Fantasy Football: Top 15 running backs to target in 2020

Fantasy Football Running Backs to Target – Number 4: Clyde Edwards-Helaire

Clyde Edwards-Helaire has been a hot topic since the defending world champs took him with their final pick in the first round. It only added fuel to the fire when Damien Williams opted out of the 2020 season. Now virtually everyone has him labeled as a first round pick in fantasy drafts.

Even yet, he still might seem like a little bit of a homer pick for the top 5, but listen to these stat predictions and try to say they don’t make sense. With most of the rest of these guys, it has mainly been based off of what could improve or regress based off of last seasons stats, but with Edwards-Helaire being a rookie, we will take a slightly different route for his stat predictions.

The two main things that come to mind when thinking about Edwards-Helaire are “will he be able to bring back that Kareem Hunt like impact back to the Chiefs’ offense?” And “could he eventually be a Christian McCaffery-type talent in KC with his receiving ability?”

He probably comes into the league a bigger receiving threat than Hunt, but likely not as good out of the gate in the receiving game as McCaffery. Also, he should have a bigger impact on the ground right away than McCaffrey, but probably not quite as much as Hunt.

With those two players in mind, I took the averages of Hunt’s rookie season in KC and McCaffrey’s first year as a full time starter just to see what Edwards-Helaire could possibly do. This is what it looks like: 1,213 rush yards, seven rush touchdowns, 81 receptions (weird that this number shows up again), 661 receiving yards, and five more touchdowns through the air.

Now those seem like lofty expectations for the rookie, but hear me out.

Oddly enough, the receiving stats came out to be virtually identical to McCaffrey’s rookie receiving stats (just one reception for 11 more yards than rookie McCaffery) and he only started 10 games that season. With Edwards-Helaire coming in projected to start from week one, those receiving stats should be achievable, especially in Kansas City’s offense.

The rushing stats are the one that could be slightly over exaggerated, so for the official stat predictions, we will round down to just 1,000 yards on the ground to be safe. His 1,000 rush yards, 81 receptions, 661 receiving yards, and 12 total touchdowns comes out to be around 278.6 fantasy points, which should easily place him in the top five.

At first, it seemed as though Edwards-Helaire would be over valued in drafts, but now I’m completely on board for taking him in the top 5 overall.