Can I Trust Larry Johnson Again? A Fantasy Football Love Affair

Every fantasy football manager has one. The player who carried you to a title, made you feel like a genius, and then broke your heart so badly that you still flinch when his name comes up. For me, that player is Larry Johnson, the Kansas City Chiefs running back who, for about two seasons, was the best thing that ever happened to my fantasy team.

This is the story of that relationship, and of the question I asked myself every August for years afterward: can I trust him again? It is also, I suspect, a story about a mistake almost every fantasy player makes at some point.

How it started

Larry Johnson came out of Penn State with a monster senior season and landed in Kansas City as a first round pick in 2003. For his first couple of years he mostly sat behind Priest Holmes, who was himself a fantasy legend. Johnson got scraps. Most people in my league did not even know his name.

Then, in 2005, Holmes got hurt. Johnson took over, and for the second half of that season he looked like a cheat code. He finished the year with 1,750 rushing yards and 20 rushing touchdowns, most of it piled up after he became the starter. If you had him on your bench as a handcuff, you won your league. I know this because a guy in my league did exactly that and has never stopped talking about it.

I was not that guy. But I was paying attention. In 2006, I took Johnson with my first pick, and I was rewarded with one of the great fantasy seasons I have ever owned. He ran for 1,789 yards and 17 touchdowns, and he carried the ball 416 times, which set an NFL single season record. Every Sunday felt like a sure thing. I won the league that year. The trophy is still on my shelf.

How it fell apart

Here is where the love story turns. That 416 carry season should have scared me more than it did. Running backs are not built to take that kind of punishment, and there was already a lot of chatter about what happens to backs after a season with a huge workload.

I ignored it. In 2007, I drafted Johnson early again. He held out in training camp, got a big new contract, and then got off to a slow start before a foot injury ended his season around the midpoint. He finished with just over 550 rushing yards. My team finished fourth from the bottom. The guy who had won with Johnson as a handcuff two years earlier reminded me of this weekly.

And then came 2008, which was somehow worse. Johnson was productive when he played, finishing with a little under 900 yards, but there were off field problems and a suspension, and I never knew from one week to the next whether he would be in the lineup. Fantasy football is hard enough when you know who is playing.

The draft night temptation

Which brings us to the real question. Every summer after that, Johnson's name would show up on my draft board somewhere in the middle rounds. And every summer, I would hear the same voice in my head.

"Look at the three year average. Look at the upside. He was the best back in the league not long ago. Maybe it was just bad luck."

That voice is dangerous. Every fantasy manager knows it. It is the voice that makes you draft the player you used to love because the price finally looks right. It is the voice of nostalgia dressed up as analysis. And I almost listened to it more than once.

Fantasy football is the only relationship where you can get burned twice by the same player and call it value.

The common advice I think is wrong

A lot of fantasy experts will tell you to "never hold a grudge" against a player. Forget the past, look at the projection, draft the value. Emotions are bad. Spreadsheets are good.

In general, I agree. But I think the Larry Johnson experience shows the limit of that advice. Sometimes the grudge is actually information. When you get burned by a player, you have usually watched him much more closely than the projections did. You saw the snap counts slipping. You saw the yards per carry dropping. You saw the off field trouble build up. Your gut is not just bitterness. It is a summary of things the spreadsheet does not weigh well.

The trick is figuring out which part of the feeling is useful. My rule, which came straight out of my Johnson years, goes like this:

1. If the player burned me because of plain bad luck, like a freak injury in an otherwise healthy career, I let it go.
2. If the player burned me because of a pattern, like a huge workload followed by decline, I trust the grudge.
3. If off field issues are part of the story, I lower my ceiling for him by a lot, because availability is the most important stat in fantasy.

By that rule, Johnson checked boxes two and three. The answer to "can I trust him again" was no.

What I eventually learned

Johnson's time in Kansas City ended in 2009, when the Chiefs released him in the middle of the season. He signed with Cincinnati and played a little after that, but the back who ran for nearly 3,600 yards across two seasons was gone. The decline was not a fluke. It was the bill coming due for one of the heaviest workloads any back had ever carried.

I still think about him every draft. Not because I want to take him, obviously, but because every year there is a new Larry Johnson on the board. A back coming off a huge season with a scary number of carries. A player with off field questions whose price has dropped to a tempting level. A former star whose "three year average" looks great if you do not look too hard at the most recent year.

That is why I now keep a short list in my draft notes called "Do not get seduced." It includes any back with an extreme carry total the year before, and anyone whose recent trend is going the wrong way. It has saved me more than once, and it has also kept me from making the same mistake twice.

Online mock drafts help with this too, since they let you see how a tempting player falls without risking your real team. I wrote more about that in why fantasy football players love online game drafts.

A note for this season

Before your next draft, go through your board and circle the players you have personal history with, good or bad. For each one, write one sentence about why you feel the way you do. If the sentence is about a pattern, trust it. If it is about one bad weekend, let it go.

And if you need someone to talk you out of drafting your old flame, my fantasy takes live in the Fantasy section, with more pro football talk over in NFL. As for Larry, thanks for 2006. I mean that. But no, I cannot trust you again.