RB: Zamir White - LV

There's a lot of people that truly believe that it's Zamir White breakout season, and I just cannot get on board with you. So for Zamir White, at the end of 2024 when Josh Jacobs was hurt, he was the starter over the last four weeks of the season. And when I say he did absolutely nothing up until that point, I promise you he did absolutely nothing.

For weeks one through 14 last season, Zamir White was the RB95 on the season. You want to know a few guys that outscored him? Nick Chubb, who only played in two games, J.K. Dobbins, who only played in one game, and even Darrell Henderson, who was a free agent for the first six weeks of the season. That's how bad Zamir White was. That's how little work he got. That is how useless he was in this Raiders offense.

Then, in weeks 15, 16, 17, and 18, he had double-digit carries in every single week, and he finished as the RB12, the RB15, the RB20, and the RB17. One fringe RB1 week and three RB2 weeks. So I get why people would be interested in Zamir White this season and to potentially pick him up to be one of their starting running backs. But even when you take a look at it, it was all volume-based. Zamir White averaged over 20 carries per game during that four-week stretch, which was tied for first with Najee Harris.

So you would think during that time we would have seen Zamir White absolutely pick up some of the efficiency stats that we like to talk about, but that wasn't the case. He only had 11 avoided tackles during that four-game stretch, good enough to tie for 17th among running backs during that time, and was only one more than Chuba Hubbard. So I can't stress this enough: Zamir White was 120% volume dependent last season, and we didn't see anything in the efficiency area to predict any type of a major breakout coming.

Do you want him to be your RB1? Absolutely not, stupid idea. Do you want him to be your RB2? Absolutely not. Not nearly as bad of an idea as him being your RB1, but still a bad one. Do you want him to be a flex player for you? That's fine, and depending on where his redraft ADP ends up falling, if you get him as your RB3, okay, you possibly could end up having worse options than that. I'll be on board with that. But he's not going to have a whole lot of upside, and he may not even keep the job from Alexander Mattison all season long.