Kerryon Johnson Fantasy Value Held Back by Limited Workload Heading Into Week 3

Detroit Lions' second-year running back Kerryon Johnson was going as the 14th running back off the board, on average, in fantasy football drafts this year, per FantasyPros.com.

He has not lived up to that draft cost so far though, ranking 20th at the position in standard scoring and 21st in PPR leagues, and that's largely been thanks to a surprisingly low workload.

Heading into his sophomore season after impressing as a rookie in 2018, the expectation was that Johnson was in for an expanded workload this year. The only other RB on the depth chart posing any threat was free-agent acquisition C.J. Anderson, who has since been cut by Detroit after Week 2.

While he has seen an increased snap share from his overall number last year (when he didn't even hit 50 percent), he topped this year's average on three occasions in 2018, twice going over 70 percent. He averaged 15.7 opportunities (11.8 rushes and 3.9 targets) per game as a rookie, and that's barely up, to only 16.5 so far in 2019.

It's always more concerning when a slow start to the year includes volume concerns, instead of efficiency, but it's not time to panic about Johnson quite yet.

He's still the team's top receiving back, which he was not last year (50 percent of the RB targets in 2019 after playing second fiddle to Theo Riddick as a rookie), and now that the Lions have released Anderson, sixth-round pick Ty Johnson remains the only real threat to Kerryon's workload.

This isn't to say that Kerryon is in the clear, though — Ty Johnson matched Anderson with five carries in Week 2, and there's a real shot that it's Ty Johnson, and not Kerryon, that gets the biggest boost with Anderson out of town.

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Jason Schandl is not a FanDuel employee. In addition to providing DFS gameplay advice, Jason Schandl also participates in DFS contests on FanDuel using his personal account, username Jaymun. While the strategies and player selections recommended in his articles are his personal views, he may deploy different strategies and player selections when entering contests with his personal account. The views expressed in their articles are the author's alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of FanDuel.