10 Running Backs Who Will Make or Break Fantasy Football Drafts

When preparing for your fantasy football drafts, knowing which players to target and others to avoid is important. The amount of information available can be overwhelming, so a great way to condense the data and determine players to draft and others to leave for your leaguemates is to use our expert consensus fantasy football rankings compared to fantasy football average draft position (ADP). In this way, you can identify players the experts are willing to reach for at ADP and others they are not drafting until much later than average.

You can also see which players create the most debate among experts by checking out the standard deviation in their rankings. The higher the standard deviation, the more disagreement there is among experts as to where a player should be ranked. These players can be the ones who make or break your fantasy football drafts. Getting these picks right can lay the foundation for a fantasy football championship. Let’s dive into a few notable fantasy football players who could make or break your draft.

Fantasy Football Advice: Make or Break Draft Picks

Here are players in our ECR top 60 fantasy football draft rankings that are causing the most disagreement among experts based on where they are going in drafts.

RK	TIERS	PLAYER NAME	TEAM	POS	BEST	WORST	AVG.	STD.DEV	ECR VS. ADP
3	1	Jahmyr Gibbs	DET	RB2	2	12	4.5	2.2	1
4	1	Saquon Barkley	PHI	RB3	1	14	4.8	2.8	-2
10	2	Christian McCaffrey	SF	RB4	2	30	10.7	5.2	-2
14	3	Ashton Jeanty	LV	RB6	5	40	13.2	4.9	-4
19	3	Jonathan Taylor	IND	RB8	10	39	20.2	5.2	1
36	5	James Cook	BUF	RB13	22	52	37.3	7	-3
38	5	Kenneth Walker III	SEA	RB14	21	55	39.3	6.6	5
39	5	Omarion Hampton	LAC	RB15	19	121	40.2	14.9	-5
40	5	Breece Hall	NYJ	RB16	23	63	40.4	8.8	-9
58	6	David Montgomery	DET	RB21	45	79	59.7	7	-6

Jahmyr Gibbs is so good that it almost doesn’t matter that he shares work with David Montgomery. In his second NFL season, Gibbs rolled up 1,929 yards and a league-high 20 touchdowns. He was a monster in the fantasy playoffs, scoring 25.9, 23.4 and 24.3 half-point PPR fantasy points in Weeks 15-17. (Montgomery was out in Weeks 16-17.) And it’s not like Gibbs was a slacker in the fantasy regular season. He averaged 16.9 half-point PPR fantasy points a game through Week 14. There was only one game all season in which Gibbs failed to score double digit points, and he just barely missed that week with 9.4 points.
– Pat Fitzmaurice

Last year, Saquon Barkley finished the season as the RB1 in fantasy points per game, finishing with 378 touches, 2,283 total yards, and 15 total touchdowns. This season, we have to have the volume conversation and the worries about that for Barkley’s outlook for 2025. It’s a similar conversation that we had with Christian McCaffrey, Derrick Henry, and Josh Jacobs before him. Is it a concern? Yep. Is it so damning that it should Barkley outside the top 3-5 running backs in preseason rankings? No. My bigger worry is Barkley’s quietly meh tackle-breaking metrics last year. Among 46 qualifying backs, he had the fourth-best explosive run rate, but he was also only 28th in missed tackles forced per attempt and 35th in yards after contact per attempt (per Fantasy Points Data). The big thing that helped Barkley was Philly’s awesome offensive line. Among those 46 backs, Barkley had the highest yards before contact per attempt (3.55). Barkley was chewing up almost four yards per carry before he faced the opposition. That helped him a ton, but it will likely help him again in 2025, as Philly will once again have one of the league’s best offensive lines. Barkley remains a top 5 back in 2025 despite some of my concerns.
– Derek Brown

Christian McCaffrey’s 2024 season was derailed by bilateral Achilles tendonitis. Yes, I know it crushed many fantasy teams. Yes, I know that if you drafted him last year, you’re probably saying, “hell no…I won’t be walking down that road again.” I’ll get this out of the way quickly. I’m back in. George Kittle had similar issues with his Achilles, but after he received stem cell infusions, it hasn’t remained a problem. McCaffrey had a similar treatment last year and enters this season fully healthy from all reports. In the small sample we got from McCaffrey last year, his numbers remained strong. In the three full games he played, he averaged 18.6 touches and 93.7 total yards, all while playing 81-94% of the snaps. McCaffrey’s 22% missed tackle forced rate and his 1.80 yards per route run were strong (per Fantasy Points Data). Among those two statistical categories, McCaffrey ranked eighth-best (70 qualifying backs) and sixth-best (53 qualifying backs). McCaffrey has at least one more big season left. I’ll be investing heavily in him for 2025.
– Derek Brown