Pat Fitzmaurice has gone position-by-position to provide you with fantasy football draft strategy and advice. Here’s how Fitz is preparing for his fantasy football drafts. His primers include fantasy football draft strategy, targets, rankings, tiers, and more.
Here are each of Fitz’s complete Fantasy Football Draft Primers: QB | RB | WR | TE
Below we dive into some of his fantasy football draft strategy and advice for Running Backs.
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Fantasy Football Draft Strategy: Running Backs
Let’s explore some fantasy football draft strategy and advice from Pat Fitzmaruice for each position.
Running Backs
Running back is usually a volatile, unpredictable position. Weirdness at the RB position is the norm in fantasy football.
It’s unusual to get a season in which there’s relative stability and predictability at running back. The lack of RB weirdness made 2024 a weird year.
The Christian McCaffrey affair was an exception, of course. McCaffrey was the consensus 1.01 in fantasy drafts, and it wound up being a Hindenburg-level disaster for the people who drafted him.
McCaffrey had calf and Achilles issues in training camp that 49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan and McCaffrey himself downplayed. McCaffrey missed the first eight games of the season and wound up playing only four games.
There were some pleasant surprises, too, including Bucky Irving, Chase Brown, Chuba Hubbard and Rico Dowdle.
But otherwise, the RB position was unusually stable. Of the top 12 running backs by half-point PPR average draft position, eight actually finished as RB1s, and two of the misses (McCaffrey and Isiah Pacheco were injury-related).
Of the 12 running backs with ADPs in the RB13-RB24 range, nine finished as RB2s or better in half-point PPR scoring, and two more (Rhamondre Stevenson, Kenneth Walker) were near-misses.
One reason for the unusual predictability at the RB position was an atypical dispersion of injuries. Normally, running backs have higher injury rates than wide receivers, Last season was an exception. McCaffrey and Pacheco were the only running backs to miss significant chunks of the season due to injury.
Meanwhile, the upper reaches of the WR position were shredded, with Brandon Aiyuk, A.J. Brown, Nico Collins Stefon Diggs, Mike Evans, Chris Godwin, Tee Higgins, Puka Nacua and Rashee Rice all missing at least three games.
What does this mean for 2025?
After a year in which we had less RB volatility than usual and more injury-related WR volatility than usual, we might see more of a lean toward running backs in the early rounds of 2025 fantasy drafts.
The question is whether it’s wise to load up on running backs in the early rounds.
The key consideration is the number of wide receivers you’re required to start every week.
If you only have to start two wide receivers, you aren’t obligated to aggressively attack the WR position. It’s acceptable to merely keep up with your competitors at wide receiver as long as you’re building positional advantages elsewhere.
But if you have to start three receivers, investing heavily in the WR position is imperative.
Wide receiver is a crucial position in 3WR leagues simply because receivers make up such a large percentage of your starting lineup. If your league requires you to start 1 QB, 2 RBs, 3 WRs, 1 TE and 1 FLEX, at least 37.5% of your non-defense, non-kicker starters will be WRs. That percentage jumps to 50% if you put a WR in the flex spot.
In a league where you only have to start two wide receivers every week, drafting a pair of running backs in the first two or three rounds is a viable strategy.
In a league where you have to start three wide receivers every week, pounding the RB opposition in the early rounds puts you at risk of shorting yourself at the WR position — a position that has amplified importance because you have to start so many.
Tier 1
Saquon Barkley was a monster last year, with 2,005 rushing yards and 15 total touchdowns. But if you include playoff games, Barkley had 482 touches last season — a Herculean workload. It’s fair to wonder if there will be after-effects. That said, the Eagles may have the best RB ecosystem of any team in the league, thanks largely to an outstanding offensive line.
Jahmyr Gibbs scored a league-high 20 touchdowns last season. That number seems destined to slip in 2025, and the loss of Lions playcaller Ben Johnson is slightly worrisome, but Gibbs has averaged 5.5 yards per carry since coming into the league and adds ample pass-catching value.
Tier 2
- Christian McCaffrey
- Derrick Henry
- Bucky Irving
- De’Von Achane
- Josh Jacobs
- Jonathan Taylor
- Chase Brown
- Kyren Williams
Dare we have another dance with Christian McCaffrey? He’s 29 and has a troublesome injury history, but we saw the upside in 2023, when McCaffrey had 2,023 yards from scrimmage and 21 touchdowns.
Derrick Henry is entering his age-31 season, and there aren’t many running backs who’ve had big seasons at that age. But Henry seems to be a different species altogether, seemingly indestructible and impervious to age. He had 1,921 rushing yards and 18 touchdowns in his first season with the Ravens.
From November on, Chase Brown averaged 18.9 carries and 4.8 receptions a game. We shouldn’t expect him to average 23.6 touches a game like he did over the second half of last season, but the Bengals didn’t make any significant RB additions in the offseason, so Brown should still be the undisputed lead back in one of the best offenses in the league.
Kyren Williams has finished RB2 and RB8 in half-point PPR fantasy points per game the last two seasons. With Kyren’s 316 carries last season, the only running backs with more were Saquon Barkley and Derrick Henry. But Kyren investors have to be nervous about how the Rams keep adding to their backfield. They drafted Blake Corum in the third round last year, and they drafted Jarquez Hunter in the fourth round this year.
Check out Fitz’s full Running Back Fantasy Football Draft Primer 
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