The Best Running Back to Take in Every Round of Your Fantasy Football Draft
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The running back position has clawed back some early-round draft capital in 2026, but that doesn’t mean the position has suddenly become easy to solve. True workhorses are still rare, committees are still everywhere, and even the backs we like often come attached to injury concerns, ambiguous depth charts, or offenses that may cap their weekly ceiling.
That makes round-by-round planning even more important. We don’t need to draft a running back in every round, obviously, but knowing which backs make the most sense at each price point can help us avoid forcing the position when the board dries up and attack it when the value lines up.
* Note: we'll be using 4for4’s Multi-Site tool for ADP
Round 1: Jahmyr Gibbs, Lions
Okay, it’s a cop-out, but it’s still true. Gibbs is one of the cleanest first-round clicks on the board because he gives us the two things we’re always chasing at running back: explosive efficiency and receiving usage. Even if Detroit’s backfield is not suddenly turning into a one-man show, Gibbs doesn’t need a Derrick Henry workload to break fantasy.
The argument gets even easier when we look at the changing backfield around him. David Montgomery is gone, and Isiah Pacheco is stepping into more of a “Diet Montgomery” role than a direct one-for-one replacement. In the Sam LaPorta profile, we already noted that Pacheco has just 22 career carries inside the opponent’s five-yard line and only one over the last two seasons, while Montgomery had 52 such attempts with Detroit over the last three years. That doesn’t guarantee a massive Gibbs goal-line spike, but it certainly doesn’t hurt the case for the league-winning ceiling.
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