RB11 finish, priced RB15; the Corum timeshare is the discount the market fairly charged.
Kyren Williams 2026 Season Preview — a volume back at a volume price
Show notes & transcript▾
Kyren Williams has finished a top-eleven back three straight years on pure volume — and the market has finally stopped paying a premium for it. He's the fifteenth back off the board after finishing eleventh. No edge, one real watch item named Blake Corum. The Muffed 2026 preview.
The season: fifteen-five a game, RB11 per game, on two hundred fifty-nine carries and a workhorse role for the Rams. The signature isn't a highlight — it's a pattern: McVay handed him fourth-and-one at the goal line three separate times, and he punched in all three. Double-digit points in sixteen of seventeen games. A floor you could set your lineup by.
The arc is a gentle slide: twenty-one-two, seventeen, fifteen-five. Declining, but on a still-elite workload. And here's the honest efficiency note — his plus one hundred forty-five rushing yards over expected looks strong in total, but per carry it ranked only twenty-second. The bulk is volume, not per-touch dominance. He's a high-floor compiler, not a creator.
What repeats: the role, mostly. His touchdown share, at twenty-nine-point-six percent, sits just under our RB fade line — close enough to flag, not enough to fire. Volume is his identity, and volume is sticky. But the efficiency is league-average, which means he needs the carries to keep coming.
The situation is the whole question, per the reports: McVay reaffirmed "Kyren is the starting back," but the carry split with Blake Corum is trending from sixty-forty toward something closer to even. Williams kept sixty-three percent of the red-zone rush attempts in 2025 — which is the part that protects his touchdown floor even if the early-down work erodes. A back whose value is volume, in a backfield trending toward a committee, is the exact profile to watch.
The price: pick thirty-two, the fifteenth back. Verdict: NO CALL — he finished RB11 and he's priced RB15, and that four-rank discount is the market fairly charging for the Corum encroachment and the average efficiency. The counter either way: if Corum takes the timeshare to fifty-fifty, even RB15 is rich; if Williams holds the goal-line role, the price is a small bargain. The market split the difference correctly.
September watch: the carry split with Corum — that's the entire bet; and the red-zone share, where his touchdown floor lives. Your guys, every week. Next preview's queued.
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2025: 1,252 rushing yards on 259 carries, 10 rushing TDs; 36 catches for 281 yards, 3 receiving TDs on 50 targets (17 games)
More episodes
2025 ReviewMay 11, 2026Kyren Williams 2025 Season in Review
RB9 on the season — 17 games, 15.5 PPR/game
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Kyren Williams 2025 Season in Review
RB9 on the season — 17 games, 15.5 PPR/game
Show notes & transcript
Kyren Williams finished 2025 as the number 9 running back in total PPR scoring and the number 11 back in PPR per game. That's a tier-one fantasy outcome, and it came the way Williams outcomes always come in Sean McVay's offense: through volume, through goal-line trust, and through being the unquestioned bell cow on one of the best offenses in football. The Rams went 12 and 5, scored at will, and Williams was the guy they handed it to whenever the field shrank. All 17 games. Over 1,250 rushing yards. Ten rushing touchdowns plus three more through the air, and every meaningful goal-to-go snap. Not flashy — workhorse, on a team scoring touchdowns at one of the highest rates in the league.
Now let's dig into the numbers, because they explain both the ceiling and the ceiling cap. Williams carried it 259 times for 1,252 yards — 4.8 a pop — and added 36 catches on 50 targets for 281 receiving yards. His rushing yards over expected came in at plus 145.3, genuinely strong, but the per-carry mark of plus 0.57 ranked just 22nd among qualified backs — meaning the bulk yardage is a story of volume, not dominance per touch. He averaged 15.5 PPR per game, and the consistency was the selling point: double-digit PPR in 16 of 17 games, with only a Week 12 dud against Tampa keeping him from a perfect floor. The ceiling games were real too — 31.1 against the 49ers in Week 5, 22.4 in the rematch, 21.8 against the Lions — but those were the exceptions. This was a steady-floor profile, not boom-or-bust. And on a Rams team that finished second in the league in offensive expected points added and converted touchdowns on better than 68 percent of red zone trips, the steady floor was where the fantasy money lived.
The defining image of Williams's season is a short-yardage one. Three different times this year — against Houston in Week 1, New Orleans in Week 9, and Seattle in Week 11 — McVay faced fourth and 1 inside the opponent's 1-yard line and handed it to Williams. Three times, Williams punched it in. That's the job. On a team where Matthew Stafford threw for 46 touchdowns and Puka Nacua caught 129 balls, Williams's fantasy value was built on finishing drives. The advanced metrics say he's not breaking tackles at an elite rate, but the role says he doesn't have to — when the Rams get inside the 5, the ball is going to number 23. That's a ten-touchdown floor before you even count the receiving work.
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