Player
Lamar Jackson
QB · BAL Ravens
Rushing volume is the entire gap between Lamar the fantasy cheat code and Lamar the ordinary starter. Whether the 2025 collapse was injury management or a real philosophical shift in Baltimore is the single question that decides if his draft price is a gift or a fair sentence.
The 2025 detour
The MVP profile lost its signature stat: 26.8 rushing yards a game, half his career norm.
TrendLamar's rushing by season (regular season)
| Season | Games | Carries | Rush yds | Yds/game |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | 15 | 176 | 1,206 | 80.4 |
| 2023 | 16 | 148 | 821 | 51.3 |
| 2024 | 17 | 139 | 915 | 53.8 |
| 2025 | 13 | 67 | 349 | 26.8 |
For seven seasons Lamar Jackson never averaged fewer than 43 rushing yards a game. In 2025 that number was cut to 26.8, on just 5.2 carries a game, while he missed four starts. From 2019 through 2024 he ran it about 11 times a game. The runs did not get worse, they simply stopped being called, and the fantasy scoring went with them: 16.5 points per game, 16th among quarterbacks after six straight seasons of 19.7 or better.
Why it matters. Rushing volume is the entire gap between Lamar the fantasy cheat code and Lamar the ordinary starter. Whether the 2025 collapse was injury management or a real philosophical shift in Baltimore is the single question that decides if his draft price is a gift or a fair sentence.
MYTH TEST: take away the legs and Lamar is just another quarterback. 2025 ran the experiment.
2025 vs prime: what held and what vanished
| Measure | 2024 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|
| Yards per attempt | 8.8 | 8.4 |
| TD to INT | 41 to 4 | 21 to 7 |
| Rush yds/game | 53.8 | 26.8 |
| PPR pts/game (rank) | 25.3 (1st) | 16.5 (16th) |
The passing barely moved: 8.4 yards per attempt and 21 touchdowns against 7 picks is still quality quarterbacking. But with the rushing cut in half, his fantasy scoring fell from 1st among quarterbacks to 16th. The claim is mostly confirmed: the arm keeps him startable, the legs are what made him the best pick in fantasy. Roughly nine points a game separated the two versions, and the passing line explains almost none of it.
Why it matters. This is the cleanest natural experiment his career has offered. His passing efficiency was nearly identical across the two seasons, so the entire scoring gap traces to rushing volume. Anyone drafting him in 2026 is not backing the thrower, who never left, but counting on Baltimore restoring the runner.
His sack rate more than doubled in one year: 4.6% to 10.7%, the worst mark of his career.
AnomalyLamar's sack rate per dropback by season
| Season | Sack rate |
|---|---|
| 2022 | 7.4% |
| 2023 | 7.5% |
| 2024 | 4.6% |
| 2025 | 10.7% |
In 2024 Lamar posted the best sack rate of his career, 4.6%. In 2025 it exploded to 10.7%, against a league average of 6.9%. A one-year swing that violent usually has injury or line collapse behind it, but what history says about sacks is uncomfortable: the rate tends to follow the quarterback, not the blockers.
Why it matters. Sack rate is one of the stickiest quarterback stats there is, which cuts both ways here. If the 10.7% reflects a body that could not escape the way it used to, it is the most alarming number on his page. If it reflects one compromised season played hurt, the 2019 through 2024 track record of roughly 5 to 9 percent is the better prior.
The rushing empire
Most rushing yards by any quarterback since 1999: 6,522, and he passed Vick in seven seasons, not thirteen.
MilestoneCareer QB rushing yards, 1999-2025 (regular season)
| QB | Rush yds | Rush TD | Seasons |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lamar Jackson | 6,522 | 35 | 8 |
| Mike Vick | 6,122 | 36 | 13 |
| Cam Newton | 5,628 | 75 | 11 |
| Russell Wilson | 5,568 | 31 | 14 |
| Josh Allen | 4,721 | 79 | 8 |
Lamar has out-rushed every quarterback of the last quarter century, and he needed barely half the seasons Vick and Wilson used to build their totals. Even with the 2025 slowdown, 6,522 yards in 8 seasons works out to a pace no one at the position has sustained in the database era.
Why it matters. Career rushing totals at quarterback are usually a longevity stat. Lamar's is a rate stat wearing a longevity crown: he took the record while still in his twenties. Every yard from here extends a record that, on current league trends toward protecting quarterbacks, may never be seriously threatened.
Six seasons of 700+ rushing yards. No other quarterback since 1999 has more than three.
Rare700-yard rushing seasons by a QB, 1999-2025
| QB | Seasons of 700+ |
|---|---|
| Lamar Jackson | 6 |
| Cam Newton | 3 |
| Mike Vick | 3 |
| Josh Allen | 2 |
| Jalen Hurts | 2 |
Lamar owns six of the 700-yard rushing seasons ever posted by a quarterback in this span, double anyone else, and three of the five biggest single seasons: 1,206 in 2019, 1,005 in 2020, and 915 in 2024. The 2025 dip to 349 is the first season since his rookie year that he missed the club.
Why it matters. One monster rushing season can be a scheme experiment; six is an identity. The list shows how quickly this skill normally erodes, since even Vick and Newton managed it only three times each. That Lamar was still adding 700-yard seasons in year seven is the strongest evidence the 2025 outage was situational rather than the end of the trait.
Scrambles at +0.42 points a play, designed keeps at +0.17, and short yardage is where the keep really pays.
SplitLamar's runs by type, 2019-2024 (regular season, kneels removed)
| Run type | Plays | EPA/play | Yds/carry |
|---|---|---|---|
| Scramble | 273 | +0.42 | 8.0 |
| Designed keep | 533 | +0.17 | 6.3 |
Short yardage keeps: 3rd or 4th down, 2 or less to go (career)
| Runner | Attempts | Conversion |
|---|---|---|
| Lamar keeps | 98 | 81.6% |
| All NFL runs, 2018-2025 | 8,617 | 70.2% |
Both flavors of Lamar run are good, but they are not the same play. The improvised scramble has produced +0.42 expected points per play, two and a half times the designed keep. And in the money situations the keep is elite anyway: on 3rd or 4th and short he has converted 81.6% of 98 career tries, against a 70.2% league rate on all short-yardage runs.
Why it matters. The scramble edge means Lamar's rushing value survives even in a pass-first game plan, since scrambles happen on called passes. That is why the 2025 carry diet did not fully erase his efficiency, only his volume. The short-yardage conversion rate is the part Baltimore can schedule on purpose, and history says that specific niche is where a called quarterback run beats every alternative.
The 2026 case
Since 2019 only Josh Allen has outscored him per game. The 2025 dip barely moved the seven-year ledger.
ComparisonQB fantasy points per game, 2019-2025 (min 60 games)
| QB | Games | PPR pts/game |
|---|---|---|
| Josh Allen | 114 | 23.0 |
| Lamar Jackson | 100 | 22.0 |
| Patrick Mahomes | 109 | 21.0 |
| Joe Burrow | 77 | 19.4 |
| Kyler Murray | 87 | 19.4 |
Zoom out from the 2025 disappointment and the ledger is stark: over seven seasons Lamar has averaged 22.0 PPR points per game, second only to Allen among every quarterback with 60 or more games, ahead of Mahomes and a full 2.6 points clear of fourth place. Two of those seasons he was the number one per-game scorer at the position outright.
Why it matters. Per-game scoring across a hundred games is about as noise-proof as a fantasy resume gets, and the multi-season view is exactly what a one-bad-year price cut ignores. The gap between Lamar and the quarterbacks now being drafted ahead of him is one season of evidence against six.
A round-5 sticker on a two-time per-game scoring champ: the market just repriced six years of dominance.
ComparisonLamar's per-game finish among QBs, by season
| Season | PPR pts/game | Rank |
|---|---|---|
| 2019 | 27.7 | 1st |
| 2022 | 19.7 | 6th |
| 2023 | 20.7 | 3rd |
| 2024 | 25.3 | 1st |
| 2025 | 16.5 | 16th |
Drafters are paying pick 56.8 (round 5) for a player who finished 1st, 8th, 9th, 6th, 3rd and 1st in per-game quarterback scoring across 2019 through 2024 before the 2025 stumble. One 16th-place season, played through missed time and a vanished run game, moved him from the first two rounds to the fifth.
Why it matters. Quarterback is the position where a single elite season is most repeatable, and Lamar has six of them. The 2026 price treats last season as the new baseline rather than the outlier in an 8-year career. If the carry volume comes back to even his 2023 level, the round-5 cost is the discount of the draft; if 2025 was the new plan, the price is fair. That asymmetry is the pick.
WHAT HAPPENS NEXT: every young star QB with a season like his 2025 bounced back. The call: top-5 per game in 2026.
QBs age 30 or under, 2+ recent seasons of 20+ pts/game, then a sub-18 year
| QB | Down year | Pts/game | Next year | Next rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cam Newton | 2014 | 17.8 | 24.3 | 1st |
| Russell Wilson | 2016 | 16.9 | 21.7 | 1st |
| Dak Prescott | 2022 | 16.6 | 20.2 | 4th |
| Justin Herbert | 2022 | 16.5 | 18.0 | 10th |
| Patrick Mahomes | 2023 | 17.5 | 17.7 | 11th |
| Patrick Mahomes | 2024 | 17.7 | 20.4 | 4th |
Six times since 1999 a quarterback aged 30 or under with at least two 20-point seasons in his previous three years has slumped below 18 points per game. All six scored more the following season, averaging 20.4, and four of the six returned to the top 5 in per-game scoring. Lamar's 2025 (16.5 at age 28, after 25.3 and 20.7) fits the pattern exactly. The gradeable call: Lamar finishes top-5 among quarterbacks in PPR points per game in 2026.
Why it matters. The cohort is small but unanimous, and the mechanism is simple: a young quarterback with multiple elite seasons has demonstrated the skill, so one bad year is far more often circumstance than decline. The one flag in his profile is the sack rate, the stat most likely to travel with him into 2026.
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