Right off the bat, I want to apologize to everyone. I was blessed with a weekend vacation, something I couldn’t say no to, but I still wanted to get a newsletter out to you. And I would have…if I didn’t leave my laptop at the resort, that is. 🙃 Fast forward nearly a week, and I was thankfully able to get my laptop back and shipped to me, shoutout to the maintenance staff that pulled through for me and got it done!

Needless to say, that has put me behind schedule, something I, and you, the reader, have sadly become accustomed to this offseason. It’s not what I wanted to happen, but this is how life goes sometimes! It’s a busy season for my family and me, and I just want to thank you all for the support you’ve given. With that out of the way, we can get to our subject for today: injuries.

Every single year, we hear about how running backs are injury-prone. That’s partly the whole reason Zero-RB is such a big thing. You know running backs will get injured, and plenty of running backs slip into the middle rounds and provide value, so why not try it?

But then 2024 came, when seemingly running backs who were drafted highly didn’t get hurt, and in 2025, when that was largely repeated again. Meanwhile, in the same time span, we saw players like Malik Nabers, Tyreek Hill, Garrett Wilson, Puka Nacua, and Brandon Aiyuk (he did play in 2024 after all) miss significant time. So I wondered, do running backs actually miss more time than receivers? Or is that something we’ve just come up with, but haven’t truly tested in the past? And if we have tested it before, it’s been long enough since then that we should probably take another look.

For this study, I went to FantasyPros and looked at the fantasy finish of every player with a Top-100 fantasy ADP since 2021, giving us a sample of five years. In time, I’d like to go back further than that, and hope to build on this current study with data from the 2026 season and beyond.

While five years is not a long period of time in totality, I hope to mitigate that with the fact that I’m looking at every running back and wide receiver with a Top-100 ADP, so while my yearly sample isn’t incredibly large, my player sample is somewhat robust: 174 individual running back seasons and 209 individual receiver seasons.

Side note: I use “individual” season here because a certain RB or WR can be in the dataset more than once. Such as Ja’Marr Chase. He accounts for 5 individual data points in the 209 WR seasons since he’s been highly drafted since 2021. Malik Nabers accounts for two years in 2024 and 2025. For this study, I’m not concerned so much about the individual player as the individual season. Each new year, the slate is wiped clean. No penalties given for missing time the year prior. Clear as mud?

Once I did all that, I had to figure out where I wanted to start. If I did the general overview first, that might reveal the answers to the test before the test is given. But if I went and started breaking down the ADP groupings and their injury history, that might be too far in the weeds too quickly. However, I decided to show you the latter first.

Among Top-24 ADP RBs, by far the best year for running back injuries and health was 2025. The 11 running backs drafted in the top two rounds of ADP missed 11 games, an average of one each. That’s nearly 3x less than in years like 2024 or 2023, and well below the average of nearly 27 games missed by Top-24 ADP RBs.

🏴‍☠ Incredibly, seven of the 11 missed games from a Top-24 RB in 2025 came from one man: Bucky Irving. Meaning the other 10 missed only a combined four games. I think this is an outlier for sure. Not so much Bucky, but the position staying as healthy as it did.

As for receivers, their worst season was ironically 2025. Receivers with a Top-24 ADP missed a combined 30 games, with Malik Nabers taking the Lions’ share of 13. On average, though, Top-24 WRs miss a combined 20 games, well below the 27 mark set by the running backs.

While receivers are generally “healthier” in terms of raw games missed, that advantage goes away when you consider how many games a player misses on average. Top-24 ADP RBs and WRs miss an average of 2.4 and 2.2 games per player, respectively.

Further down, in Rounds 3-5 of ADP, we find some more interesting things. I wrote last year about the 2024 Zero-RB disaster, where it felt like the ever-popular Zero-RB draft strategy didn’t pan out at nearly the rate it had in years past. Put briefly, the data showed that the top-end running backs generally scored more than usual, and the Zero-RB targets didn’t hit the ceilings we’ve seen in the past. I also proposed that the higher-end running backs were just healthier in general. For at least the mid-round backs, that proved to be very true. Across our larger sample of 2021-2025 (while taking out 2024), mid-round running backs missed an average of 3.6 games a year. That dropped to 1.7 in 2024. 🤯

Meanwhile, we saw a spike in games missed by receivers, with a mid-round WR going from just 2.1 missed games a year in 2021-23, to 3.7 games in 2024-25. Putting it in raw totals shows the contrast even better. Games missed by year starting in 2021: 34, 22, 27, 60, 55. Yikes! 😨

Still, receivers have the edge across the last five years, with an average of 2.8 games missed per year compared to 3.3 for a running back.

Finally, and I will be brief here for Rounds 6-8, running backs and wide receivers drafted here miss an average of 3.8 and 3.3 games a year, respectively.

Now that we’ve gone over both positions by ADP, let’s get the big picture. I thought I would include a bit from my spreadsheet here that might help provide a visual.

Among players with a Top-100 ADP, running backs miss just over 10% more games than receivers, which is not nothing. But regardless of position, any player picked at random is going to miss an average of 3 games per year. However, let’s look at one last thing: range of outcomes.

We’ve largely been talking averages with some of the crazy high totals thrown in from time to time. I want to introduce a range of outcomes using the data we’ve been using from 2021-25 so that you not only hear the averages, but also the likelihood of a light, catastrophic, or no injury. In the chart below, we will define “Healthy” as missing 0-1 games, “Slight Risk” as 2-3, “Risky” as 4-6 games, and “Danger” as 7+ games missed. The percentages are the chances in a given season that a running back or wide receiver will land in a certain bucket (aka, there is a 46% chance a RB stays “healthy” all season).

While “Risky” and “Danger” are fairly similar, “Healthy” and “Slight Risk” are certainly in favor of the receiver. And that makes sense. If you are missing 4+ games (especially 7+), those are generally because of injuries that anyone could suffer at random, regardless of position. Think hamstring, bad ankle injuries, moderate to severe knee issues, broken bones, and the like. But because of the beating running backs take, they’ll likely miss a game or two more than a receiver, just because they may need to rest a week to get their knee or ankle into good order.

One more thing I want to share before we get out of here, and how it impacts fantasy. While running backs and receivers will miss around the same number of games on average, with running backs missing a little more, the games that the running back misses are generally more valuable for fantasy. And that’s precisely why the Zero-RB strategy works (though not the only reason). Why?

Because when a running back misses time, we often have a good idea who the RB2 is on the roster, and he will step into that role. As for receivers, just because the top target goes down, it doesn’t automatically mean the WR2 is going to be fed with extra targets unless that player is Tee Higgins, Jameson Williams, or George Pickens. Even so they likely won’t absorb every vacant target, and finding out who else benefits isn’t always easy. There is usually a little more certainty of workload at the running back position, making RB handcuffs more valuable than WR handcuffs.

That’s going to do it for today. Thank you for reading. I hope you enjoyed it, and I will see you again soon!