Stock Watch: David Johnson

I'm trying to assemble this year's NFL coach/coordinator grid at the moment and it will take a while, so over the next couple weeks I'll be a bit distracted from the dynasty-specific content.

To keep that section of our coverage from going totally silent in that span, though, I'll try to post a few of these relatively brief entries where we consider the general valuation of assorted players. This article will look at David Johnson.

David Johnson, RB, ARZ (6-1, 224) [12/16/1991]

2018 stats: 940 yards (3.6 YPC) and seven touchdowns on 258 carries, 50 catches for 446 yards and three touchdowns on 76 targets (65.8 percent catch rate, 5.9 YPT)

Johnson's 2018 season was pretty much a disaster. His output came nowhere close to justifying his price tag, which was generally in the first three picks and almost universally no lower than the fifth pick. His 2019 market reception understandably implies some significant public anxiety about Johnson's future, to the point that it seemingly can recall almost nothing about his past.

Johnson's current ADP – 16th overall on DRAFT.com as of this writing – seemingly contains a punitive element due to bitterness over last year's results. Last year was basically the worst-case 16-game scenario possible for Johnson, and he still finished with an average of 12.4 points per game in standard scoring and 15.5 per game in PPR. He finished 10th among running backs in standard scoring points, yet his ADP on DRAFT is that of RB11.

Do we really figure that Johnson will have a worse season than last year? I think this is one of those especially obvious cases of recency bias and maybe bitter emotion leading to flawed reasoning. You can already tell that I think Johnson is going too late, but I mean to argue something more aggressive than that. Particularly in PPR scoring, I think Johnson is a justifiable top-five pick and shouldn't fall past the eighth pick. More specifically, I think Johnson should be considered the favorite to lead all running backs in receiving yardage in 2019. Marshall Faulk was the last running back to go over 1,000 receiving yards in a single season, but the Cardinals don't need to be the Greatest Show on Turf for Johnson to do the same on the 20th anniversary this year.

Perhaps not all of Johnson's current RB11 valuation is due to bitter skittishness over the 2018 season. Perhaps there's unease around the hiring of coach Kliff Kingsbury, the upjumped Mike Leach protege widely perceived as some Ryan Gosling case who both hasn't paid his proper dues and otherwise never proved anything in the Big 12, where he accumulated only a 35-40 record in six years. If so, then it's a market error that demands exploiting.

What specifically would anxiety over Kingsbury fear? Kingsbury's offensive philosophy all but dictates a golden outlook for Johnson, who projects for heavy usage no matter the game script. If Kingsbury is a bad real life coach then that's mostly immaterial to us, because if Johnson finishes a game with only 10 carries then there's a good chance he also caught six or more passes. Kingsbury's undoing in the Big 12 was his bad Tech defenses. If that's his undoing in the NFL then it will just as easily be to Johnson's benefit as detriment.

It's also important to note how improbably ill-conceived was the 2018 Cardinals offense. Mike McCoy is probably bad, but the rot didn't meaningfully clear up when Byron Leftwich took over, indicating that both were working within the parameters issued by head coach Steve Wilks. Those parameters dictated comically misguided usage of Johnson in at least two aspects: (1) an overemphasis on running between the guards, not to mention tackles, and (2) a gross underutilization of Johnson as a route runner. According to NFL.com's Graham Barfield, McCoy ran Johnson between the tackles on 59 percent of his carries, and while Leftwich presented an improvement (41 percent at the time of the cited article) he still ran Johnson inside more than Bruce Arians (35 percent in 2016). The Cardinals, and especially McCoy again, also failed to utilize Johnson as a wide receiver anywhere near the rate that Arians did.

It's not the perfect analogy since LeSean McCoy didn't begin at a nadir when Chip Kelly arrived to Philadelphia in 2013, but Johnson's situation with Kingsbury reminds me of McCoy that year. Kelly's Oregon offenses averaged 75.21 plays per game with 37.5 percent of the plays resulting in pass attempts. His Philadelphia offenses averaged 65.85 snaps per game at a passing percentage of 55.3. Kingsbury's Texas Tech offenses averaged 81.92 plays per game at a passing percentage of 58.86. The Cardinals won't run anywhere near that tempo in 2019 – NFL refs literally hold on to the ball between snaps to prevent you from running that many plays – but Kingsbury's Cardinals are a good bet to lead the league in snaps all the same. Poor time of possession stats could limit the play count, but the tempo should be almost constant and in the event that the Cardinals are competitive the play count could really spike upward. I'm going to assume the Cardinals average at least 66 and as many as 70 snaps per game with a pass rate no less than 56 percent.

Using the lowest ends of that presumption, the Cardinals would project for 591 pass attempts and 465 rush attempts after respectively attempting 495 and 355 last year. I don't think this is optimistic – it's important to understand that Wilks' offense was a zero-tempo one, and a surge in projected plays would occur regardless of who the new coaching hire was. That it was Kingsbury means you can assume some truly profound deviations from last year's tendencies. If the Cardinals call 465 run plays and Johnson maintains a 70 percent share of the team's rush attempts (72.7 in 2018), then he would project for about 326 carries. Let's assume that's too optimistic and lower it to 290. Let's continue with the pessimism and assume Johnson averages only 3.5 yards per carry. If he can score seven times on 258 carries (2.7 percent) in last year's cursed offense, then let's assume he scores three percent of the time this year. That would put his 16-game floor projection around 1,015 yards and 8.7 touchdowns on the ground.

As I hinted before, it's the pass-catching aspect that presents the opportunity for truly explosive production. I've seen some shortsighted analysis that Johnson actually projects poorly in this capacity based on the usage of Kingsbury's running backs at Texas Tech, and the reasoning is appealing enough in this shallow framing. I think it's totally wrong, though. Kingsbury didn't have any David Johnson-like running backs at Texas Tech, and the reason those running backs weren't running routes is because they couldn't compare to the wide receiver options. That will never be the case for any NFL team Johnson plays for. Indeed, the Cardinals have one of the league's weakest pass catcher lineups even as they dive into the Air Raid. If anything, it's hard to imagine a scenario where an offense is more dependent on a running back for targets. While they have various things going for them, Larry Fitzgerald will turn 36 in August, Christian Kirk is trying to bounce back from a season-ending broken foot, Trent Sherfield is a recently promoted practice squad guy, and Ricky Seals-Jones was a disaster in 2018.

Instead of recent Texas Tech running backs like Da'Leon Ward (2.9 receptions per game in 2018), Justin Stockton (2.5 receptions per game in 2017), or DeAndre Washington (3.2 receptions per game in 2015), Johnson's projection in this scheme, in passing situations, would more so resemble the usage of Texas Tech wide receivers. They tend to put up numbers, you might have heard. Johnson secured 15.35 percent of Arizona's targets last year in an offense that seemingly intended to sabotage him. Let's assume he secures 18 percent of the targets this year (he earned 18.6 percent of the targets in 2016). That would project him for 106 targets. Let's again be pessimistic and project a catch rate of 60 percent at 6.0 yards per target (66.7 percent catch rate, 7.3 YPT in 2016).

In this scenario, projecting bottom-grade efficiency as both a runner and receiver, Johnson would project to 64 catches for 636 yards in addition to the 1,015 yards and 8-to-9 touchdowns on the ground. If Johnson had totaled 1,651 yards from scrimmage last year it would have ranked sixth overall and fifth among running backs, between Todd Gurley and Alvin Kamara. If we presume the eight rushing touchdowns and no receiving touchdowns, it would project to 13.32 points per game in standard scoring (RB8 in 2018) and 17.32 points per game in PPR (RB7 in 2018).

I see no reason to presume the pessimistic efficiency this projection does, so I think Johnson is a realistic candidate to reestablish himself as a top-three fantasy back by the end of 2019. If you own him in dynasty, I would keep demanding the world from anyone trying to trade for him. If you don't own him in dynasty, I'd look into acquiring him in case the current owner lost the faith. In redraft and best ball drafts, he'll be a staple in my portfolio, maybe even my most-targeted player, so long as his ADP doesn't break the top eight.