Is CMC Worth it? Here's what the Math Says

The largest question in fantasy football this year is, as always, Christian McCaffery. In 4 of the past 7 seasons, he finished as the RB1, RB2, or RB3 in Half-PPR leagues; in the other 3, RB53, RB39, and RB72. A lot of analysis on CMC revolves around how if he is healthy, he can win you your league, which is absolutely true. To properly assess his risk vs reward however, it is important to actually quantify the amount of a difference CMC makes when healthy (and how much he hurts you when he isn't). In order to do so, consider Underdog best ball advance rates. If you are unfamiliar with advance rate, it is the % of the time a team finished in the top 2 of their best ball pod during the regular season, thus “advancing” them to the next round. The expected advance rate for any given player is 16.7% (2/12).

              Note: Using advance rate data means CMC’s performance in fantasy playoff games is not included in determining his win rate. This is by design as to avoid the massive impact of one huge or poor performance that just happened to come in a playoff week. Advance Rate captures the totality and truth of the season better than percent of championship teams he was on would.

              In his last 2 healthy seasons, Christian McCaffrey posted 21% and 36.2% advance rates on underdog (We will use the average of 28.6%). For simplicity sake, we will say that means if you took him in redraft, you had roughly a 14.3% chance of winning your league. A standard player has a rate of 8.33% (1/12). A significant advantage for sure, but far from a sure-fire championship.

              In 2024, CMC was the 1^st overall pick and was injured - finishing as the RB72 and yielding a 4% advance rate. This would equate to a 2% chance of winning your redraft league.

              I do not have access to his advance rate data for every season, so we will use these datapoints to represent healthy vs unhealthy seasons from CMC. Weighting these % by the 4 healthy seasons and 3 unhealthy ones gets us a 9.02%-win rate (slightly above average). Doing the math in this way probably gives CMC a little more credit than he deserves, as it includes 2 of his healthy seasons when he was young and before his injury concerns began. If you start the math from 2020 onwards, which is the first time he was hurt, and the win rate falls to a subpar 6.92%.

              All this being said, in each of these the last 6 seasons, he was the often the 1^st overall pick. This year, he is on average the 7^th pick. It’s nice to get a discount on CMC, but the difference between these picks shouldn’t be too overblown – if you draft him 7^th overall and he gets hurt, it still destroys your team.

              He is also now 29 years old which is right around, if not past, the RB age cliff. Although it can be partially excused by injury, he did not quite look like himself during his time on the field last year. This is where my largest issue with CMC lies. CMC can be healthy and not deliver. That is possible – and nobody talks about it. Below is the list of running backs to finish in the top 5 RBs in Half-PPR at age 28 or older since 2016 (a year younger than CMC):

              Derrick Henry (2024) - 18TDs

              Raheem Mostert (2023) - 21TDs

              Derrick Henry (2022) - 13TDs

Eventually, the combination of wear and tear and accumulated injury will catch up to McCaffery. It is not impossible to think it could be this year.

Per Benjamin Solak, an NFL analyst at ESPN, and Next Gen Stats, in CMC's first 3 games back last season, he failed to reach a top speed equal to his worst week in 2023. In his 4th game, he reached a mark that would have been his 5th worst mark in 2023 (per Sports Illustrated and NGS).

According to Player Profiler, he posted 3.35 less fantasy points per game than was expected. This is partially explained by his zero TDs, but still concerning. CMCs evaded tackles per touch also saw a small dip, and his route participation decreased drastically (although it was still high compared to other backs). The small sample size makes it hard to extrapolate these stats too much, but its what we have to work with.

The counter argument to all of this is that only one team can win a fantasy league in a given season. You need to “play like you’re right” in order to win. This notion may make sense in the context of something like Best Ball Mania, where your goal is to beat hundreds of thousands of people, but in the standard 12-man league, it isn’t as true.

All you really need to do in your regular league is make the playoffs. Once you’re there, you don’t need the nuts to win, you just need to have more points than the team you happen to be playing in a given week.

Drafting CMC is essentially a bet of going all in on saying that if he is healthy he will be a top 3 RB. Even though he is an outlier and the chances he would produce at this level are likely over 50%, there are worlds where he is healthy and not a top 3 back. The math says it is only worth it if you know for sure that he would be. He has essentially been a break-even pick in the past 7 years without age concerns.

If he falls towards pick 12 or later, where other players start to show more warts than early first rounders do, I would become ok taking the shot. At current cost, it feels we may be chasing days gone past.