We’re all very excited to watch Marshawn Lynch play for his hometown team following a very brief retirement. Even if you think he’s fool’s gold, Oakland’s first game of the season will be appointment television. Based on very early draft data, Lynch is projected to be drafted in the late second or early third round. At that rank, Lynch is slotted to be the top RB option for some teams, and the second for everyone else. Conventional strategy dictates that a player drafted this high should be handcuffed. Lynch, especially, is a volatile asset given his odd situation – he was injury prone last we saw him in the league, and we don’t know exactly how game-ready this 30-year-old will be. It seems like a reasonable approach to prepare for the worst by investing in Oakland’s young RB core.
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Don’t bother. Both DeAndre Washington and Jalen Richard are promising players. They ended the 2016 season with eerily similar stat lines, but the eye test revealed Richard to be the emerging talent toward the tail end of 2016. Richard’s ability in the passing game stood out in comparison to fellow rookie Washington, but it all fell apart once Derek Carr ended his season early on Christmas Eve with a broken leg.
Richard’s superiority isn’t clear-cut enough to warrant recommending him as a draft candidate for handcuffing Marshawn Lynch. Frankly, the Raiders organization has no reason to prioritize one over the other at this point. Both backs are almost identical in build, each listed at 5’8″, weighing in at five pounds within of one another, and boasting the same amount of experience. It would behoove the Raiders to run a committee in the event that Lynch loses the starting role (due to injury or performance). Both players are undersized and would benefit from a shared workload. The team will need to make a decision on which of the two to keep in a few years, and the more meaningful game film they have to compare the players, the more informed their decision can be.
The ideal handcuff is a player who will benefit from depleted roster depth. Once RB1 goes down, the handcuff should be able to lay claim to a significant portion of the team’s carriers, to the extent that the volume will compensate for any deficiencies in the talent department. Jalen Richard and DeAndre Washington are practically neck and neck in their current race for depth chart relevance, and whatever plan is in place for a Lynch-less Raiders team remains entirely unclear.
No, you’re not exactly going to have to fight off suitors to get one of these two on your team, but they’re not even worth using up a spot on your bench. Use your final picks on options with more upside, like rookie tight ends OJ Howard and David Njoku, or receivers with a higher floor, like Mohamed Sanu and Brandon LaFell. It might seem pedantic to harp on ultra late picks, but football is a violent sport and injuries are a guarantee for every squad that you could conceivably draft. If a low-level prospect breaks onto the scene, it’s always better to already have him on your team than it is to fight for him on waivers. Your best chance to get dibs on such a player is to draft wisely, all the way through to the end.
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Shane McCormack is a correspondent at FantasyPros. For more from Shane, check out his archive and follow him @ShaneMcCormack_.
