Every year there are 12 rb1s in a 12 team league. Every year people try to project players by comparing their past production to rb12 and declaring them a rb1. Every year there are more than 12 guys who fit that bill, and every year some of those guys get injured.
You should project more than 12 guys to put up top 12 rb numbers. Some of them will get hurt or have other unpredictable issues, but there are more than 12 guys who fit that bill.
I agree with your mentality, but in the opposite direction. Roughly 5 years ago, I proposed a new way to define and measure RB1, WR2, etc etc. My thesis at the time, was that there are actually NOT 12 RB1s in the league, but that there were roughly 20 WR2s in the league. It was not received well, but out of curiosity, I still create this data set from time to time, to help orient myself to the ever-evolving talent pool of the NFL, because every season I believe it's important to account for the current population of all positions and their scoring ability, to help prepare a draft strategy that is based on what's actually going to be on the NFL field this season. Not blindly pick a position to draft early, because RB early is right, or Anchor is cool, or Zero RB is trendy... I design my draft strategy based on who and how many, are playing football THIS year.
This isn't really where this belongs, but I don't know where else to drop this... so here goes nothing.
In order to measure variance, you need a baseline. There are a lot of ways to define a baseline and 99.9% of them are arbitrary. Mine is also arbitrary.
The following is a data compilation I created for the 2022 season. The easiest way to explain it is...
Take the highest scoring RB of week 1... and week 2... and week 3... and continue through week 17. You now have 17 weeks of the #1 RB finisher, of each individual week, for a total of the entire fantasy season. Now average those 17 scores together. The #1 scoring fantasy RB, on average, scores 35.2 points per week.
The #12 scoring fantasy RB, on average, scores 17.3 points per week.
The #24 scoring fantasy RB, on average, scores 11.2 points per week.
The #36 scoring fantasy RB on average, scores 7.7 points per week.
As you can see I did it for 24 QBs, 24TEs, 36WRs, and 36RBs, each for 17 weeks. 2,040 data points. But what we get, is that to be a "RB1" on any given week, you need to score 17.3 points or better. To be a WR1 you need to score 19.5 points or better. Again, this is somewhat arbitrary, but at least it's based on real world results over the course of an entire season. Obviously, it's not perfect by any means, as who knows how many of the players within each average pool was even owned, yet alone in a starting lineup in any given week.
So, you can do whatever you want with this data. In the past I've posed a thought experiment, that to truly have an "RB1" in any given week, you need to have an RB1 who averages 17.3PPG. There were only 5 RBs in the game last year who managed to do that. When I told people that there were only 5 RB1s in the league, it was not well accepted. This was probably 6 or 7 years ago now, and I tried to find ways to quantify my outlook, and honestly this is where I began focusing on measuring a players impact on a weekly basis, within the realm of my specific team and matchup, not a year long basis, and not their own individual weekly average. I never did find a way to present this to the community in a way that was well received, but it really helped me outline what I believe in the past 2-3 years has now been referred to by 'experts' as deadzone players.
I tried to theorize that the reason I prefer WR early or late, but never middle, was because WRs 7-30ish were all indistinguishable, and that in the grand scheme of fantasy, we were really only talking about 100 yards and 2 TDs either direction (4 total) that would determine whether a WR would finish as a low end 1, or low end 2, and that trying to rank, draft, predict, or chase that difference was futile. Now, the game has changed, and therefor our data analysis needs to as well.
Using the chart above, to be a WR1 on average, you need to average 19.5 points per game. That means last year, I believe there were really only 6 WR1s. To be a WR2 on a weekly basis, you needed to average 14.2, meaning there were 14 WR2s last year. 11.1 to be a WR3, meaning there were 21 WR3s last year, and any WR who couldn't average at least 11.1 ppg, wasn't worth owning. Well, wasn't worth starting at least. That means there were only about 41 WRs worth starting at any given point last year.
As I'm doing this, I think I remember why I originally created this chart. It was to disprove the notion of RB scarcity and 'depth' of WR. I had a league mate on this forum, who claimed that they could just grab any WW WR and get 10 points from them, and my rebuttal that a 10 point WR was useless in our game, and that the statement they were making carried no real world application. I could counter by saying I can pick up any WW RB and score 5 points, it wasn't a valid counter argument for drafting a RB with a high pick.
To really drive home this tangent I've wandered into, I'm going to do it 2 ways. The first, is to disprove the RB scarcity and WR depth claim. As noted above, a WR3 is 11.1 or higher and there were 41 WRs who met that mark last year. To be an RB3 you need to average 7.7 or higher, and there were 57 runningbacks who managed to average 7.7 or higher last year. So while the industry will always pick out the 12th RB overall, 24th RB overall, and 36th RB overall to try and make their claims for RB1, 2, 3, and define scarcity and depth... I'm looking at fantasy football through the lens of what it takes on any given week (aka our 1v1 matchups) to score as an RB1, 2, 3, without the idea that 'points' are limited to 12, 24, or 36 spots.
Secondly, doubling down on this first part, it took 11.2 points to be an RB2 on any given week and we know from above, there were only 5 RBs we consider RB1s. So If you ask 99.99% of the population how many RB2s there are in fantasy, they would tell you, only 12, right? My outlook on the game is that, last year, there were 24 RB2s in fantasy. 24 different RBs averages less than 17.3 but more than 11.2. (This covers RB6 through RB29)
I think this is where the devaluation of RBs has come from and why ZRB continues to gain so much popularity, and the idea of 'dead zone' RBs. Because why draft the 12th RB off the board, if they score in the same range as the 29th RB off the board? This creates basically a 2 round area where people feel justified to ignore the position, because we can't identify a benefit within the gap.
Apologies to the Dobbins thread, if there's a strategy thread this would better be served in, someone point me in the right direction.