Clyde Edwards-Helaire has been the most difficult player for me to rank in fantasy football this season.

Let's take a look at him throw the lens of the #bulletproofprospect process to see why.

Let's dive in.

CEH is short but thicccc.

He stands 5-7 but weighs in at 207 pounds for a whopping 89th-percentile BMI courtesy of @rotounderworld .

From a side/speed/draft capital perspective these are the guys that he most closely resembles.

It's a pretty hit and miss group

I dont normally take it much further than this from a physical perspective but I've seen a few people citing his otherworldly burst score as a reason to get excited...

From a physical stand point Ameer Abdullah and CEH are near doppelgangers when looking at these. CEH is just a little thicker.

The next thing I look for is production and CEH has one of the most bizarre production profiles I can remember looking at.

Everybody knows that he was pretty irrelevant prior to his final year at LSU and we'll talk about that final year in a moment, but first let's look at 2018

CEH was highly not effective nor dominant in his junior year.

Brossette was clearly the lead dog in that backfield and despite MUCH higher volume CEH only had 0.2 more ypc than he did.

We all know YPC is a terrible RB metric, but its all we have on Brossette in 2018.

That 11 reception season didn't really tell us what was bubbling under the surface for CEH the next year....

CEH exploded in 2019 in the best offense in college football history.

And he was utterly DOMINANT on the ground.

That 55 reception 453 yard receiving season sure looks impressive, so lets put some context around it and his prior years.

2019 - 453 / 6,024 passing yards = 7.5%
2018 - 96 / 2,970 = 3.2%
2017 - 46 / 2,645 = 1.7%

Here is how he compared to a bunch of the top RB's in the NFL right now.

Thanks to @pahowdy and @theDudeZee for the slick graphing tool available on @DLFootball

*CEH was missing so I manually added him with my sweet paint skillz.

So he had one above average season and basically didnt exist before that.

So lets talk about the NFL draft next. CEH was a first round pick (barely). He was selected 32nd overall by the superbowl champion Kansas City Chiefs.

Draft capital absolutely matters.

Just being a first round pick gives him an 82% chance of hitting a single top 24 season

He was the latest first possible which I dont really think is comparable to a guy like Saquon Barkley at #2 overall so lets blend first and second rounds

(82+50)/2 = 66

Still a 66% chance

But the weird thing is that CEH didnt really grade out as a first round talent according to @LanceZierlein's grades on http://NFL.com 

He was among the lowest graded RB's to be selected in the first round since the data set began.

Yet again, he looks more like a 2nd round pick

And even among the second round picks he really doesnt grade all that highly

This is probably a good time to let you know that these grades are EXCELLENT at predicting future fantasy production per my guy @DavidZach16 https://twitter.com/DavidZach16/status/1260996129833058306?s=20

The other thing that factors heavily for me when I am prospecting RB's is @GrahamBarfield's yards created metric. It is basically incredible.

If you refer back to the tweet above from David you will see the correlation on this metric is also crazy strong.

I wanted to show you how CEH and Kareem Hunt compared as prospects through Graham's work for the obvious KC parallel.

If its highlighted in green that means its above average.

You will notice that Kareem Hunt had a heckuva lot more green than CEH did.

One thing that I am curious about was how run blocking affected yards created, so I took the average yards created per carry vs the average yards blocked per carry as a ratio to try to control for my head of steam hypothesis.

I am not sure if it matters or not but I think having a clear runway and building up a head of steam should give players a better chance at avoiding or breaking tackles.

So thats what the YC/YB ratio means. CEH performed very poorly in this while Kareem Hunt performed very well

One interesting nugget in this regard was that Hunt averaged a FULL YARD more in the passing game on a yards per route run basis than CEH did.

But TBH, CEH played at LSU and Hunt played at Toledo so these could probably use some type of control for strength of schedule

All of these screams to me that we should be proceeding with caution.

I do believe that CEH will score fantasy points so long as he is the starter in KC but if a challenger ever emerges I am not sure that CEH is good enough to hold him off.

CEH currently has a Maybe grade from me but his situation has shot him up my dynasty rankings on patreon.

I will be quick to sell at the first sign of trouble. Until then enjoy the ride.

Though tbh at his current price id rather have SEVERAL other RB's as I have him ranked a fair bit lower than his ADP.

Anyway, these are the type of factors that power my dynasty and devy rankings on patreon. https://www.patreon.com/DFBeanCounter