FanHouse KevinSmith

Young players announcing impossible goals are as much a part of preseason as two-a-days, roster cuts and injuries. Eleven years ago, then-second-year running back Corey Dillon announced that he would rush for 2,500 yards during the 1998 season. He came up 1,370 yards short.

In 2007, Frank Gore set his sights on Eric Dickerson's single-season rushing record of 2,105 yards. He ended up with 1,102 yards, barely halfway there.

As the season nears, FanHouse's fantasy football team decided to put our heads together for another set of updated positional rankings. In this installment, we'll hit up the thoroughbreds.

The thing that sticks out to me, when viewing the running backs for this season, is what a muddled mess the group is. I stared at a group of about 15 players -- those ranked from six to 20 -- for probably 45 minutes while tinkering with how to rank them. Some will pan out, and some will end up being viewed as busts. May the force be with you. (Last Updated: 8/27/09)

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For those who may use a different term or are new to fantasy football, "handcuff" is the term used when you own insurance for one of your players in the form of owning his real-life backup. It's usually a running back, but you could conceivably handcuff a quarterback. The theory is that some or all of the production is automatically replaced should you lose a high draft pick to injury, meaning you need to insure a high draft pick by grabbing his backup.

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The Detroit Lions, who haven't won a football game since 2007, just wrapped up their final minicamp of the offseason. There's a lot that's new about them, including offensive coordinator Scott Linehan, who was good enough to return FanHouse's phone call on Thursday afternoon and answer some questions about the way the team looks to him so far.

Linehan, the former head coach of the St. Louis Rams, addressed the quarterback competition between top draft pick Matthew Stafford and veteran Daunte Culpepper, had very high praise for rookie tight end Brandon Pettigrew and called himself a longtime admirer of new Lions head coach Jim Schwartz. He also spoke of the challenge of coming in as part of a new coaching staff on a team that only has to win one game to call 2009 an improvement over 2008.

The Detroit Lions are at a turning point, no? They just shed their old regime run by Matt Millen, they drafted their franchise quarterback and, even in the darkest of times for Detroit, there appears to be some hope. Until you start reading Terry Foster's recent Lions round-up in his Detroit News column.

You see, Foster finds -- in two separate items -- the real reason why the Lions fail: as their fans are, sadly, busy caring too much about the team, the Lions are busy caring too little about their fans. How do I know this? Because Foster mentions a fan who gets a Lions tattoo on his butt, and then in the next item discusses the fact that the team is repurposing jerseys. That's right, "Kevin Jones" is suddenly becoming "Kevin Smith."

Maybe drafting Matthew Stafford would be a total success for Detroit. Maybe it would be an unmitigated disaster. There's just no way to know for sure how things will work out. It's a total crapshoot -- so the Lions should put the dice down, pick their money up and cash in whatever chips they hold in exchange for Denver quarterback Jay Cutler.

Detroit's slow, slow, slow crawl back to respectability took a step in the right direction on Thursday, as the Lions signed running back Maurice Morris to a three-year, $7 million deal.

Morris rushed for 574 yards in 13 games with the Seahawks last season. He's been in Seattle since being drafted out of Oregon in 2002 (fun Lions fact: Morris was the Ducks running back when Joey Harrington was their quarterback), and has proven to be a valuable backup behind guys like Shaun Alexander and Julius Jones.

Let's face it, this year was all about the Rookie RB when talking about fantasy football. Depending on the scoring system for your league, three rookies most likely finished in the Top 10 RB producers. This made for arguably the single greatest rookie RB class in recent memory, not only from a realistic perspective, but also for fantasy purposes.

Is this the new trend and will we lust over the rookie class next season as we prepare for our drafts? Well, let's not jump the gun just yet. However, what we can depend on will be the spiked draft day values of the returning sophomore class. Many of these talents have already become mainstays on the fantasy football horizon.

And so today, we take a quick look back at the season that was, but more importantly gage the values of this heralded class moving forward. Follow along and in order...

As opposed to quarterbacks, I'm definitely in favor of keeping running backs. In fact, I highly recommend keeping two runners instead of a quarterback, if you have two of my top 20. Running backs are the life-blood of your fantasy team, much like the oil in your car. Two consistent runners on your fantasy team make life so much easier, which is why it's your starting point.

As I said, I'm recommending you keep two from the list, which is why I'm ranking more than I did for quarterbacks or wide receivers.

Ladies and Gents, your top 20 keeper running backs ...