Big Blue View
Welcome back, readers. It’s now June, and while draft season for season-long fantasy football redraft leagues is still a couple of months away, plenty of fantasy football diehards are doing drafts now – for best ball leagues and tournaments, dynasty startups, and a variety of charity and other specialty leagues.
While some might not be ready to start thinking too hard about fantasy rankings and depth charts, many are, and I’m here for you. Click this link if you’re interested in my rookie landing spot analysis for the 2026 fantasy season, and my division-by-division burning questions for fantasy. I’ll have plenty of additional content throughout the summer, including rankings, players to target and avoid, sleepers, draft strategy, and more.
My focus today is the running back position, and its return to the top of Mt. Fantasy. In the 1990s and into the early 2000s, running backs were the undisputed heavyweight champs of fantasy, as multiple teams deployed three-down workhorse backs who did it all and racked up the points.
But as the league got more pass-happy and teams started using more three-wide receiver sets and rotations in their backfields, receivers started to challenge running backs for predominance, and that started showing up in fantasy scoring, and in how players came off the board in the first and second rounds of fantasy drafts. However, trends are trends, and nothing is permanent in the NFL. As more defenses started deploying two-high safety looks to take away explosive passing plays, offenses adjusted with more heavy personnel, more multiple-tight end sets, and more running.
Those recent trends culminated in a remarkable 2024 season. A bunch of veteran backs changed teams, which in itself was unusual. But the big story was that overall, players at the position stayed remarkably healthy and piled up numbers reminiscent of that earlier period. It was the year of the running back. To prove it wasn’t a fluke, we mostly got a repeat in 2025.
Here’s one of many fantasy stats that illustrates the trend I’m talking about. Last season, the top four non-quarterback scorers, and seven of the top nine, were running backs (Half-point PPR scoring). In 2024, it was even more extreme, as 10 of the top 11 non-QB scorers were RBs. Go back to 2023, and only three of the top eight non-QB scorers were RBs. In both 2022 and 2021, of the top ten non-QB scorers, five were running backs and five were wide receivers. We are in a mini-golden age for running backs.
With that as the backdrop, here are 23 fantasy facts you need to know about the running back position.
1. Christian McCaffrey, at age 29, led the NFL with 413 total touches in 2025 (24.3 per game) – almost three clear of Jonathan Taylor, who was second with 369 (21.7 per game).
2. McCaffrey has finished as the overall RB1 in Full PPR three different times, including last season, and the overall RB2 twice (he’s been in the league for nine seasons,...
