30 Fantasy Football Bold Predictions for the 2017 Season

Eddie Lacy Will Finish as a Top-15 Running Back

Why This Is Bold: Lacy is being selected in the sixth round of fantasy drafts, and he hasn't even been running with the first-team offense during camp.

Why This Will Happen: It'd be surprising if the Seahawks went out and signed Lacy for a moderately lucrative one-year deal for a running back just to throw him on the bench. And he's got to get acclimated to a new offense, so we may not want to look too heavily into the notion that he's playing with backups right now.

When a Seahawks running back saw 60% or more of the team's snaps in a game last year, that running back performed in fantasy. It happened nine times and, on average, the running back ranked as RB19 in that given week. Four of the nine games resulted in top-12, RB1 performances, with another two ranking in the top-24.

That rate of finishing with an RB1 week (and, to be clear, one of the performances that ranked outside the top-12 was an RB13 one) -- 44% -- was along the same lines as what we saw from Devonta Freeman last year.

For Lacy to become a top-15 running back, it'll mean that the Seahawks make him the unquestioned early-down starter. That may not be all that difficult -- Thomas Rawls, his competition for that work, finished last year with a 26.61% Success Rate. Among the 768 instances where a running back ran the ball 100 or more times in a season since the turn of the century, that ranks second worst.