Stick’s Fantasy Football Rankings

1. •Quarterback
   

2. •Running Back
   

3. •Wide Receiver
   

4. •Tight End
   

5. •Defense
   

6. •Kicker
   

7. •Top 50
   

Recent Underground Columns

1. •NFL Draft Winners and Losers
   

2. •Fantasy Ranking this year’s draft picks
   

3. •Pandora’s Box
   

4. •Kansas City Conundrum
   

5. •Debunking the strength of schedule argument
   

6. •Vikings likely to leave for LA
   

7. •Jerry Jones must be joking
   

8. •Dolphins swimming in options
   

9. •Favre frustrating Packers
   

10. •April’s Fools
    

11. •Mark’s Mock Draft Philosophy
    

12. •How ‘bout them Cowboys...
    

13. •Tampering a sensitive issue to tackle
    

14. •Utecht will greatly impact the Bengals
    

15. •Quinn vs. Leinart
    

16. •Chasing Julius
    

17. •Another bad deal for the Raiders?

All good things come to an end and it happens to even the most reliable fantasy running backs. It happened to Curtis Martin and Eddie George and even the superstars such as Emmitt Smith and Walter Payton. Eventually it will even happen to the greatest running back fantasy football rubes have ever seen, LaDainian Tomlinson.

In the course of my 15 years of playing fantasy football I’ve learned, as most have, that running backs rule. If you have one or two of the top ball carriers your team is going to contend. If not, you probably just wasted an entry fee and have to listen to your fellow league members taunt you for a sub-.500 record.

The reason a team ends up without a good back is usually because of one of two things. The first being made the mistake of tempting fate and waited until round three to grab a back and none of the risk/reward backs you selected panned out. The second, and more maddening, possibility is that your stud back was injured or suddenly saw his production plummet. Some have come up with rudimentary ideas to avoid grabbing the washed up running back, but none are fool proof. The two most common I’ve heard are not to take anyone past the age of 29 and don’t take a back who had an inordinate amount of carries the previous season, like Larry Johnson two years ago (although it seemed that last year there was a 50/50 split among experts regarding the L.J. quandary).

The statistics are staggering when looking at the reasoning behind downgrading L.J. If you look at the nine running backs that have carried the ball 390 times or more in a single season eight of them suffered a significant drop off in production or accumulated only one more 1,000 yard season in their entire career. The only player who didn’t was Eric Dickerson, who accounted for...

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