Everyone Wants to Draft Running Backs Again

Player mentions

Article text

Each thing is of like form from everlasting and comes round again in its cycle — Marcus Aurelius I don’t know whether Mr. Aurelius would have made for a good fantasy football analyst or not. But like Aurelius, the fantasy intelligentsia is fond of the notion of repeating cycles. ‘Late Round Quarterback’ was once a revolutionary and successful fantasy football strategy. Upon the rise of several young rushing quarterbacks, it became de-emphasized, only to be re-popularized again in recent years. Zero-RB has existed as a draft strategy since at least 2013 when Shawn Siegele wrote its seminal text . But for years, the volume of discussion surrounding Zero-RB drafters far out-paced the number of actual Zero-RB drafts. That shifted over the last couple of years, in particular with the advent of tournament best ball and successful conditions for Zero or Hero RB teams in 2023. Those conditions were not replicated in 2024 and 2025. An (arguably) compounding issue for ZeroRB drafters during this time was how much the draft economy shifted toward the prioritization of wide receiver. See below showing the rise of ZeroRB teams from a relative fringe strategy to a commonly deployed one: @Steveospeak Combo of the contest sizing increasing but also people drafting a ton more zero RB teams\n\nNumber of Zero RB teams by year:\nBBM2: 3,523 (can't find total entries)\nBBM3: 17,208 (451,200)\nBBM4: 32,084 (677,376)\nBBM5: 87,786 (672,672)","username":"JustinHerzig","name":"Justin Herzig","profile_image_url":"https://pbs.substack.com/profile_images/1953510486223331328/0CBXP-JH_normal.jpg","date":"2025-05-21T14:44:27.000Z","photos":[],"quoted_tweet":{},"reply_count":4,"retweet_count":0,"like_count":10,"impression_count":2113,"expanded_url":null,"video_url":null,"belowTheFold":false}" data-component-name="Twitter2ToDOM"> Note the above tweet only counts teams with zero RBs selected until Round 7. This does not capture the full extent of teams incorporating ZeroRB principles without deploying the strategy to a maximalist degree. In 2024 and 2025 there was a consistent debate whether wide receiver inflation should be exploited by pivoting toward early running back, or whether the shortened window to select high-ceiling wide receivers actually meant it was more imperative to prioritize that position early in drafts. (I.e. the same scarcity argument which was made for early-running back drafting for decades) I wrote at length about this topic in each of the last two off-seasons. Some of the individual player discussions in these articles aged well and others poorly. But I stand by much of my thought process in each, and will be building off both pieces throughout this article to avoid re-stating research or principles I believe don’t require significant re-investigation. Coming into 2026 there seems to be a wider consensus that wide receivers had their time in the sun, but running backs have returned to their rightful place as rulers of the fantasy kingdom. That’s not only reflected in the tone of content, but in draft habits. As you can see in the chart below, running backs are being drafted at a much higher rate than in either 2024 or 2025. The X-Axis of the above chart represents the positional ADP of each RB and the Y-Axis represents the overall ADP. For example, the RB14 is being drafted at an ADP of 25 in 2026, while the RB7 was being drafted at the same spot in 2024. Does a Return to Running Back Heavy Drafts Mean a Return of the Running Back Dead Zone? I…