Is Michael Turner being undervalued in fantasy drafts?

It was one of the most heated debates of our annual fantasy football summit, one with compelling arguments on either side.

It was also one of the most polarizing. The facts are there in black and white. Come summit's conclusion, we "agreed to disagree" and placed Michael Turner 16th among running backs, 37th overall. But you can be sure, members of neither camp -- the pro- and anti-Turner sides -- were celebrating that rank.

That's why, as "Decisions 2012" shifts its focus to Michael Turner's fantasy prospects, we're taking a different approach. We've asked two of our most fervent Turner backers, Ken Daube and AJ Mass, and two of our most vehement Turner detractors, Tristan H. Cockcroft and Jim McCormick, to weigh in.

With which analyst do you agree? Read on, and we'll see which side of the fence you settle on at the end.

Cockcroft: History is not on Turner's side

Fantasy football is a game of odds. We know that the NFL can be an unpredictable game, bereft of guarantees.

As fantasy owners, therefore, our goal is to play the percentages, draft players with the highest probability of success, and hope we catch the right breaks.

Unfortunately, history says that Turner's odds aren't especially good, that running backs typically suffer a steep decline at approximately age 30 … the birthday Turner celebrated on Feb. 13. At some point -- some point soon, say the history books -- the odds say that Turner's production will suffer a dramatic drop.

You do not want to be left holding the bag when it happens.

The pro-Turner crowd will stress that he has more tread on his tires than a typical 30-year-old, that four years working as a backup with the San Diego Chargers, totaling 228 carries, has kept his legs somewhat fresh. They'll point out that 57 players in NFL history had more than Turner's 1,417 carries by their 30th birthdays, describing it as if he's a 30-year-old with a 28-year-old's legs.

While it might be true that Turner's odds of a collapse are smaller than that of a 30-year-old with a greater amount of career usage -- think Edgerrin James or LaDainian Tomlinson -- they're also substantially greater than that of a 28-year-old with equal wear and tear to the four-year, 1,189-carry workload Turner has endured with the Atlanta Falcons. The truth is that any 30-year-old running back, regardless of style, role or workload, faces a historical pattern that indicates a probable 15 to 20 percent drop in production.

To illustrate, consider that the 10 running backs closest to Turner's career carries total at the time of their 30th birthdays averaged a 94-point seasonal fantasy total. That represents a 57-point drop from their seasonal averages as 28-year-olds.

To illustrate it another way, one even more relevant to Turner's example, I isolated from my all-time age-30 study players whose seasonal rushing attempt trends most closely followed Turner's career patterns. The chart below lists the 13 closest career comparables to Turner in descending order of their similarity ("Sim. score"), illustrating how each fared as a 30-year-old.

These 12 most similar running backs -- excluding Cedric Benson, who has yet to play his age-30 season -- collectively lost 31 percent of their per-game fantasy production and played 25 percent fewer games as 30-year-olds than they did during their ages 26-29 "workhorse" seasons. Only four -- Barber (293), Jones (225), Walker (174) and Taylor (107) -- managed a 100-point fantasy season at age 30.

Now, I'll readily admit that shrinking a larger sample size -- my past age-30 studies have examined more than 100 players -- to a mere 13 presents dangers. Turner's is a unique case, not necessarily perfect parallels to Murrell, Johnson or Allen. But neither is it fair to selectively compare him to only Walker, Jones or Barber. The upshot is that this group, as a whole, exhibits identical aging trends to the entire pool of 30-year-old running backs in history. There will always be outliers, but the lesson is clear: Every running back faces overwhelming odds against maintaining career production at age 30.

Couple that with Turner's history of late-season decline, a point that colleague Jim McCormick will detail below, as well as the Falcons' own recognition of the need to curtail Turner's workload in 2012, and there's little question that his downside exceeds his fantasy upside.

That's not to say Turner shouldn't be picked at all, not in an era in which running production across the league has dropped. But come the time of his No. 34 overall average draft position, I'd prefer Fred Jackson, if I must choose a running back, otherwise I'd advise looking at another position (Julio Jones?).

Daube: The bias against the predictable

I love statistics and will usually side with the mathematics portion of the argument, but sometimes common sense needs to be injected into the discussion. Using a group of 13 running backs to determine how the 14th will react is very questionable mathematically.

For instance, the closest comparable in Cockcroft's study is Adrian Murrell. Murrell averaged only 2.9 yards per carry when he was 29 and signed with another team to be a backup at age 30. The second most similar, Larry Johnson, shouldn't really be viewed as comparable, either. Johnson had two amazing seasons and then became a malcontent, which culminated in him getting cut after seven games in the 2009 season. His age 26-29 split is very misleading as he dominated the NFL at ages 26 and 27, but was a below-average back by the time age 28 rolled around. When significant holes can be poked into the reasoning for the inclusion of a small sample size, the sample size becomes too small to be mathematically viable and it therefore become illogical to base decisions on that data.

Turner's detractors will also note that his performance during the second half of last season dropped compared to how he started. They'll claim it's indicative that his age finally caught up with him and he wore down. In my view, that decline was probably significantly more attributable to the quad and groin injuries he played through during that time frame. Even with that diminished production because of those injuries, Turner finished with 4.5 yards per carry and tied with Marshawn Lynch with 203 fantasy points, the fifth highest total for running backs last season.

This argument shouldn't really be about Turner's age or muscle pulls that occurred last season. It should be about his value this season. Our team projects Turner to score 183 fantasy points, a total that would have been good for sixth last season, but we rank him 16th among running backs. That difference is mostly attributable to the fact we aren't projecting injuries, but the reality is that the...