What even happened in 2025? Part 1: QB and RB
A look at some positional scoring trends, and what draft structures won
I’ve gotten a lot of supportive messages over the past month, and I just want to say thanks for all that. I’d say it’s my New Year’s Resolution to figure the below stuff out, but it’s not like I haven’t been aware of it for years. Still, for those of you who try to remind me frequently that I shouldn’t indulge these impulses, at least we can have a laugh.
(Holly goes on to say she doesn’t even accept drafts anymore from people who do things like say their own work is bad, which answers a question a couple of you had about what types of readers and subscribers I don’t think are great fits around here. If you want more confidence in the writing than I tend to offer, you’re likely to be disappointed multiple times over.
Personally, while I readily accept defensive writing is not enjoyable to read, and I’ve commented many times that my style puts more on my readers from an energy and effort standpoint than is probably fair, I would also argue there’s more value in honesty and transparency in one’s writing than anything. If feigning a type of confidence that’s not part of one’s pathology starts the writer from a position of restraint, that also arguably equates to a dishonesty that can complicate everything the writer is offering.)
What I’m going to do today is make some bad tables in Google Sheets that show points per game by different positions, at the top of the leaderboards, across years. This is a very common form of analysis that’s been around for literally decades; it’s just looking at fantasy scoring results. I saw some stuff on social yesterday after I’d started the first half of this that was research in the same vein.
I say “bad tables” because my visuals are never super useful, but here’s how they will work:
I’ll only look at players who played 10+ games, because PPG on small samples isn’t super useful to the point, which is to find leaguewide scoring trends by position.
The conditional formatting is by row, which means that for each positional finish, e.g. QB1, I’m comparing 11 seasons of results horizontally with the coloring, so we can quickly see which years were higher and lower scoring across the different positional finishes, which might include years that were down at every spot or years that were, say, top heavy, with strong totals for the very best players at those positions, those years, but weak totals for the, say, QB8 compared to the QB8 in other years. (This will make more sense when you see the tables, I hope.)
I’m using FFPC scoring for QBs, so a point per 20 pass yards, 4 points per pass TD, and -1 for all turnovers. There are formats that devalue pass yards some, increase the value of pass TDs, and either increase the value of turnovers to -2 or remove them entirely in some cases — as well as all the other unique scoring quirks that I’m frankly a fan of for the QB position — and all of those would change the scoring range some.
For TEs, I’m going to use standard PPR, not TE Premium, so I’m not using FFPC there.
I did not remove Week 18 (or Week 17 for the seasons before the 17-game expansion). There are strong arguments for it, but removing it also removes good data like what happened for all the players who were in meaningful games. It’s probably more right than wrong to remove it, but it takes out stuff like Jahmyr Gibbs’ monster game last year in a must-win contest that I found to be extremely important to his value going into last offseason. Ultimately, I defaulted to what is simplest, which is including all the data for the regular season. It will push down some players a touch, but I’m not using specific names, and for what it’s worth that impact will typically be about a point at most. By way of example, if a player averaged 20 points per game in 16 games, then played in a 17th game but did so little that he got zero points, his per-game average would fall to 18.8, so a 1.2-point dip. That’s with zero points, but if the player at least got a portion of playing time and say earned 5 fantasy points (because they played like 25% of the snaps in Week 18), their season average would fall less than a point (to 19.1). Again, it would probably be better to remove that, and certainly these things will impact the results, but the margin isn’t massive. It’s not nothing, but it won’t sway the whole analysis.
The goal of this is to look at what won and lost leagues in 2025, though the very important factor that is not included in the table is ADP. I’ll discuss it quite a bit, but keep in mind that even when I don’t mention it, where the scoring came from is extremely important. It’s not my central focus here — I’m really trying to look at how the positions score because of how the sport itself is evolving (which I’ll address more in additional pieces later) — but price must be central to any takeaway from analyses like this.
I’m going back 11 years through 2015 mostly because that’s the span of how long I’ve done fantasy work, and because it was a fascinating RB year I always like to incorporate with a lot of top RBs struggling and points at the position way down. I wrote my first article for RotoViz in August of 2015, and I’m pretty familiar with the annual landscapes since then, so that’s the main reason I chose that cutoff.
Alright, let’s get into the positions real quick and hopefully this stuff will start to make sense.
Late-round and streaming was optimal at QB
I mentioned above that ADP isn’t included, but it’s extremely important to start here with the expensive QBs in 2025. While Josh Allen is the QB1 in this visual, Jalen Hurts is QB8 and Lamar Jackson and Jayden Daniels didn’t even qualify. The four clear expensive mobile QBs didn’t score in 2025, full stop.
Allen, as the one expensive QB who did score, was the lowest-scoring QB1 on this chart. We do immediately have a Week 18 issue in that he was at 25.8 points per game before Week 18, where he played a snap but didn’t record any stats. Even at that 25.8 number, we’re talking about him being the lowest-scoring QB1 since 2017.
Matthew Stafford, as the QB2, was also the lowest-scoring QB2 on the table. He would’ve finished higher than QB5 in just one other season in the five years leading into 2025. Still, that season, 2023, doesn’t look all that dissimilar to 2025, and we do know offense has been down since 2020. It’s not totally shocking this happened in 2025, but it was definitely a lower-scoring QB season.
So much of what made later-round picks like Stafford and QB3 Drake Maye so valuable in fantasy comes down to not having a QB in the 27+ range. As recently as 2022, we had three QBs that high, all meaningfully better than this year’s QB1. Last year, the QB4 at 24.5 was higher than where Allen finished, or would’ve been the QB2 this year if we omit Allen’s Week 18.
Arguably, there was a fifth QB last year who was in this range. Daniels is the QB6 from last year at 23.2, but his per-game profile is another one that was hit hard by leaving games early, both with Week 18 but also the earlier game where he played just 15% of the snaps due to injury. He also ran way less while playing hurt with that rib issue, and then scored at a higher level in the playoffs, which were parts of the Daniels argument I made this offseason that argued his 2024 scoring was held down even more than most, by these types of things. Again, I’m not forensically combing through every player’s game log for consistency, but I do look at enough players to know that it’s not the norm for a QB that still scored this high on a per-game basis to have two games at fewer than 50% of the snaps, with one being only 15%. The relevance is simply to vaguely point to yet another high-end 2024 QB scorer that isn’t well-represented here; his scoring last year was in truth pretty similar to Allen’s QB1 season this year, in addition to multiple QBs finishing ahead of it, and Jackson being way up there at 28.2.
The 2025 QB landscape is something that does happen in fantasy with the different groupings at different positions, and mostly due to variance with small samples. It’s similar to how in 2024, the elite TE group that I argued stretched seven names long didn’t really hit, other than basically two names, and rookie Brock Bowers came from behind them to vault to the top. The five misses there was just an uncorrelated parlay of bad outcomes for that position.
Quarterback is a little different, and I do think there are some macro things here, but in 2025, we had four elite QBs coming in, and two were hurt for meaningful stretches, while Hurts was ranked last of those four by ADP and was there in large part due to his rushing value, but in 2025 his rushing cratered. After 13+ rushing TDs in three straight seasons across 2022-2024, he fell to 8, plus he’d rushed for over 600 yards every year since he’d taken over as the full-time starter in his second year, and he fell this year way down to 421 rushing yards. He hemorrhaged rushing fantasy points from what had been an incredibly consistent four-year stretch, because even back in 2021 he had 10 rushing TDs with a career-high 782 yards.
We don’t want to overlearn lessons based on tiny cohorts; in this case, it’s four QBs, and how their seasons played out. That said, the macro thing here that needs to be acknowledged is the sport also chewed up and spit out rushing upside guys like Kyler Murray and Justin Fields as massive parts of the 2025 story. There’s a shift there; one of the upcoming parts of my “biggest storylines of 2025” piece will be how the mobile QB bubble popped.
But more than second-tier guys like Murray and Fields, the reason there wasn’t a high-end QB season this year does in large part come down to Daniels and Jackson getting hurt, plus Hurts losing all that rushing, and Allen being good but not necessarily great by his standards. It could be said that if Jackson had stayed healthy and had a year like 2024, he would’ve been one of the best third-round picks of the year, because of how the other QBs all scored. Same would be true for if Daniels had hit the ceiling I argued was possible. These things didn’t happen, but there was certainly room for one star QB to gap the field.
There are some interesting numbers with the macro rushing stuff. In every season since 2017, there have been at least three QBs over 500 rushing yards, until 2025, where only Allen reached that plateau. And Allen didn’t even hit 600 yards this year; last year, both Jackson and Daniels were around 900, and just a few years back in 2022 we had five different QBs hit 700 in the same season. We’re supposed to be in a golden era for QB rushing; including guys like Murray and Fields, a healthy chunk of the league’s offenses coming into 2025 were built around QBs where mobility was a big part of the game. That was the schematic meta, right? The shift in 2025 was drastic.
You want the craziest stat? Allen’s aforementioned league-leading rushing number was 579. That’s the lowest number for a league leader since David Garrard led the league’s QBs in rushing in 2009. Do you know how many eras of QB rushing we’ve gone through since then? Michael Vick, a trailblazer for QB mobility, ran for more yards in the two years that followed that — both 2010 and 2011 — than any QB ran for in 2025. How many different teams’ plans had to fail in 2025 for no QB to hit 600 rushing yards?
We know how rushing impacts the high end of fantasy QB scoring, so that helps explain what happened at the top here. When there are no clear dominant scorers, not only is late-round QB massive, but the position also becomes about streaming. Late-season and fantasy playoff runs from guys like Brock Purdy and Trevor Lawrence carried people to titles. Maybe part of how you got there was by riding Jacoby Brissett for a while — he had a nine-week stretch of scoring at least 21.9 in FFPC, but then faltered in Weeks 16 and 17 so you’d have needed a well-timed off ramp there. Maye was a big hit, but you could replicate his scoring in the aggregate. That’s always going to be the case when the top QBs aren’t scoring at a level where they are running away from everyone else.
Broadly, 2025 was a seasonal outcome that strongly validates the research into QB streaming and late-round QB strategies. That doesn’t mean it’s the only way things will go in the future; none of the descriptive analysis done in this post today will argue that type of conclusion. But it’s extremely straightforward to understand what type of approach one would have preferred at QB based on the stats that were compiled in 2025, and that’s to have waited for as long as possible to select a QB.
Running back wasn’t flat in 2025
As I noted, I went back to 2015 and did 11 years instead of a rounded number like 10 for these charts in large part because that’s always a fascinating RB year to look back on. The RB2 that year would finish no higher than RB7 by these parameters in any of 10 years since.
Looking at more recent years, one of the most important notes about this table is how the high end of RB scoring looks very different for the five years from 2016 to 2020 compared to the five years since. That trend is more extreme when you understand the impact of one man.
The two seasons that stand ahead of others over the past five years are both Christian McCaffrey in 2023 and 2025. He also stood alone in the previous era where it was more common to score 25+; that 2019 season up at 29.3 was him, too. This is an extreme version of the cohort commentary above, where the top of the RB scoring on this chart is in some ways influenced by a sample size of one: Did Christian McCaffrey have a healthy, epic season?
But other than McCaffrey, we do see a pretty clear trend that the top scorers at RB have been down for a half decade now. No one else has had a season where they’ve broken 22.5 points per game, which coincides with scoring being down around the league, as well as some minor stuff like less passing to RBs, and I think probably some of the player health stuff that’s been more emphasized since the move to 17 games. Back in the stretch from 2016 to 2020, there were 12 different RB seasons that broke the 22.5-point mark, and importantly they came from eight different RBs. No single RB did it more than twice during that span. (McCaffrey, Le’Veon Bell, Todd Gurley, and Alvin Kamara are the four who did it twice, and the four who each did it once are David Johnson, Saquon Barkley, Melvin Gordon, and Dalvin Cook.)
The list doesn’t include two others who broke 20.0 multiple times each, but never quite got to 22.5. For those of you who have read me since then, I was often out on those two — Ezekiel Elliott and Derrick Henry — on the grounds their ceilings weren’t quite legendary enough. It’s important to understand their type of scoring during that era in the 20.0-22.0 range has played up in the 2021-2025 era, with Barkley’s 22.0 points per game as a TRAP back in 2024 as the best recent example. Barkley had a bigger fantasy impact in 2024 than Elliott had in 2016 when Elliott scored very similarly at 21.8 with a similar profile, but both Bell and Johnson were over 25.
Within that context, 2025 was really strong at the top. There were five RBs over 20 points per game, and the RB5 hitting that mark is something we only see one other time on this table, even including the prior era. Only the epic RB season of 2018 also boasts five 20-point RBs. In 2025, CMC was amazing, and additionally Bijan Robinson, Jahmyr Gibbs, Jonathan Taylor, and De’Von Achane rounded out a truly impressive top five. All of them would’ve been at worst RB3 in the four seasons leading into 2025; you look at a guy like Taylor, who is RB4 here at 21.3, and look back at his biggest season in 2021 when he was the overall RB1 at 22.1, and a big part of the difference of the impact of those similar seasons was external, i.e. the production of other backs around the league (another part of it was sequencing, because his 2021 production was back-weighted while his scoring in 2025 was much more front-loaded, which was unfortunate when fantasy playoff time came around).
One of the key things I’m trying to drive home here as I dig into this stuff is how the shape of the scoring year to year presents as frankly pretty random. In my experience, that’s always been true about the RB position, which is a bit maddening because we all do realize and acknowledge how important RB points are to winning at fantasy. You do need good RBs!
That perceived randomness dramatically impacts the way we see different RB seasons, as I’ve given multiple examples of. These external factors of how the rest of the RBs perform dictate a lot of the emotional weight we put on some RB seasons. We overlook how good other RBs are in packed seasons, as a correlated result.
One of the consistent things I believe is there are limitations to how many RBs have the legendary upside we talk about chasing, and so the shape of this year to year does come down to the cohort stuff with the elite mobile QBs I discussed above. The CMC example is the best one, where his scoring range is indisputable, and part of the top of the RB scoring landscape will be influenced by whether CMC was CMC that year. Barkley’s 2024 featured the same exact 22.0 points per game of Bijan’s 2025, but Barkley’s felt so much more impactful because CMC was injured (and additionally because of the presence of Gibbs, JT, and Achane as three other 20-point scorers right behind Bijan, whereas in 2024 there was a bit sharper of a decline behind the 22-point season).
Simplifying and finishing the cohort point, some years the best RBs hit and some years they don’t. The actionability of that is to understand the shape of a future season of RB scoring is going to be difficult to predict, and also that what makes a good or bad RB pick is more heavily influenced by this perceived randomness of where else the RB scoring comes from than we want to readily admit.
It’s not entirely random, though, right? One thing we do know is the very best RBs tend to come from the first few rounds, and then the RB Dead Zone tends to exist. We definitely took some shots on Dead Zone rookies this year, and that didn’t play out great. I also argued this offseason that we keep hearing “the Dead Zone is dead” and that was a clear fallacy. That part of my analysis was dead on. We chased the players in the Dead Zone that tend to be the only types that succeed from that range, but in truth there were essentially none that did, other than James Cook, who wasn’t necessarily elite but was very good (and he’s one of those beneficiaries of external stuff, where his level of scoring as the RB6 on the above chart was way more impactful since none of the other names in the entire top 10 went later than him).
The other way to view that is if we had gotten better scoring from a TreVeyon Henderson or RJ Harvey throughout the season — similar to other young RBs in those ranges that have scored more consistently in the past — the value would’ve been tremendous. It’s very hard for me to feel that the process was wrong on those guys when I know that sometimes rookies just aren’t as good right away as their profiles suggest, and when I do believe there were outcomes where these guys had better seasons and then if they did they would have been massive to the 2025 equation.
This gets at something I’ve written multiple times before and have had multiple other analysts tell me is particularly sharp insight which is when we’re wrong on rookies, or unproven players, the fantasy community wants you to know about it. Hell, we feel stupider. There’s an emotional element. It’s way easier to miss on a player who has already shown a level of scoring. Alvin Kamara was a Dead Zone RB this year on a bad offense who was old and had basically zero shot to be a good pick, and yet no one made half the issue with his disaster season that they did with Henderson, because Kamara beat ADP in 2024 and has other great seasons in his past and when you’ve recently seen that player exceed expectations, there isn’t as much of an emotional element to the backward analysis of the failure.
But I would strongly suggest the process that led to drafting Kamara was way worse than the process that led to drafting Henderson, and I would cite all of the years and years of Dead Zone data, and the types of players who actually succeeded from those ranges looking like Henderson and not like Kamara. They are, almost without exception, unproven players the market does not yet understand. When the market actually knows an RB’s scoring level and is still skeptical enough to push them down into the Dead Zone, that’s your sign to be off them.
The Dead Zone discussion is an aside, but it’s an important part of the 2025 RB discussion, because of the drop from RB5 to RB7 on the above table. Cook was there at RB6, bridging things a bit, and he was a huge piece. Anyone who took James Cook this year was in great shape for a variety of external reasons (including that a lot of non-RB picks in his ranges were not good picks, but mostly because all the consistent RB points were more expensive than him).
After Cook, the bottom half of the top 10 doesn’t look all that impressive relative to recent seasons, even despite how good the top five was. We know 2024 was a particularly healthy RB season where the position really scored, and that’s evident with performances of 17+ points down to RB10, all of which would’ve been good enough for RB7 in 2025, despite the fact that 2025 featured a much stronger top five.
And again, all five of the great RBs this year had ADPs by the end of Round 2, and then the next four RBs on this chart also had high ADPs — RB7 through RB10 is Henry, Chase Brown, Josh Jacobs, and Kyren Williams. There’s one other player with a lower ADP that would’ve made the chart had he played two more games — Cam Skattebo failed to qualify with just eight games played, but he averaged 16.0 despite just 2.9 in Week 1. His rookie season is absolutely what the hope would’ve been for Henderson and Harvey, and why they would’ve been worth more in August, and it was the best 2025 evidence that rookie RBs can take jobs and run with them pretty early. Skattebo had double-digit PPR points in all seven of his games after that minor Week 1 role, right up to his injury, and his point-per-game total was likely only going to continue rising the rest of the way just by drowning out that 2.9-point game if he had stayed healthy. In a season with so little later-round RB production in general, that type of outcome was likely going to be league-winning if he’d stayed healthy.
Behind Skattebo, veterans with similar ADPs like Javonte Williams, Travis Etienne, and D’Andre Swift were solid producers between 14.5 and 15.5 points per game who were more impactful than their scoring level typically dictates, because of that same phenomenon of limited later-round RB production. Even the back-end top-10 RBs with the high ADPs — Henry, Brown, Jacobs, Kyren — were in that range of scoring that does tend to be replaceable by the Frankenstein RB stuff I’ve written about.
There will be data that shows RB-RB starts were strong, because all the teams that started with two of the top five guys were in incredible shape. Typically, they weren’t hammering RBs for the next several rounds, which was an ancillary benefit because you didn’t want to be taking those Dead Zone RBs unless it was Cook. Naturally, those were going to be really strong builds. Even the ones that got a Chase Brown or a Henry as the RB2 were going to be solid this year. That doesn’t mean all RB-RB starts were strong, but the strategy did have the real ceiling we’re after with elite RB picks, if you landed on the right RBs.
But again, there are different outcomes. Two years prior, in 2023, Kyren Williams was the RB2 at that 21.4 figure from an ADP so late he was mostly undrafted, while Raheem Mostert was a late-round RB pick that was the RB3 at 18.0. Even the RB4 was rookie Achane at 17.5, also as a mid-to-late-round pick. In a year where the earlier RBs were frankly a disappointment relative to either 2024 or 2025, the 2023 later-round RB bonanza was massive.
And yet, in some ways Mostert and Williams were both less valuable that year because they both hit. If you take either of those seasons from 2023 and drop it into 2025, you probably have the second-most valuable RB of the season. Even if that was Mostert at his 18.0 number, but definitely if we had Kyren’s breakout 21.4 points from that year as a waiver add here in 2025, in a year where there was no other late-rounder at 18.0 like Mostert, or 17.5 like rookie-year Achane.
This is the type of stuff that I’m really trying to hammer home that can only be understood when you really look at the specifics. People will just talk about “late-round RB” or “Elite RB” trends and not give enough thought to this nuance, but it influences those widely-discussed lessons a ton.