ArrylT wrote: ↑Sat Jun 16, 2018 5:11 am
Every player has blemishes and faults - many people are just choosing to ignore / overlook whatever faults / blemishes Barkley has. But that is in part what I am looking for (and much appreciate your response).
However if a player is so blemish free then that suggests both his floor & ceiling are higher - which means should they not reach that already higher than normal expectations - then their value should see a drop. Which in turn leads to one of the questions I was asking which was what was the minimal floor and expected ceiling you are looking for out of Barkley at his current ADP.
The ceiling for some seems to be Marshall Faulk in his prime. I'm still curious to know what the minimal floor is needed to keep him on that path.
This is very true, much like people were so absorbed in Mixon's off the field issues last year that they forgot to look at his very apparent on the field issues.
I like Barkley a lot, mainly because of his upside. But it's very much being ignored that for a running back he kind of struggles running the ball between the tackles.
There is a stat out there called "yards created per touch" which is meant to measure how many yards the RB gained on a run compared to what an average RB would have gotten with the play as blocked. The goal is to remove the effect of offensive line play similar to the way dominator is designed to remove QB play for receivers. In that metric, Barkley scored off the charts insanely awesome on runs outside the tackles, but scored well below average on runs between the tackles.
"Well below average" relative to college peers is pretty bad for a generational RB prospect. Now granted, the creator of the stat, who loves Barkley, attempted to dismiss it by noting how poorly Penn State's line graded in his line rankings. But the whole point of the stat is to separate the RB from O-line play. And that's how much people like Barkley, the guy was willing to throw his own stat under the bus rather than criticize Barkley.
Likewise on the notion of his terrible Penn St line ranking, Fournette's line ranked equally bad and Dalvin Cook's line wasn't far behind, and both of them graded out very well in yards created per rush on runs between the tackles, so clearly just having a bad O-line doesn't make it such that you can't create yards inside. Only Barkley struggled with that.
This struggle in between the tackles came through on the field too, as Barkley had a tendency to disappear in games way more than other generational RBs. In Barkley's final two years alone he had a whopping SIX games were he received double digit carries and failed to crack 3ypc, some of them against some pretty lousy defenses (Indiana, twice). That is really really bad relative to other college RB prospects. By comparison that never happened to Zeke, it happened to Gurley only once. Most notably, since he had a similarly bad O-line and even worse QB play, is Leonard Fournette whom it happened to only twice in his final two seasons, both against one of the best defenses in the nation (Alabama).
Obviously Barkley's floor is pretty nice because of his receiving ability and his ability to break off big plays. But to reach his upside he's going to need to do it all, and he still needs to learn to do the meat of the RB work. He struggles between the tackles to some extent and for such a big guy, he really doesn't run with nearly as much power as he should. He struggles to grind out games where he can't get the ball out in space. I know the line was bad, but if you're the next great running back you shouldn't be be gaining 58 yards on 33 carries against Indiana while playing on a top 5 college football team.
I am still a buyer on Barkley, but he is not as bullet proof as people seem to think.
