Faceoff - RB Chris Johnson, Tennessee Titans

Posted 6/24, exclusive to Footballguys.com

Upside - by Sigmund Bloom

If you're debating whether to take Chris Johnson in the middle of the first round, I encourage you to cue up the tape of the playoff loss to Baltimore. Johnson gouged the No. 3 rushing defense in the league for 100 total yards in a quarter and a half of play on only 12 touches, including a 28-yard reception and a 28-yard run. The Titans had a much better gameplan to use Johnson in that game than they did in the regular season, getting him the ball out in space instead of using him like a traditional tailback. LenDale White also got only three touches before Johnson left with a high ankle sprain. All signs point to Johnson's 2009 going a lot more like that game, instead of the up and down numbers of 2008, when White got only 51 carries less than Johnson over the course of the regular season.

You don't really need to do any analysis to come to this conclusion. Just look at the comments from the Titans coaches during the offseason:

• RB coach Earnest Byner: "The playoff game was an indication of where he could go. (The Ravens) could hardly touch him."
• Offensive coordinator Mike Heimerdinger: "There are places we can move him, routes we can run with him, looks we can do with him that we held back last year because I thought I was stretching him too much."
• Head coach Jeff Fisher: "We didn't get as much done with him as we wanted because it was his first year and he was learning. We're going to expand on what we did with him."

If you do want to dig deeper to find evidence to support Johnson getting more work in 2009, just look at how LenDale White was used last year. White got more than two-thirds of his carries when the Titans were leading, and more than a third when they were up by more than a score. With no Albert Haynesworth to anchor the middle of the defense, the Titans won't be nearly as dominant on defense as they were last year, and they won't be looking to White to put the lean on the opposing defense nearly as often as they did in 2008.

Chris Johnson has the coaches excited about using more often and more effectively than they did in his rookie year. The likely script of the Titans' games is going to make him the vastly superior choice to LenDale White in most situations. Most importantly, Johnson showed his combine record speed was legit last year, so he can take any of those numerous touches to the house. He could easily make the jump to the uberstud "franchise fantasy RB" tier, so in the middle of the first round, look no further than the speedster from East Carolina.

Downside - by Mike Brown

There's very little debate surrounding the talent level of Chris Johnson. He entered the league last season and immediately make an impact, finishing as the 11th-ranked rusher in the league in terms of fantasy points.

However, this season there are several reasons to be skeptical as to whether Johnson can avoid taking even a small step back. And that's an important factor to weigh. In order to live up to his ADP, Johnson cannot afford to take any steps back. Not only that, he must actually play a lot better than he did in his rookie year. The reason is because he's being taken as the fifth rusher off the board on average. Most people saw what he did last year as a rookie and simply assume he'll improve in Year 2. You're paying for what you expect him to do with continued improvement, but continued improvement is far from a guarantee.

For starters, he turned in the season he did on 251 carries. He averaged 4.9 yards per carry on those rushes. Will either of those numbers increase? The carries almost certainly will not, and the YPC will be extremely tough to maintain. The touches aren't likely to go up with a highly productive (not to mention much slimmer) LenDale White still around. White will also handle the vast majority of the goal line carries, meaning Johnson needs to produce a ton of yardage to live up to his ADP. And while not impossible, maintaining a 4.9 YPC average is one of the more difficult things to do in the NFL. Just ask Adrian Peterson, whose YPC dropped from 5.6 in his rookie year to 4.8 last season.

Next, Johnson suffered an ankle injury during the postseason that knocked him out of the team's season-ending loss last January. He claims the ankle was at 95% as recently as April, but is it really good news that the ankle was almost back to normal three months after the fact? We saw how much a late-season injury affected LaDainian Tomlinson a year ago, so why risk the possibility for a lingering issue again? At 5-foot-11, 197 pounds, Johnson is one of the smaller backs in the league and could just be more susceptible to injury than most.

Johnson isn't going to sneak up on anyone this time around, and teams can now strategize a better gameplan for slowing him down. He might still turn in a solid season, but expecting a player to vault into the elite while still in a strict time-sharing situation is asking a lot of anyone. None of this is meant to suggest that Johnson can't live up to the hype; just that it's highly unlikely he'll get the opportunity to do so.