As we gear up to the start of the NFL season, Football Absurdity is going to bring you a comprehensive breakdown of every notable player that will be available in fantasy football drafts. We only look at the past three seasons for a player. Derrius Guice is now two-for-two at losing some or all of his seasons to various knee injuries (and it’s been three-straight seasons if you count his injury in college). What can we expect from him in 2020, except for another catastrophic knee injury?
Derrius Guice ADP and AAV:
Standard Scoring ADP: RB28, 74 overall
PPR Scoring ADP: RB30, 80 overall
Average Auction Value: $4
Derrius Guice Statistics:
| Year | 2019 |
| G | 5 |
| GS | 1 |
| Ru Att | 42 |
| Ru Yds | 245 |
| Ru TD | 2 |
| Tgt | 9 |
| Rec | 7 |
| Yards | 79 |
| TD | 1 |
| Touches | 49 |
| Opp | 51 |
| Total Yards | 324 |
| Year | 2019 |
| YPC | 5.83 |
| Ru Att/G | 8.4 |
| Ru Yd/G | 49.0 |
| Tgt/G | 1.80 |
| Rec/G | 1.40 |
| Catch% | 77.8% |
| Yds/Tgt | 8.78 |
| Yds/Rec | 11.29 |
| Touches/G | 9.80 |
| Opp/G | 10.20 |
| Yds/G | 64.80 |
| Year | 2019 |
| Std Pts | 50.4 |
| HPPR Pts | 53.9 |
| PPR Pts | 57.4 |
| Pts/G | 10.08 |
| HPPR Pts/G | 10.78 |
| PPR Pts/G | 11.48 |
| Pts/Touch | 1.03 |
| Pts/Touch (HPPR) | 1.10 |
| Pts/Touch (PPR) | 1.17 |
Derrius Guice Overview:
It’s hard to do anything with Derrius Guice without starting with an accounting of his various knee injuries in the NFL and their subsequent problems. August 9, 2018: left ACL tear, he missed all of 2018. Then, after 23 snaps in week one of 2019, he tore his right meniscus and missed the next nine games. He finally returned in week eleven and played three full glorious (well, uh, maybe not glorious) games before injuring his left MCL and costing him the last three games of the season.
Woof, that’s a heckuva career so far for Derrius Guice. It’s hard to feel anything but sympathy for someone so talented and so snakebitten. Let’s look at his three career games that weren’t cut short due to injury. Washington kept an eye on his workload, with Guice never topping 24 snaps in a game. He struggled in two of these games, mustering 107 total yards on 19 touches. Granted, that counts as struggling since 45 of those came on one catch. Then, he came alive against Carolina, rumbling for 129 yards and two touchdowns on ten carries. Side note: Carolina gave up the second-most fantasy points per game to running backs in a season going all the way back to 2012. Only the 2016 49ers have been worse at stopping the running back since Barack Obama was elected to a second term as president.
Then, Guice got hurt again against a Packers team that he played well against but was physically incapable of stopping the running back down the stretch. That’s the entire career of Derrius Guice so far. Not often you can sum it up in fewer than 300 words, but here we are.
Derrius Guice Draft Strategy:
Derrius Guice Auction Value: $3
Draft Ranking: Find out for your league settings in a Beersheet! (coming late June)
By his pure talent the last time we saw him able to play four games in a row without exploding into a pink mist, Derrius Guice is a screaming value. Unfortunately, he performed pretty badly when he wasn’t taking on a historically bad-against-running backs defense. That puts us in a bit of a quandary with Guice’s 2020 value. Should he stay healthy and be the player we hoped he was when he left college, then 80 overall could be a league winner. Unfortunately, we haven’t really seen a lot of that guy since January 1, 2018.
I’m not super excited about drafting Derrius Guice, but I sort of understand the people who are super excited about it. I get it, he was an extremely talented college player who you see as having bad injury luck so far in the NFL. What I see is a guy who can’t stay on a field due to recurring injuries to his knees. I don’t think guys are “injury prone” but I do think players are capable of having negative effects from repeated injuries in the same area. We see it all the time, though we always want to deny it when it’s in front of us. I am not saying that is definitely Guice’s situation, but I fear it may be. I’d be more than happy to be wrong because it means the NFL won’t be denied another amazing talent due to injury.
Washington seems more than prepared for this inevitability, however. They kept Adrian Peterson and Bryce Love and added Peyton Barber and Antonio Gibson to that running back room.
Best Case Scenario:
Derrius Guice bounces back and finally plays up to being a top-fifteen back in the NFL.
Worst Case Scenario:
There literally isn’t a joke I could put here that wouldn’t come off as monstrous given literally his whole career so far in the NFL, so I’ll go with literally his whole career so far in the NFL.
[Statistics are sourced from pro-football-reference.com and airyards.com]
