Alexander Mattison Is The Dead-Zone Running Back To Avoid

Photo: Noah K. Murray, USA Today Sports

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A Peculiar Journey

Alexander Mattison's career has been peculiar. He's shown dominance when given starting duties, with 24 touches, 116 scrimmage yards, and nearly one touchdown per game. However, he's only started six games over his four-year career. Playing behind superstar Dalvin Cook left few opportunities for Mattison, and Cook's injuries were the only times Mattison found his way to the field.

As we head into 2023, Mattison is at the top of the depth chart. The Vikings released Dalvin Cook, and the hype train for Mattison started barrelling down a hill with no brakes. He's currently being drafted in the fourth or fifth round as a back-end RB2, despite never finishing better than RB39 over an entire season.

Given the uncertainty of his projected workload, our staff has a vast range of individual rankings. Some rank him as high as RB17, while others rank him as low as RB38. This gap among rankers has made Alexander Mattison one of the most polarizing players in 2023 fantasy football drafts.

The case for Mattison is easy to make. His per-start numbers throughout his career average 20.4 PPR points per game. Only Christian McCaffrey and Austin Ekeler surpassed that number last year, showcasing how high Mattison's ceiling can be if everything works out.

Here are the game logs from his six career starts:

Besides his impressive numbers in previous starts, Mattison has the build to be a three-down back. He weighed in at 221 pounds at the 2019 Combine. He is also consistently graded near the league average as a pass-blocker. And that's about it for the pro-Mattison argument. He's relatively big, isn't a liability on passing downs, and has looked good in the handful of games he's started.

However, there are numerous red flags that fantasy football managers and rankers seem to be ignoring.

Dwindling Efficiency

Mattison has been a hot dynasty trade target since 2020. He seized the opportunity whenever it arose, and savvy dynasty managers kept him stashed for years, waiting for the hopeful breakout. But over that time, Mattison's efficiency metrics dipped significantly.

None of these stats are accumulative, so volume shouldn't matter. If anything, decreased volume in 2022 should have boosted his per-touch numbers. Once known for his abilities to shed tacklers and break off long runs, that was missing from Mattison's bag of tricks last year. Rarely do we see a running back trending down in efficiency buck the trend. And considering he saw the fewest average defenders in the box in his entire career last year, those dips in efficiency are especially problematic.

As an early-career efficiency monster, most people (myself included) assumed he had maintained those numbers. Touting him as an offseason “buy” became second nature for dynasty analysts. But few analysts realized how much he's slipped over the last couple of years. Whether it be analysis fatigue or limited reps, he's not the same player he was in years past, and most people haven't taken notice yet. We haven't seen him start a game since the 2021 season, so memories are foggy.

Missing Context From Mattison's Starts

Looking at Mattison's six career starts, only two would be against teams we'd consider to have good run defenses: Week 6, 2020, against the Atlanta Falcons, and Week 16, 2021, against the Los Angeles Rams.

In his two tougher matchups, Mattison averaged 11.5 carries, 33.5 rushing yards, 2.0 receptions, 16.5 receiving yards, and 0.5 touchdowns. That averages out to 10.0 fantasy points per game.

In his other four starts, against teams that were bad against the run, Mattison averaged 23.5 carries, 102.5 rushing yards, 5.3 receptions, 45.8 receiving yards, and one touchdown per game. 26.1 fantasy points per game.

The NFC North is far from a defensive gauntlet these days, but we can't expect two in three of his matchups to come against the league's worst run defenses. That crucial piece of context is missing from Mattison's notorious start splits. He beat up on teams that couldn't stop the run and struggled to do much against stout defensive fronts.