Week 3 of the NFL season brings with it another opportunity to either stay on an early roll in fantasy or to get some redemption after a rough start. Running backs are always a premium position in fantasy, but with how few true bell cow backs there are in the NFL these days, a lot of draft success comes on guessing the split right on backfield touches for teams that tend to use two backs.
There are of course those you can trust to get the vast majority of touches, and those players are at the top of every ranking every week — your Christian McCaffrey’s and Dalvin Cook’s and Derrick Henry’s — but the first two weeks have been illustrative at times, and frustrating at others, for those trying to figure out who is going to be used most in those more egalitarian backfields.
Here, we have the Week 3 consensus projection rankings for running backs, based on the projections from four sites: ESPN, NFL, CBS, and FantasyPros.
- Christian McCaffrey
- Dalvin Cook
- Derrick Henry
- Alvin Kamara
- Austin Ekeler
- Aaron Jones
- Nick Chubb
- Joe Mixon
- Jonathan Taylor
- Chris Carson
- Najee Harris
- Ezekiel Elliott
- Saquon Barkley
- David Montgomery
- D’Andre Swift
- Antonio Gibson
- Miles Sanders
- James Robinson
- Clyde Edwards-Helaire
- Chase Edmonds
- Mike Davis
- Ty’Son Williams
- Damien Harris
- Myles Gaskin
- Leonard Fournette
- Melvin Gordon II
- Elijah Mitchell
- Darrell Henderson Jr.
- Kareem Hunt
- Devin Singletary
- Kenyan Drake
- James White