5 Running Backs to Avoid (2025 Fantasy Football)

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. Let’s dive into a few notable fantasy football players below. And you can check out which experts are lower than our expert consensus rankings using our Fantasy Football Rankings Comparison Tools.

Fantasy Football Draft Advice

Let’s dive into players Pat Fitzmaurice likes less than the expert consensus rankings.

Players to Avoid

Running Backs I Like Less Than ECR

Expert Consensus’s Rank	Player	Pat Fitzmaurice’s Rank	Diff.
20	Joe Mixon HOU – RB	28	8
30	Jaylen Warren PIT – RB	34	4
37	Rhamondre Stevenson NE – RB	44	7
45	Ray Davis BUF – RB	51	6
52	Jaylen Wright MIA – RB	59	7

Over the last four years, Joe Mixon has averaged 1,377 yards from scrimmage and 12.3 touchdowns per season. But Mixon is heading into his age-29 season and dealing with a foot issue that might force him to miss all of training camp and could linger into the regular season. It’s also possible he’ll cede some snaps to rookie Woody Marks on passing downs and to veteran Nick Chubb on early downs. Plus, the Texans have one of the league’s worst offensive lines. There are a lot of storm clouds here — probably too many to warrant spending a draft pick on Mixon.

Jaylen Warren should once again have something close to a half share of the Pittsburgh backfield, with his tag-team partner now rookie Kaleb Johnson instead of Najee Harris. Warren is 5-8, 215 pounds, so he isn’t cut out to handle 20 carries a game. But Warren has averaged 61.7 scrimmage yards per game over the last two years while sharing work with Harris, who didn’t miss any games over that stretch. Warren has averaged 4.8 yards per carry over his NFL career but has never averaged more than 8.8 carries per game in any of his three NFL seasons. The workload may not expand significantly, but perhaps we can squeeze a few more touchdowns out of Warren, who’s scored only six TDs in 48 career games.

Rhamondre Stevenson may have peaked with his 1,040-yard rushing season in 2022. He missed five games in 2023, and his 2024 season was a disappointment. Stevenson averaged a career-low 3.9 yards per carry last season, and his seven fumbles cost him some playing time. Now, the Patriots have added playmaking RB TreVeyon Henderson, a second-round draft pick. A 50/50 workload split might be the best Stevenson investors could hope for in 2025.