter’s production. This is a better result than at any other position in fantasy and is generally predictable. This doesn’t even account for the fact that most Zero RB hits don’t come from an injury; they come from a breakout. This is why Zero RB-ers seek players who could simply wrestle a job away from a shaky starter ahead of those with strict contingency value that only manifests during a starter’s absence.
• Value-based drafting (VBD): VBD was high-level stuff 20-25 years ago and forms the base logic for most fantasy players today. VBD attempts to compare draft candidates to positional baselines based on projections, aiming to draft players with a higher value-over-replacement at their positions.
• VBD’s flaw: Projections are agnostic of probability, ignoring that each player has a high-end and a low-end variance. If a player like De’Von Achane hits the high end of his range of outcomes, he could be the overall RB1, but that won’t show up in projections; he is back-to-back with Kenneth Walker and Rhamondre Stevenson, who lack this type of upside. Also, it focuses on a complete starting lineup rather than a soup-to-nuts roster, so injuries plague a VBD team.
• Defining fragility: Generally speaking, a fragile lineup means injuries and chaos can worsen it while an antifragile lineup (Zero RB) means injuries and chaos can improve it. What people are ultimately saying when they use these terms are “heavily invested in high-end RBs and complete starting lineups” or “divested in high-end RBs and complete starting lineups.” Robust RB is a strategy that attempts to combat fragility by over-investing in the RB position early, securing top-end talent at the “most valuable” position; the fly in the ointment is that a Robust RB drafter neglects all other positions far too much and usually can’t form a holistic lineup strong enough to compete.
• Chaos and injuries are inevitable: It seems like carpetbaggery to benefit from the misfortune of others, but to clarify: no one is rooting for injuries to happen, simply advocating we be prepared for the inevitability that they will. It’s like medical insurance; we don’t want an accident, but accidents happen so it’s prudent to have medical insurance.

It Is a “Many-WR” Strategy

The fifth round is about as early as a pure Zero RB drafter wants to take an RB, often later. We want to build advantages in other high-leverage positions, creating a disproportionate edge over the rest of our opponents at these positions. Many modern formats offer unique positions of leverage. However, in most leagues, we want to hammer WRs because they are also quite scarce (especially in PPR leagues with flexes, where we should train ourselves to think of these open slots as WRs).

Additionally, a WR’s production doesn’t consolidate to one clarified beneficiary when the starter is removed from the lineup like it does at RB, so trying to find big producers off the wire is more elusive; this is why we want to draft beyond the capacity of our starting lineup at WR. In Shawn’s 2020 follow-up, he suggests that, in 2-3-1 (RB, WR, Flex) or 2-2-2 formats, we should aim for six WRs and a TE as early as we can get them.

It Works!

This type of build is terrifying to most rational human beings. Ripping away the safeguards of convention – not seeing that pretty starting roster on Week 1 – frequently drives people away. Embracing the chaos, unvested participants can play RB as a weekly game from the wire. Eventually, select players get longer runs or become league winners. If we drafted this way in 2023 and signed Kyren Williams after Week 1 or 2, we almost certainly won our home league.

Looking at results from high-stakes games in redraft and best ball in 2023, the winning FFPC Main Event roster took RB in the fourth but waited until the eighth to strike again. In Best Ball Mania IV on Underdog, the high scorer waited until the sixth. The BBMIV Overall Champion drafted four WRs to start and didn’t take an RB until the fifth. This is an effective strategy in huge tournaments. For more info, check out Matthew Betz’s tremendous article about Best Ball Zero RB targets.

It works in home leagues, too. My wife, Kelly (a fantasy football killer), is also a Zero RB acolyte. These are recent teams we’ve built in home leagues, where they’ve placed, and the top three RBs we left the draft with:

It’s Also What You Add

To conclude, let’s start with an analogy. We diet because it is intuitive that, if we want to lose pounds, we’ve got to lose calories. But if we pursue nutrition seriously, we discover that it isn’t what we subtract from our meals that makes us healthier; it’s what we add. This is because our bodies need good nutrients to make the machine work properly; when the machine works better, we’ll feel better, have more energy, be sharper and stronger, and even process food better, leading to weight loss.

I know Shawn has wondered, at times, if he erred in naming his concept Zero RB; I’ve heard him discuss it. That regret stems from the focus the name puts on subtraction rather than addition, but he’s quick to emphasize that the strategy is as much about what you put in as what you take out. It’s one reason it’s almost amusing when people call it Zero RB simply because they don’t take an RB in the first two or three rounds. That’s not really what it is about. It’s about strengthening the things others neglect, stockpiling the parts that are harder to replace, and rejecting the myth of certainty. It’s about recognizing when we lose WRs, we can usually only bail water out of the boat; when we don’t invest in RBs, we can reliably repair it mid-ocean.

People also resist Zero RB because it seems uncertain. I felt this once myself. As I slowly turned to it some time ago, I began to learn that it is, in fact, far more certain than traditional VBD principles. But it is hard to let go of that foundation; I get it. I’ve been there. I never thought, in a million years, Zero RB was actually the pathway to more certainty and stability. Amid the swirling maelstrom of chaos, I don’t feel anxious anymore; I feel calm and controlled, knowing I’ll find a solution. Nothing is guaranteed, of course. Shawn has told me “Zero RB is not a magic wand…We don’t gain the ability to predict the future.” It’s a statistics game, and probability dictates we sometimes come in at the top end of variance while others we roll snake eyes. But done right, Zero RB gives those who wield it far more outs in almost any format, providing them with far more peace to navigate the uncertain.