Zero RB.

 

(No, don’t leave!)

For a decade and change, this fantasy football draft strategy has been incredibly polarizing. It’s made that one guy in your 12-team league into the league pariah. It has separated loved ones from their families in search of their new Zero RB star — sorry, the answer was NOT Bryce Love. It has also separated a lot of people from their money and won those intrepid pioneers millions of dollars in best ball contests throughout the last several seasons. To say Zero RB has been successful is an understatement.

It’s easy to see how waiting to draft a running back until the fifth round (or later) can be a daunting task, worthy of a game show hosted by Rob Lowe. Meanwhile, the Robust RB draft strategy – known to most as ‘drafting a fantasy football team’ up until 2019 or so – has been an approach many more people have utilized if they’ve drafted a handful of teams. Grab a bunch of running backs that gobble up opportunity and profit. Easy, right?

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In today’s fantasy football landscape, the modern drafter – points at you – has a ton of options at their disposal for how to maneuver through a fantasy draft. There’s no right or wrong way to draft a great team able to navigate the waters of an NFL season that is full of chaos, but we’re going to dive into both draft strategies and how they will apply for 2025.

Best Ball Strategy — Zero RB vs. Robust RB

Zero RB in 2025

We can’t talk about Zero RB in 2025 without first discussing Zero RB in 2024. As there are in every season, there were plenty of late-round running back stars that Zero RB drafters took full advantage of. Players like Bucky Irving, Chase Brown, Chuba Hubbard, Rico Dowdle, Najee Harris and several other backs make up just shy of half of the top 24 running backs from 2024 in total fantasy points. Last season represents one of the best times in recent memory to employ a Zero RB strategy, as the low-end RB1s and RB2s have never been this productive across the board.

And we didn’t even mention running backs like Jordan Mason, Zach Charbonnet, Sean Tucker, Tyrone Tracy, Isaac Guerendo, and Tank Bigsby, who all spent time as a weekly top-five running back. There are ALWAYS running backs available thanks to the chaos of the NFL season.

For 2025, we’re already laying the groundwork here in regards to the backs you’ll be able to draft. As far as an early tier list of ZeroRB running backs goes, check out this piece I wrote last week where I went in-depth about the running backs and who I prioritize over one another. If you’re interested in how I rank every running back currently on an NFL roster, here’s a color-coded graphic that does just that.

Just as it has every single season, the football gods will take away your favorite running backs in fantasy, but the Zero RB gods will give back with available running backs to plug in any gaps in your roster. It’s beautiful, really.

Robust RB in 2025

Robust RB can be summarized as the emotional attachment to how normal fantasy football players always drafted fantasy football teams. We’ve always known this because that was the state of the league for a long time, especially at the beginning of the 2000s and into the 2010s. When the league commissioner carved draft boards in stone 25 seasons ago, the first three rounds of most leagues were peppered with 250-to-300-carry running backs.

If you’re a seasoned fantasy manager and have been playing fantasy football since the days of calculators, scratch pads, and Monday morning box scores, it’s been a tough adjustment to the NFL evolving to not just increased passing volume throughout the league but also the bell-cow running back going the way of the Dodo.

Robust RB requires a drafter to spend multiple early round selections on running backs with the hope that you nail multiple top running backs to carry your fantasy team each week. Spending a large portion of your early fantasy draft capital on running backs in turn affects how you draft the other positions. Of course, Robust RB ignores the volatility of the position in terms of injury risk. And oh, there is plenty of risk.

RotoViz’s Josh Hermsmeyer did injury-specific research regarding running backs several years ago. He found that in a seven-year study of running backs selected in the first five rounds of fantasy football drafts, running backs are 200%-360% more likely to suffer a serious injury (injured for four or more weeks) than wide receivers are in the same average draft position (ADP) range.

Despite that, each NFL season has its own ecosystem, and what we saw in 2024 was that running backs stayed healthier than in any season that I can remember. Only three running backs inside the top-24 consensus ADP missed more than three games last season: Christian McCaffrey, Kenneth Walker and Zamir White.

These are the conditions where Robust RB thrives: when backs are staying healthy across the board. Otherwise, you’re going to see them mostly underperform unless you hit a three-leg parlay of running backs and select the optimal ones.

For 2025, it’s going to be hard to replicate the great health of running backs from 2024, but in terms of bellcow backs, there will be plenty to choose from. The thing is, there are plenty to choose from every season, and trying to project volume on a running back with the chaos of the NFL season is foolhardy.

Kevin Tompkins is a co-owner of Optimus Fantasy Football. Find more from Kevin on Bluesky @ktompkinsii.bsky.social and right here on Optimus Fantasy.