How should fantasy owners look at the Rams backfield in 2020? After selecting Cam Akers in the 2nd round of the 2020 NFL Draft, questions arose about how LA would split the carries. Sean McVay isn’t too worried about it. The Rams head coach thinks the workload will just work itself out. He’s taking the Kyle Shanahan approach.
“I think it’ll just naturally work itself out. I think if you look at that success San Fran had last year with that running back-by-committee approach,” McVay said, via Cameron DaSilva of The Rams Wire. “What I thought Kyle (Shanahan) and their players did a great job of is, ‘Hey, we’re going to have an open-mind approach, we’re going to be committed to trying to have some balance and then we’ll go with the hot hand or whoever really expresses himself as deserving of the carries.”
“We feel good. We’ve got three guys really on our roster that have played football when you look at Darrell Henderson, John Kelly is another guy, Malcolm Brown has consistently produced in that No. 2 role behind Todd,” he said. “And then Cam Akers is a guy that we’re excited about. So we’ve got four backs that we feel like are all NFL-legitimate starting-caliber backs and not feeling like you’ve got to force carries or touches to any of them. Just open mind and see how these guys do.”
I said this in one of the episodes of the fantasy show. Give me all the Cam Akers stock. You don’t pick him in the second round to not use him. We’re talking about vacating 223 carries from Gurley’s departure. Those are going to Akers. The man is too talented. Mark it down.
What I’m more interested to see is if Darrell Henderson makes a jump. Malcolm Brown has been in this offense forever and they never use him. Henderson is the one guy with explosion that should carve out a role, even if it’s only in the passing game.
