Fantasy Football Draft Guide 2025: Running Backs – How much does having a good Offensive Line matter?

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  • By Nathan Hernandez

    Last Updated on August 22, 2025 2:42 pm by Jon Mosales | Published: August 22, 2025

    We’ve all had the dilemma of finding talented running backs we love that are unfortunately tasked with finding holes behind one of the worst offensive lines in the league. However, we’ve seen some running backs manage to do damage behind some of the league’s worst offensive lines, such as last season’s impressive performances from Joe Mixon and De’Von Achane, who both managed to turn in top-12 finishes on the season despite running behind two of the bottom-seven offensive lines in RBWR. So, Achane and Mixon were talented enough to survive their environments, but is there any correlation between OL talent and fantasy RB performance?

    ESPN Analytics started tracking lineman success rates in 2021, and among that info is every NFL team’s Run Block Win Rate (RBWR) across their entire OL combined. So, taking the RBWR data from ESPN, I listed teams in that order and paired it with that team’s fantasy RB1, and also the team run play rate for the accompanying season to help contextualize the team’s tendencies. I went through each of the last three seasons and compiled all the data together into a table for each of them. Each table will be followed by some notes on the data, and at the end I’ll recap any takeaways and potential RBs to target in 2025 based on the potential of the OL and overall run game. We’ll start with the most recent season, 2024, since it’s the freshest, and go back in time from there.

     

    2024 Data

    WordPress Data Table Plugin


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    August 22, 2025, 2:42 pm