In 2013, Shawn Siegele of RotoViz wrote a legendary article called “Zero RB, Antifragility, and the Myth of Value-Based Drafting” that essentially changed fantasy football forever, creating an almost cult-like movement into the Zero RB strategy.
While the back and forth debates about what draft strategy is the best are amusing, the fact is that every season in fantasy football presents unique opportunities and challenges that cater to different strategies in different ways. What worked in one season is unlikely to work the same way in another because so many things change in the NFL year over year. Coaches, players, schedules, ADP and much more are all wildly different each drafting season.
It took some time in the Best Ball streets for Zero RB to really catch fire, despite the success of the strategy in re-draft leagues and tournaments like the FFPC Main Event for quite some time. In fact, some might say that a particular episode of Ship Chasing more than 3 years ago, where I joined the hall of fame trio of Peter Overzet, Pat Kerrane and Ben Gretch to talk Best Ball strategy on Underdog, lit the proverbial Zero RB fire in best ball drafters and changed the draft landscape forever.
Since then, Zero RB, or at least Zero RB principles, has become more popular in the Best Ball streets. WR ADP has collectively risen, with RB ADP falling overall. Using Underdog ADP, the RB15 in 2022 was drafted at pick 32 on average. In 2024, that number was pick 47. In 2025 pre-draft contests, the RB15 has been drafted at pick 42.
The WR15 in 2022 was drafted at pick 33. In 2024, that number was pick 22. In 2025 pre-draft contests, the WR15 had been drafted at pick 27.
I do firmly believe that is a more appropriate and efficient movement over that time, but like I mentioned above, every season presents unique variables. Even setting aside the unique variables during the draft cycle over the summer, every NFL season is frankly very chaotic and high variance. Players get hurt, touchdown variance occurs, and many other unpredictable events ultimately end up defining a fantasy football season, and thus define which draft strategies we look back on and view as “right” or “wrong” in a given year.
If we set aside that variance since, ya know, it’s variance, and we take a deep look at this upcoming 2025 Best Ball draft season, I truly believe there are a significant number of eye popping elements of the draft landscape that point directly to Zero RB in 2025.
2025 is the Greatest Year for Zero RB in Best Ball History
Zero RB Crashed and Burned in 2024 (sort of)
The common belief is that Zero RB was a disaster in 2024. That’s sort of true, but also sort of false. Using a metric called “points per game added” in Underdog scoring (half-PPR), which measures how many points a player adds to your best ball team over the median points scored at their position, we actually see a fairly even split between RBs and WRs at the top. 5 of the top 10 in points per game added are WRs and 5 are RBs. Ja’Marr Chase actually was number one in that metric, just edging out Saquon Barkley for the top spot.
However, there are two clear problems for the WRs here. First, all the RBs you see near the top are expensive. The cheapest RB on this list was drafted as the RB9 by ADP (Derrick Henry). We’ll get to some of cheaper backs who were certainly hits, but we certainly didn’t get the emergence of a Kyren Williams type like we did in 2023, who was drafted as the RB67, but finished 4th overall in points per game added.
You can quickly see the WR2 and WR3 in points per game added were Rashee Rice and Chris Godwin. Both of these receivers suffered season ending injuries fairly early on in the year.
It’s also important to note what isn’t present atop that metric. Amon-Ra St. Brown, Puka Nacua, Malik Nabers, Nico Collins (highly drafted WRs) sit between 10th and 20th. But the likes of CeeDee Lamb, Tyreek Hill, AJ Brown, Marvin Harrison, Drake London and other WRs with very significant draft capital are nowhere to be found. That’s before we get to Chris Olave, Jaylen Waddle, Brandon Aiyuk, Deebo Samuel and others.
Chuba Hubbard is the cheapest RB by ADP to eventually show up on this list (which you can see here), sitting at 27th overall in points per game added with an ADP of RB43.
Points per game added is not the only metric that matters by any stretch, and it obviously is only looking at things on a per game basis, but it does give a glimpse into the impact the top players in fantasy from 2024 were making on a per game basis, which is particularly huge for Best Ball. Naturally, cheaper RBs who often require some form of chaos to play out in their favor such as a teammate injury or late season surge, will not pop in this metric. In 2021, Rashaad Penny was arguably the single greatest definition of “the guy you need” in best ball tournaments, finishing as the RB1 overall from Week 14 on, with his best game coming in Week 17, but he scored a TOTAL of 2.2 fantasy points prior to Week 14. Naturally, he did not crush the points per game added metric that year.
Chase Brown, drafted as RB29, was the closest thing to that in 2024, finishing as the RB5 from Week 9 on. However, his two lowest scoring games over that stretch were in the most meaningful best ball weeks (16 &17). Bucky Irving, Alvin Kamara, Rico Dowdle and other cheaper RBs were absolutely hits in fantasy drafts, but they just didn’t quite reach the level of a Penny or a Kyren either over the whole season or when it mattered most.
When you combine that with strong performance from the expensive RBs, the fact the expensive RBs stayed healthy, the expensive WRs having quite a few misses, and injuries to the likes of Godwin and Rice, it puts a major dent into Zero RB in 2024. Ja’Marr Chase’s legendary season and some big cheap RB hits just couldn’t totally overcome all those factors.
No Influx of Mid to Late Round WR Talent
While what happened last season certainly matters, we really need to look to what the upcoming year brings us in terms of an overall player pool and market. For 2025, the WR pool is wildly different than what we saw last year or even in recent seasons.
First, this incoming rookie WR class is projected by essentially everyone as a weak class. 2024 brought us several hits, with Malik Nabers, Ladd McConkey, Brian Thomas Jr. and Xavier Worthy hit in very big ways. The expectation by all rookie experts is that this class does not offer that level of upside or depth. You can see that pretty clearly in just the amount of WRs projected to be selected in the first two rounds of the 2025 NFL Draft.
Second, those big hits from these young WRs, both in 2024 and the preceding several years, have created one of the strongest crop of early round WRs we have ever seen in fantasy football. Last year, the WR craze pushed up WRs with profiles that had some cracks. Drake London and Marvin Harrison Jr. were pushed the 1-2 turn on Underdog, but the latter had never played a snap in the NFL, and the former had never shown that level of production at the NFL level. We know Drake London is a good football player, and we were hoping the addition of Kirk Cousins would help him take that leap to stardom. That’s before we get to Waddle, Deebo, Aiyuk, Olave and others. In 2025, this same ADP range has proven stars with concrete production at the NFL level, including last season. Malik Nabers, Brian Thomas Jr. and Ladd McConkey had elite rookie seasons and project as alpha WRs in their offenses. Whether it’s Nico Collins, CeeDee Lamb, Puka Nacua or even AJ Brown, these are undeniable stud football players in their prime. Heck, AJ Brown was a first round pick just last year but “disappointed” as the 24th overall player in points added per game thanks to the Eagles anemic passing volume.
Lastly, the young crop of WRs that did not have the success of the Nabers and BTJ types leave a LOT to be desired. We often see nice hits coming from 2nd year WRs, so let’s just take a look at the remaining list of 2nd year WRs we haven’t yet touched on, leaving out Harrison and Rome Odunze since they were top 10 NFL draft picks:
- Ricky Pearsall
- Xavier Legette
- Keon Coleman
- Ja’Lynn Polk
- Adonai Mitchell
- Malachi Corley
- Jermaine Burton
- Roman Wilson
- Jalen McMillan
- Luke McCaffrey
- Troy Franklin
- Javon Baker
- Devontez Walker
- Jacob Cowing
I’ll just leave it there with players selected before the 5th round in 2024. I actually quite like Pearsall, and there are others, like McMillan, that are definitely intriguing. But those players have been priced up (Pearsall ADP 72, McMillan ADP 103) because of our excitement. If early RB builds are going to bury the Zero RB slappies again, we really need some emergence from the cheap WRs to really give you enough firepower to compete with the teams loading up on the aforementioned group of stud early round receivers. It’s certainly not to say none of these guys will pop, but the collective strength of that group is quite poor.
So we simply aren’t backfilling the cheaper WRs with the type of talent, profile or opportunity with potential breakout options that we’d really like if we are going to be reliant upon cheap WRs in our best ball builds. That sets up the potential for a huge change from the points per game added outlook that we discussed above from 2024, where this elite crop of WRs are generating a larger gap over the median WR than last season.
Huge influx of mid to late RB talent
On the flip side of this WR context, the influx of RB talent at cheaper prices is massive. This rookie RB class is lauded as one of the best and deepest we’ve seen in quite some time. Jonathan Brooks was the RB1 overall in the 2024 draft, and he wasn’t selected until the 46th overall pick. Trey Benson was the RB2, and he was a 3rd round pick at 66th overall. Some mock drafts have as many as 4 RBs in the first round of this 2025 draft alone, with several more in the 2nd and 3rd rounds.
We also have an interesting situation with the younger backs or backup RBs already in the NFL. With WR pricing still quite high (although down from 2024), that naturally pushes down the RBs who are in backup roles or committee roles. As with the Penny, Kyren, Chuba Hubbard, Chase Brown and Bucky outcomes, we know those players can offer tremendous value when they emerge into prominent roles in their backfield, whether that be because of talent or injury.
And yet, here is a list of players either entrenched in their role or in a potentially valuable backup or committee role and their respective Underdog ADPs in pre-draft contests:
- Rhamondre Stevenson – 99
- Zach Charbonnet – 107
- Jordan Mason – 111
- Isiah Pacheco – 112
- Brian Robinson Jr. – 116
- Tyjae Spears – 141
- Trey Benson – 143
- Jerome Ford – 143
- Ray Davis – 157
- Tyler Allgeier – 169
- Jaylen Wright – 173
- Blake Corum – 174
- Braelon Allen – 179
That is not even an exhaustive list, but you get the point. Some of these players will be impacted by the draft, but plenty will not. Some will be whiffs, but some will also be very real hits, at least for stretches of the season. We just know that hits come from this group every single season, just as they did last year, and the year before, and that’s not even counting the rookies.
Elite RBs Prices Moved Back up This Year
We know that the entire best ball market was totally shaken up in late 2022 (see the Ship Chasing episode mentioned in the intro), and from that point forward we saw a continual cheapening of the prices of running backs, particularly at the top of drafts.
Let’s take a quick look at RB pricing on Underdog each year from 2022 to the pre-draft contests this year in 2025:
As you can see, each price point of running back from RB6 to RB12 to RB24 got continually less expensive starting in 2022. RB36 remained essentially stagnant from 2022 to 2023. This culminated in the market creating all time low pricing on RBs last year in 2024. All 4 price points were significantly cheaper than each year prior.
Naturally, one might think that is a potential driver of the lack of Zero RB success last year. If you were able to pick off the correct expensive RB or RBs (like Saquon Barkley), you were getting the biggest discount on that elite RB season we’ve ever had in fantasy football. When you combine that with the results we discussed above with the amount of whiffs from the early round WRs, we get almost a perfect storm scenario.
However, if we look at the early 2025 RB pricing, we see a significant course correction. While the RB36 price point has stayed stagnant at pick 115, we have actually reverted all the way back to pricing even more expensive than in 2023. You could certainly argue that last year’s pricing was incorrect, and I wouldn’t even disagree. But have we overcorrected?
In 2023, when RB prices were actually even a bit cheaper than what we have right now, we had an elite Zero RB season.
These are only the results of one season and just descriptive of what happened that year, but as you can see, the WRs dominated. The only RBs making their way into the top 15 in points per game added were Christian McCaffrey, who was the 1.01 in drafts, Kyren Williams (RB67), Raheem Mostert (RB38), Devon Achane (RB43) and Alvin Kamara (RB26). We saw WRs across a variety of ADP ranges make their way onto this list, but the theme was cheap RBs and firepower in 2023.
Certainly this does not mean the results of 2023 are destined to duplicate in 2025, but we see what can happen when the market overvalues too many RBs in the early rounds. No one is denying the greatness of Saquon Barkley, Derrick Henry, Bijan Robinson and other elite RBs, but historically when we have had pricing similar to what we have in 2025, it has been a breeding ground for Zero RB success.
When we add all these factors up – a possible overreaction to 2024, the WR player pool, the RB player pool and the possible overcorrection in RB pricing – it really stands out that we could be headed for the greatest Zero RB draft season in this era of NFL Best Ball.
