Great players are more important than you probably think. And losing them for an extended stretch may not be as bad as you think.
Christian McCaffrey averaged 24.7 points per game last year in PPR leagues, which was 7.7 points better than Breece Hall (who finished as RB2) and 9.9 points better than Bijan Robinson (who was RB8).
That kind of positional advantage is nearly impossible to replicate. McCaffrey outscored Robinson by more per game than Robinson outscored Emari Demercado or Zamir White, who finished the year 56th and 57th at the position. A team could have two Top 10 running backs with Robinson (RB8) and Derrick Henry (RB9) and they'd still get beat out by a team starting McCaffrey and some random guy off of waivers.
That kind of edge explains why, despite dealing with a calf injury all throughout August, McCaffrey was the first player off the board in all 12 drafting platforms and formats we track in our aggregate ADP data. The upside more than justified the downside risk.
Unfortunately, managers who took a chance on his health have already had one nasty surprise; the 49ers revealed Monday morning that McCaffrey's injury was lingering and he wouldn't play in Week 1. And now reports suggest he might not play in Week 2, either.
It gets worse. After the game, McCaffrey's backup, Jordan Mason, inadvertently revealed that he knew he'd be starting as early as Friday. During that same span, San Francisco's coaching staff played coy with the media and made it seem as if they believed McCaffrey would go. It will be hard to trust their statements about McCaffrey's availability going forward.
https://t.co/El202bFQKo pic.twitter.com/BzNWOfTpwY
— Will Brinson (@WillBrinson) September 10, 2024
There's been a lot of great content produced in the last 24 hours on what the expectations should be for his injury and what fantasy managers should do if they had Christian McCaffrey. And that is good and proper; for what purpose does the fantasy football advice industry exist if not to help managers make decisions on the best course of action?
But most of what I've seen has put the treatment ahead of the diagnosis, so to speak. It is prescribing courses of action without first grappling with the ailment. The first question to be addressed, in my opinion, is this: If you are managing a team that drafted Christian McCaffrey, how much does this injury hurt your chances of walking away with a title this year?
I'll start with the bad news, first: if you drafted McCaffrey, you probably aren't going to win the championship this year. But here's some slightly-less-bad news: if McCaffrey was perfectly healthy, you still probably wouldn't win the championship. Even the best teams are much more likely to end the season with a loss than a win.
Which isn't to say that losing Christian McCaffrey for any length of time doesn't negatively affect your championship odds. But it's important to put the size of the impact in perspective. Fortunately, we can estimate how much of an impact missed time has on your title odds across a variety of scenarios, and armed with this knowledge, you can make more-informed choices about how you want to address the situation.
How Much of His 2024 Value Will Christian McCaffrey Lose?
Probably a lot less than you think, even if he continues to miss time.
Let's start with a baseline. Let's consider a 12-team league where six teams make the playoffs, two of them earning byes. In this league, if you select a team at random, there's a 50% chance that team will win in any given game, a 50% chance the team will make the playoffs, a 16.7% chance the team will earn a bye (two out of twelve), and an 8.3% chance the team will win the title (one out of twelve).
Let's further say that every game we are without McCaffrey costs us 20 points in expectation-- a massive drop. (In reality, the expected loss is much lower, both because McCaffrey is unlikely to match his 24.7 points per game from last year and because we're likely able to do much better from our replacement than RB50.) Each point per game we lose reduces our chances of winning.
How much our odds fall depends heavily on league scoring and lineup requirements. (Losing 20 points per game is a much bigger deal when average scores are 110 than when average scores are 160.) But one estimate I've seen suggested that in a fairly standard league, every 2.2 extra points a team scores translates to about a 1% better chance of winning. Let's round that to 10% and say that our odds of winning a game with McCaffrey in are 55%, and our odds with McCaffrey out fall to 45%.
(To reiterate, this is an implausibly large estimate of his likely impact, so the following estimates should serve more as an upper bound.)
If he was perfectly healthy, McCaffrey could play a maximum of 13 out of 14 regular-season games for us (because of San Francisco's Week 9 bye), which would result in an expected record of 7.6 wins and 6.4 losses. For every game he misses, our expected losses decline by... just one tenth of a win. If McCaffrey misses a month, our expected record only falls to 7.2 and 6.8.
But playoff seeding isn't decided by expected wins. Each of those averages represents the midpoint of a distribution. To show what that distribution looks like, here's your odds of winning at least X games based on the number of regular-season games McCaffrey plays.
Here we can see the impact of missed time. If McCaffrey plays the entire regular season for us, there's a 72% chance we finish the year at .500 or better. If he misses the entire regular season, that falls to 45%.
Estimating how likely we are to make the playoffs and earn a bye at any given win total, this is what our playoff and bye odds look like:
| Games Played | Playoff Odds | Bye Odds |
|---|---|---|
| 13 | 62.4% | 23.6% |
| 12 | 60.4% | 22.0% |
| 11 | 58.4% | 20.4% |
| 10 | 56.3% | 18.9% |
| 9 | 54.2% | 17.5% |
| 8 | 52.1% | 16.2% |
| 7 | 50.0% | 15.0% |
| 6 | 47.9% | 13.8% |
| 5 | 45.8% | 12.7% |
| 4 | 43.7% | 11.6% |
| 3 | 41.6% | 10.6% |
| 2 | 39.6% | 9.7% |
| 1 | 37.6% | 8.9% |
| 0 | 35.6% | 8.1% |
Just by missing Week 1, managers who drafted McCaffrey saw their odds of making the playoffs decline by 2%. Each additional game he misses costs another 2%. Odds of earning a bye likewise fell by 1.6%, although the impact there will decline over time. (By the time he's missed 12 games, missing a 13th only drops your odds of a bye by 0.8%-- mostly because you're much less likely to be contending for a bye after he already missed 12 games!)
This is bad; it's better for our fantasy teams when our stars play than it is when they don't play. But the ultimate goal of fantasy football isn't to make the playoffs, it's to win the title, and if Christian McCaffrey is fully healthy by then, he'll be a tremendous help to our chances.
How big of a help? Here's the same chart as above, except it assumes that the team with Christian McCaffrey has an expected 55% win rate in any playoff game (provided they make the playoffs in the first place).
| Games Played | Playoff Odds | Bye Odds | Reach Title | Win Title |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 13 | 62.4% | 23.6% | 24.7% | 13.6% |
| 12 | 60.4% | 22.0% | 23.7% | 13.0% |
| 11 | 58.4% | 20.4% | 22.7% | 12.5% |
| 10 | 56.3% | 18.9% | 21.7% | 11.9% |
| 9 | 54.2% | 17.5% | 20.7% | 11.4% |
| 8 | 52.1% | 16.2% | 19.8% | 10.9% |
| 7 | 50.0% | 15.0% | 18.8% | 10.4% |
| 6 | 47.9% | 13.8% | 17.9% | 9.8% |
| 5 | 45.8% | 12.7% | 17.0% | 9.3% |
| 4 | 43.7% | 11.6% | 16.1% | 8.9% |
| 3 | 41.6% | 10.6% | 15.2% | 8.4% |
| 2 | 39.6% | 9.7% | 14.4% | 7.9% |
| 1 | 37.6% | 8.9% | 13.6% | 7.5% |
| 0 | 35.6% | 8.1% | 12.8% | 7.0% |
Remember, a random team in a 12-team league will have an 8.3% chance of winning the title, which means if Christian McCaffrey is the difference-maker we all expected he'd be, he needs to play just 6 games to leave his managers better off-- provided three of those games happen to come in the fantasy playoffs.
San Francisco could hold him out until after their bye week and managers with McCaffrey would be less likely than the average team to reach the playoffs (45.8% vs. 50%), but more likely to win the entire league (9.3% vs. 8.3%).
I'm not saying San Francisco will hold McCaffrey out that long; most medical experts believe he's at worst a few weeks away from returning to action. I'm just illustrating that while missing regular-season games is annoying, it's the playoffs that ultimately matter the most.
With One Very, Very Important Caveat
All of this so far assumes that Christian McCaffrey is, well, Christian McCaffrey. If he's providing a 10-point-per-game advantage against the competition and he plays during the fantasy playoffs, your chances of winning a title this year are looking good.
But just because McCaffrey did it last year doesn't mean he's going to do it this year. Even if he remained healthy, perhaps age would have caught up to him or San Francisco's offense would have declined. If McCaffrey was destined to be a bust anyway, it doesn't really matter whether he misses games or not.
Austin Ekeler was the 2nd player drafted last year after averaging 21.6 points per game in 2021 and 22.3 points per game in 2022. He dealt with nagging injuries, but even in the 14 games he played his production fell to 13.8 points per game and he never provided managers with the edge they were hoping for; 19 different running backs played at least 10 games and averaged more points per game. History is not destiny.
And so far, this analysis assumes that McCaffrey's injury is independent of his chances of underperforming, but it's not. Perhaps McCaffrey rushes back too quickly and aggravates his injury, leading to more missed time. Perhaps the injury robs him of some of his explosiveness.
Perhaps San Francisco is impressed enough with Jordan Mason in McCaffrey's absence that he continues to earn more snaps upon McCaffrey's return as the 49ers prioritize keeping their star healthy and fresh for the NFL playoffs.
The fact that Christian McCaffrey is missing a few games in September should not concern fantasy managers very much. Even if he misses a month, there's only about a 1-in-50 chance it will make any difference in the final outcome. If McCaffrey remains a superstar, managers who drafted him with the 1st overall pick are still much more likely than their peers to end the year with another trophy for their mantle.
But the possibility that McCaffrey isn't going to be the same player we've grown accustomed to should keep fantasy managers up at night. For a parallel, managers who drafted Justin Jefferson in the first round last year won championships at the lowest rate of any player.
That's not primarily because Jefferson missed seven weeks and left early in two others. It's because Jefferson fell from 26.3 points per game over the first month of the season-- best of any wide receiver-- down to 17.5 points per game during the fantasy playoffs and just 10.9 fantasy points in the championship week.
Managers who held on to Jefferson accepted the greater risk of missing the playoffs believing they would have a difference-maker waiting for them upon his return. They did not. McCaffrey's injury hurts not because of a few missed games in September but because it makes it ever-so-slightly more likely that his managers likewise find themselves disappointed in December.
