UnderDog Risers and Fallers 6/6/22

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Darrel Williams (RISER) and Keaontay Ingram (FALLER), RB CARDINALS – Darrel Williams has landed with the Arizona Cardinals, a transaction that has boosted Williams’ stock and has had a concurrent cooling effect on sixth-round rookie Keaontay Ingram’s undercover buzz as a deep sleeper in early best-ball action.

The thesis for the Ingram play was as follows: Ingram was a good college running back who only left Texas thanks to the presence of superstar Bijan Robinson and undisputed Longhorns team leader and future NFL runner himself, Roschon Johnson. Ingram is 220-plus pounds, has good size-adjusted speed and has always been a plus-option in the receiving department. Add in the fact that fellow backfield-mate, Eno Benjamin, has done nothing to prove himself at the NFL level, and you have all the makings of a player in Ingram who would return value in spades should anything happen to starting Cards runner James Conner. Arizona figures to be a good offense that will find itself in scoring position, and Conner has an injury-riddled history. He tore an MCL in college and also famously overcame cancer. In 2018, he missed time with an ankle sprain and concussion. In 2019, he made the injury report for issues with his knee, ankle, quadricep and AC joint respectively which cost him a total of 6 games. in 2020, it was an ankle, a toe, and a quadricep, but only one game was lost in total. Last season, Conner missed 3 games (ankle and ribs).

Darrel Williams now enters the equation as a player familiar to many fantasy enthusiasts due to his role in Kansas City as a primary backup who would generally serve us well for fantasy purposes when we knew that he was going to be getting a good chunk of the workload. It stands to reason that a veteran may be more ready to step in, if and when Conner is forced to miss time. So, the 15-point rise and the near 10-point fall in Williams’ and Ingram’s respective ADPs does make sense, and it is something that we’ll certainly have to adjust for on the UnderDog Best Ball Cheat Sheet.

However, something to be noted is that one of the reasons why the Cardinals, and Kyler Murray, seem to love James Conner so much is because of his ability and functionality as a three-down back — which means more than just being able to catch footballs out of the backfield. Conner was ranked as the No.1 pass-blocking RB in the NFL last year by PFF by a good margin to his nearest competitor (who was, ironically, Darrel Williams’ old backfield-mate in KC, Jerick McKinnon). Williams, himself, was actually ranked in the bottom-12 among all NFL RBs in pass-protection by the same graders at PFF.

In the end, Williams is hard to trust as the slam-dunk bet to make if you are making a play on predicting Conner to miss time due to injury, but his presence does indeed make the depth situation in Arizona much more ambiguous than it was when it was just Ingram and Benjamin on hand. It’s perfectly reasonable in this case to adjust the positions of both players on the cheat sheet to account for what is a reasonably shifting ADP.