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.
- Fantasy Football Draft Kit
- Fantasy Football ADP
- 2025 Best Ball Fantasy Football Draft Kit
- Free Fantasy Football Mock Draft Simulator
Fantasy Football Draft Strategy & Advice: Running Backs
Let’s explore some fantasy football draft strategy and advice from Pat Fitzmaruice.
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.
Four Approaches to Drafting Running Backs
Let’s look at four strategies for drafting running backs.
- Zero RB: Pioneered by Shawn Siegele of RotoViz, this strategy involves bypassing RBs in the early rounds of your draft and focusing heavily on pass catchers with early picks.
- Hero RB: A variation on Zero RB, this strategy allows for the drafting of a top running back in one of the first two rounds of your draft, with other early-round picks dedicated to non-RBs.
- Robust RB: This strategy involves an RB-heavy approach in the early rounds – typically three RBs in the first four rounds.
- Opportunistic RB: This is basically just a value-hunting approach to the position. Is there value at RB in the early rounds? Jump on it. If not, be patient and get your RBs later.
In years where running backs are injured more frequently, those RB injuries create opportunities for backups, and we’ll see late-round or undrafted running backs become immensely valuable.
That’s one of the reasons why Zero RB is a viable strategy: You can still do well for yourself at running back if you hit on one or two unexpected surprises at the position.
Another reason Zero RB is viable: The WR position typically does not yield many late-round gems, so it’s hard to play catch-up at the position without investing early-round picks.
Check out Fitz’s full Running Back Fantasy Football Draft Primer 
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