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Spotlight - RB Cedric Benson, Cincinnati Bengals

Posted on 8/17, exclusive to Footballguys.com

David Yudkin's Thoughts

Cedric Benson was one of the heralded Big Three RBs drafted in the 2005 NFL draft along with Ronnie Brown and Cadillac Williams. While the trio has been disappointing as a whole, Benson perhaps has been the biggest disappointment of them all. He never did all that much in Chicago but saw a flurry of better numbers at the end of the year for the Bengals. For now, he hopes it's something to build on and it remains to be seen if he's truly been reborn in Cincinnati.

In 38 games with the Bears, Benson could only muster two games with 100+ rushing yards. With his career in question after his release by Chicago and some off-field legal issues, he resurfaced in Cincinnati and wound up with three 100+ yard rushing games in 12 games. While his ypc was hardly awe inspiring (3.5), he did manage to produce 765 yards from scrimmage over his final eight games, totaling 88.5 fantasy points over that time. Given that he started the season in the proverbial fantasy scrap heap, over the second half of the season he ranked as the 19th best fantasy RB.

In the quirky but true statistics category, Benson has managed to improve his carries, rushing yardage, receptions, and receiving yards since he entered the league. Given that he starts the year as the Bengals starting tailback, he could continue that trend again this year if he can be productive and can hold off rookie Bernard Scott, who has be generating a bit of buzz out of training camp.

The Bengals offense as a whole suffered overall when QB Carson Palmer missed 11 games with an elbow injury in 2008. The rushing and passing attack suffered equally, but before to last season the Bengals had been able to produce a decent fantasy RB option for years. Prior to last season, the Bengals produced a Top 20 fantasy RB for 11 straight seasons

The only longer such streaks have been:

1975-92 Bears (18 seasons)
Walter Payton, Roland Harper, Neal Anderson

1979-94 Rams (16 seasons)
Wendell Tyler, Cullen Bryant, Elvis Peacock, Eric Dickerson, Charles White, Greg Bell, Cleveland Gary, Rober Delphino, Jerome Bettis

1987-98 Bills (12 seasons)
Ronnie Harmon, Thurman Thomas, Antowain Smith, Robb Riddick

1985-96 Seahawks (12 seasons)
Curt Warner, John Williams, Derrick Fenner,, Chris Warren,

1970-81 Redskins (12 seasons)
Larry Brown, Mike Thomas, John Riggins, Clarence Harmon, Joe Washington

With better health to Palmer and Chad Ochocinco, Laveranues Coles, and a kinder, gentler Chris Henry, the Bengals could have another productive season offensively. The passing game played an integral role in the success of the running game over the past few years, and it's possible that the offense could rekindle some of the magic that produced a number of viable fantasy starters in the past few seasons.

Positives

• In recent years, the Bengals have consistently produced a Top 20 fantasy RB
• Benson ranked as the 19th best fantasy back over the last half of the season last year
• Other key cogs in the offense are returning and should be healthy, thus enhancing the offense as a whole and getting Benson more red zone looks

Negatives

• Benson is allergic to the end zone. He's averaged a TD every 57 touches over his career
• Of the 22 RB in the NFL with at least 400 carries between 2007 and 2008, Benson sports the lowest ypc of that data set with a meager 3.47
• The Bengals may look to move on if he doesn't improve on his total numbers from last year, not just the ones from the last few games

Final Thoughts

For those that have evolved into taking wide receivers early and filling in with lower priced running backs farther down the draft, Benson is the type of candidate that will be one of your options. The problem is, he's definitely a "buyer beware" type of a pick. On the surface he looks like a great option, he ended last year like he had turned the corner, and he's in a decent situation on a team that has supported a productive running game.

But his career numbers to date have not been all that great, he doesn't get many touchdowns, and would anyone be all that surprised if he lost the starting job by October? And that's not even considering any off-field issues that could come up.

It's hard to get the warm and fuzzies over someone that owns a career 3.7 ypc and has already had a lot of chances to earn a big workload. He's probably best suited for bench depth on your fantasy roster, and if things do work out early on you could always trade him or use him as an injury/bye week fill in.

It's unlikely that he will have a huge breakout at this stage of his career, but he may still have some fantasy utility and if he keeps his head on straight he could still be a useful fantasy commodity.

Quotations from the Message Board Thread

Tanner9919:
Rudi Johnson-esque performance. [Benson] will be the workhorse back on a team that loves to use one RB and one RB only, No threat of RBBC here, which means Benson represents strong value on draft day. Performed well last year despite playing with Fitzpatrick under center...now enter Carson Palmer: this changes everything. He had more carries over final 8 weeks of 2008 season than all but 2 RBs.

rzrback77:
Cedric Benson had a very successful collegiate run and was drafted as the fourth overall selection in the 05 draft. He came out of the gate slowly and was outplayed in Chicago by Thomas Jones, who was very successful rushing for over 1300 yards and finishing as RB9. IN Benson's second year, he received about one third of the carriies and performed similar to Jones, averaging 4.1 ypc and scoring 6 rushing TDs in 157 carries.

In 07, he became the starter as Jones left Chicago and the entire bear rushing attack floundered. Benson averaged only 3.4 ypc while he had the majority of the carries prior to being injured in week 12 and missing the rest of the year. In 08, he hooked up with the Bengals and became their main back for the second half of the season. His numbers remained average at best with a 3.5 ypc, but had over twenty carries in 5 games. Carson Palmer was also out and the entire Bengal offense was atrocious.

Benson should continue to be the bell-cow back for the Bengals in 09 with very little threatening him on the depth chart. I expect that the QB play will improve significantly for the Bengals in 09 with Palmer's return. TJ Housh has departed for Seatlle, but Chad Ochocinco, Coles, Chris Henry and a couple of decent second year guys, their WR corp looks strong. The OL is not the best, but the improved QB play should open a little more room than Benson saw last year. I expect that you will get very nice production for the price spent on him as his current ADP is RB31 and 73 overall.

BuckeyeArt:
Last year, the #1 RB each game received 86% of the carries. I don't think any other team was higher. In 2007, it was injuries that made the final stats look like RBBC. In reality, the #1 RB each game got 79% of the carries. In 2004-2006, that number ranged from 81%-91%. Cincy (or Lewis) clearly likes to use 1 RB.

So unless someone is predicting injury or a complete meltdown by Benson, there isn't any reason to expect Benson to get less than 80% of the RB carries. Using the FBG staff's median RB projection of 391 carries, that gives Benson a likely minimum of 313 carries. Cincinnati's RBs averaged 3.94 yards per carry in 2006-2007. Since Benson has led his teams in ypc in every year but his rookie year, averaging 4.0 would not be unreasonable. In 2004-2007, their lead RB averaged 11+ TDs. Again, giving Benson 10 isn't unreasonable. He averaged a little less than 2 receptions per game last year and has a career average of about 8 ypr.

Mene:
I didn't get to see him last year, but I watched him a bunch in 07, and he had the worst vision of any RB I've watched in years. Someone mentioned it already, he has a knack for running right up the backside of his OL, and rarely seems to see holes. Add that to the ease in which he seems to go down, I just don't see how he puts up RB2 numbers this year. I can't imagine Cincy keeping him as the bell cow all season. I bet someone emerges to make this a rbbc, or outright push Benson to second fiddle, right around the time it appears the schedule lightens up.

Bayhawks:
The bottom line is that Benson appears to be the only RB in Cincy, and the offensive situation in Cincy can't be worse than last year. Last year, Benson averaged 17.8 carries/game. This is with a HORRIBLE offense that rarely sustained long drives. So, I wouldn't expect him to get less than that. Let's round down to 17 carries/game. That's 272 carries. His YPC last year was 3.5. However, that was with Ryan Fitzpatrick at QB. He averaged 5.1 YPA last year. This allowed opposing defenses to crowd the line of scrimmage regularly with 8 (or more) defenders. This year, by all accounts, Palmer is healthy, Ochocinco is healthy, and that will force defenses to defend the pass more, giving the Cincy RBs more room. So let's take his 3.5 YPC from last year, and bump it to 3.8

272 carries @3.8 YPC= 1034 rushing yards. His receiving stats probably won't be much, but I'd bet that he catches for at least 66 yards. Before last year's TD output (again, probably due largely to the ineffectiveness of the Cincy offense), Benson averaged 1 TD for every 35 rushes. That would equal 7.8 TDs with 272 rushes. Let's round up to 8.

So you're looking at 1100 total yards and 8 TDs. I wouldn't call that Benson's floor (he could do worse), but it isn't his ceiling either. If you get a solid RB1, and two good WRs, Benson wouldn't make a bad RB2, and he would be a really solid RB3.

Cedric Benson Projections