Fantasy Football Debate: Miles Sanders vs. Aaron Jones

Fantasy football drafters are trying to decide between boring, but dependable Packers running back Aaron Jones and former Philadelphia Eagle Miles Sanders in a new Carolina Panthers offense in 2023 on Yahoo! leagues. In this debate, 4for4's Justin Edwards explains why he prefers Jones while Neil Dutton argues the Sanders side.

Read other player-specific analysis from the 4for4 staff: Player Profiles | RB Rankings + Green Bay Packers Team Preview

The Case for Miles Sanders

Neil: After spending most of his tenure with the Eagles infuriated by Miles Sanders, the 2023 season and his move to the Carolina Panthers have me hopeful he can be someone to trust and enjoy this fantasy football season. Even more so than Aaron Jones, a player I have enjoyed watching and rostering throughout his NFL career.

In the words of our own John Paulsen, Sanders could be in line for a bell cow workload in Carolina. The Panthers lost an absolute boatload of their running back production from 2022 this offseason, with a whopping 288 carries—not to mention another 38 receptions—no longer on the roster. Sanders enjoyed his most productive season in the NFL with the Eagles in 2022, but even then he was restricted to just 49.5% of the team's rushing attempts. He should not face such competition in 2023, with only the unproven duo of Chuba Hubbard and Raheem Blackshear for company in the Panthers' backfield. While clearly the lead back, Aaron Jones still has A.J. Dillon's specter over his shoulder in Green Bay. Last season, Jones commanded a 48.3% share of the Packers' rushing attempts. Dillon was not far behind with 42.2%.

The Panthers have also gone out of their way to convince us they want Sanders to get involved as a pass-catcher. Sanders has 124 receptions in his NFL career, but 50 of them came in a single season. This was back in his rookie campaign of 2020 when his running back coach was Duce Staley. Staley is now on the Panthers' coaching staff and looks to be the driver behind Sanders returning to his former glory as a receiver. The lack of genuine game-changing talent at the receiver position in Carolina could help Sanders here, especially if the Panthers look to use their running backs in the passing game more than they did after trading away Christian McCaffrey last season. After Week 7, the Panthers ranked 29th in targets to their running backs across the whole NFL with just 41, while only two teams saw their backs catch fewer balls than the 30 Panthers runners managed. Aaron Jones is no slouch as a pass-catcher, with 49+ receptions in each of his last four seasons. But the Packers' passing game has serious question marks around it in 2023, starting with the player tasked with making the passes. This is one of the reasons why the ADP of Packers pass-catchers has me somewhat nervous.

I should of course stress that I don't hate Jones this season. Far from it, in fact. I believe he should still have a big role in his offense. But I worry about the competition for touches and the overall offensive picture in Green Bay. I don't worry about Sanders losing work to his fellow backs as much. With Jones currently going off the board early in the fourth round of drafts, I would happily wait for another round and take Sanders, enjoying a comparable level of production at a fraction of the price.

The Case for Aaron Jones

Justin: Aaron Jones’ touchdown production took an expected hit in 2022 as the Packers' offense as a whole couldn’t uphold the lofty 13.4 scores he averaged over the previous three seasons. Green Bay finished the season in the middle of the pack in both scrimmage yards and points scored, yet Jones still finished the season as the RB9 in fantasy football, a repeat performance of his final placing in the 2021 season.

Much of that has to do with his availability, something very difficult to come by at the position. Jones has two full seasons out of the past four years, and only missed a combined four in the others, leaving his clear-cut backup (Jamaal Williams in ‘19, ‘20, A.J. Dillon in ‘21 and ‘22) to pick up his scraps at a very rare rate.

While most of us have heard what type of upside A.J. Dillon could have without Aaron Jones (and Jamaal Williams previously), there’s not a lot of talk about what Jones’ projections would look like if Dillon were forced to miss time. Admittedly, a lot of that stems from Jones entering his age-29 season, but his upside is clear without his running mate; he would be regularly ranked as a weekly fantasy RB1. We haven’t had much to go off of since Dillon has also been a beacon of health, but for what it’s worth, there were four games Williams missed in ‘19 and ‘20; Jones had 532 scrimmage yards and five touchdowns.

Those games were eons ago, so let’s focus on what the Packers' backfield looked like last year. Though running back usage out of the slot is almost exclusively an overrated statistical category to look into when evaluating the position, it’s not entirely so with Aaron Jones. In 2022, Jones ranked third in yards out of the slot (100), second in receptions (15), and third in yards per route run (2.56).

Since taking over as the head coach in 2019, Matt LaFleur has shown little restraint in making Aaron Jones a focal point of the offense, and that has an opportunity to increase as the team shifts away from a Hall-of-Fame quarterback for the first time in 30 years. Jones has certainly proven he remains one of the most dangerous dual-threat running backs in the NFL, let alone in his own division.

But alas, this isn’t an article about which Green Bay Packers running back we want on our fantasy team, or it would have been quite a short debate. What we really want to know is why I would rather pay a 13-spot ADP difference for Jones over new Carolina Panthers running back Miles Sanders. Let’s start by repurposing that table to see where the two line up against each other.

On a team with arguably the best running quarterback in the NFL in Jalen Hurts, Sanders was less than an afterthought in the passing game, earning an almost impossibly low 10% rate of targets when he was out in a route. While he should find himself in a much better pass-catching environment when he’s not sharing the field with A.J. Brown, DeVonta Smith, and Dallas Goedert, he’s also clearly heading into a worse offense, with a far-worse offensive line, which is almost assuredly going to negatively impact his efficiency on the ground.

Miles Sanders is not a full-fade in fantasy football for 2023, but I don’t think the sheer amount of RB1 weeks between he and Aaron Jones is going to be close. I’m willing to spend up, even if it has to be a full round of draft capital.