Rashaad Penny joined the Philadelphia Eagles this offseason as the defending NFC Champions revamped their backfield. The talent is evident, but Penny has appeared in just 42 of a possible 82 games during his five NFL seasons. Should you add him to your fantasy football rosters this year?
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Rashaad Penny’s Fantasy Outlook
The Eagles were the third-highest-scoring offense in 2022, and with that potency comes fantasy football points in bunches. Penny and D’Andre Swift were added to the roster this season after Miles Sanders signed a four-year deal with the Panthers, giving this team plenty of backfield upside alongside preseason hype machine Kenneth Gainwell.
Jalen Hurts will continue to stir this offensive drink, and that includes plenty of those push plays that are still not illegal. That, naturally, takes upside off the plate of the running backs, but it also creates a floor for this offense that is tough to match.
Hurts’ development as a passer is the biggest moving piece when trying to evaluate Penny’s upside. Hurts saw his completion rate and touchdown-to-interception ratio spike in a massive way in Year 1 of the A.J. Brown era, an improvement that, if sustained, is going to make handing the ball off essentially bailing out the defense.
Brown, DeVonta Smith, and Dallas Goedert return as the nucleus of pass catchers on this offense, all of whom have the confidence of Hurts.
What Is Penny’s Range of Outcomes?
This is the rub on Penny. The next time he reaches 120 carries or 10 catches in an NFL season will be the first, fueling concerns about his low floor, even in this offensive environment.
This isn’t a blind date; you know the flaws going in and are trying to see if you can work around them. The good: 5.7 yards per carry over a 337-carry sample size, with nearly 82% of those carries gaining yards. That’s a similar rate to what we saw from Saquon Barkley a season ago and is a level of efficiency that is simply rare.
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Using his efficiency and this offense as a whole, you could make the case that Penny could be a poor man’s 2022 Tony Pollard. The pass-catching potential isn’t there, but the per-carry value is in that range. Pollard ran 193 times for 1,007 yards and nine scores last season … is that possible?
That production, with no role in the passing game, would put Penny around 10 ppg and thus on the weekly Flex radar.
Should Fantasy Managers Draft Penny at His ADP?
Penny isn’t my favorite pick in this range (sign me up for some Khalil Herbert!), but I have no issue with his current price tag — he’s a nice cheap way to get exposure to an elite offense.
Up to this point, we’ve yet to see Swift carry a feature role, so Penny should have a respectable touch floor when active, and that’s good enough for me.
Understanding that, be realistic. I just laid out a best-case scenario, and I still came up way short of him being a locked-in fantasy option. Penny’s health concerns are no secret, and that results in him often falling below ADP.
I’m keeping an eye on him as the draft wears on. I’m not going into the festivities targeting Penny, but I won’t hesitate to pounce at value, and I’ll take him at price before Swift.
