DFS: Meet Alfred Morris, the Worst Great RB in Daily Fantasy

Alfred Morris may be the most polarizing running back in fantasy football.

While standard-scoring, season-long leagues love the Washington Redskins bell cow as a high-end RB2 (or even a borderline RB1 in 14- or 16-team configurations), Morris doesn't get much love at all in daily fantasy, where the majority of sites use PPR scoring.

The PPR scoring format rewards players like the Bears' Matt Forte or the Steelers' Le'Veon Bell. Forte ranked eighth among all players with 130 pass targets while Bell was 19th with 105; both still racked up points with their feet, totaling over 1,000 yards rushing with a handful of TDs each.

PPR is great for WRs and good for TEs and fantastic for RBs with good hands like Forte and Bell. So who isn't feeling the love from DFS formats that feature PPR? RBs like Morris.

Morris is a throwback to an age where RBs did one thing really well: they ran straight, hard and often. That suits Morris; he struggles to receive the ball from further than the length of Kirk Cousins' arm.

Here is a chart comparing the 2014 stats of Morris and some of his contemporaries:

The Eagles' DeMarco Murray was one of the NFL's true dominant runners with the Cowboys last year. Bell and Forte make up for fewer carries by being receiving threats, so their value is actually in the same ballpark as Murray's. A look at Morris would suggest that he isn't that far off in terms of his running game; in fact, he even topped Forte in yards rushing in 2014.

That's where the comparison to Forte ends. In terms of all-around ability in all facets of DFS scoring, Morris is more like what Colts' RB Frank Gore has become.

Gore used to be a receiving threat, averaging 73.6 targets per season from 2006 to 2010 in some awful 49ers offenses. At age 32, the pressure on his performance as both the team's primary RB and as a pass-catcher is lessened by the presence of Pro Bowl QB Andrew Luck and his stable of talented WRs.

Morris isn't playing in that situation; he needs to be the man in Washington on a team that lacks stability at the QB position. Morris will be priced like a top-15 RB but his limitations as a pass-catcher will prevent his use in passing situations.

That means no third-and-long, fourth quarter comebacks and two-minute drills. You can afford to wait on a player like Morris in a full-season league and pray that he returns to his 1,613-yard, 13-TD rookie season form - but you don't have the luxury of time in DFS.

As a ball-carrier, Morris is one of better RBs in the league, but unless he's facing a shaky run defense, he needs to be faded in all formats. A game like Week 1 against the Dolphins - where Morris ran for 121 yards on 25 carries - is the exception, not the rule.

That performance was still only worth 12.1 fantasy points in PPR leagues. The Saints' RB Mark Ingram amassed a paltry 24 yards on the ground, but exploded with an RB-leading 98 yards on eight receptions - good for 20.2 FP.

Both Ingram and Morris were priced similarly in the majority of DFS sites, and Morris projects as more of a traditional RB in a traditional run-based NFL offense. In PPR leagues, Alfred Morris was left in the dust. In today's NFL and today's DFS, a good back who can't catch is the worst back you can bet on.