Player
Josh Jacobs
RB · GB Packers
Goal-line share is the closest thing fantasy football has to a guaranteed points contract, because a carry from the 2-yard line converts at roughly ten times the rate of a carry from midfield. What makes Jacobs's version durable is the absence of a vulture: no backup with a meaningful short-yardage role and a quarterback the staff will not run near the end zone. That is why he can post a low yards-per-carry and still finish as a weekly starter.
The touchdown machine
Green Bay ran it 27 times inside the five. Jacobs got 20 of them and everybody else combined for seven.
SplitGreen Bay carries inside the opponent 5-yard line, 2025 (regular season)
| Player | Carries inside the 5 | Touchdowns |
|---|---|---|
| Josh Jacobs | 20 | 8 |
| Emanuel Wilson | 4 | 2 |
| Jordan Love | 2 | 0 |
| Malik Willis | 1 | 0 |
Green Bay rushing touchdowns, 2025 (regular season)
| Player | Rushing TD |
|---|---|
| Josh Jacobs | 13 |
| Emanuel Wilson | 3 |
| Malik Willis | 2 |
| Jordan Love | 0 |
Green Bay's short-yardage plan is one man. Jacobs took 20 of the team's 27 carries inside the opponent 5 and scored 13 of its 18 rushing touchdowns. The quarterback, who ran 47 times for 199 yards on the season, never scored once. In an offense that finished fourth in the league in value per play, the entire close-range conversion business belongs to the running back, and no committee has emerged behind him.
Why it matters. Goal-line share is the closest thing fantasy football has to a guaranteed points contract, because a carry from the 2-yard line converts at roughly ten times the rate of a carry from midfield. What makes Jacobs's version durable is the absence of a vulture: no backup with a meaningful short-yardage role and a quarterback the staff will not run near the end zone. That is why he can post a low yards-per-carry and still finish as a weekly starter.
MYTH TEST: 3.97 yards a carry means he is finished. He moved the chains more often than Bijan, Gibbs and Henry did.
2025 running backs, 150 or more carries: moving the chains versus averaging yards
| Back | Carries | Yards per carry | Success rate | Runs of 10 or more |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kyren Williams | 259 | 4.83 | 50.2% | 26 |
| D'Andre Swift | 223 | 4.87 | 48.0% | 30 |
| James Cook | 309 | 5.25 | 45.6% | 39 |
| Jonathan Taylor | 324 | 4.90 | 44.4% | 36 |
| Josh Jacobs | 234 | 3.97 | 43.6% | 23 |
| Derrick Henry | 307 | 5.20 | 41.7% | 36 |
| Bijan Robinson | 288 | 5.14 | 41.3% | 36 |
| Jahmyr Gibbs | 243 | 5.03 | 39.9% | 27 |
Yards per carry is an average, and averages get wrecked by the tail. Jacobs finished 2025 at 3.97 a carry, near the bottom of the workhorse group, and 43.6 percent of his runs still counted as successes, ahead of Derrick Henry at 41.7, Bijan Robinson at 41.3 and Jahmyr Gibbs at 39.9, all three of whom averaged over 5.0. The difference is explosiveness, not competence: he had 23 runs of 10 or more yards to Robinson's 36. He is not failing on first down. He just is not the one breaking a 40-yarder to fix a bad drive.
Why it matters. Success rate asks whether a run kept the offense on schedule, which is what a lead back is actually paid to do; yards per carry asks how far the longest ones went. Splitting them explains Jacobs precisely: reliable early-down work, almost no explosive tail. For fantasy that combination is survivable only because the touchdowns are there, and it is exactly why the 2026 read hinges on whether the scoring holds rather than on whether the average rebounds.
Seven years of carrying it
Same runner, same 4.2 a carry in both cities. Green Bay just points him at the end zone 50 percent more often.
ComparisonJosh Jacobs by team, regular season
| Team | Seasons | Games | Carries | Yards per carry | Rush TD | Rec TD | Total TD per game |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Las Vegas | 2019-2023 | 73 | 1,305 | 4.25 | 46 | 0 | 0.63 |
| Green Bay | 2024-2025 | 32 | 535 | 4.22 | 28 | 2 | 0.94 |
Two teams, five years apart, and the running is identical: 4.25 yards a carry in Las Vegas, 4.22 in Green Bay. What changed is where the carries happen. He scored 0.63 touchdowns a game across 73 games as a Raider and 0.94 across 32 as a Packer, a 50 percent jump with no change in how the ball comes out of his hands. He also caught his first two touchdown passes in Green Bay after five seasons without one. Same runner, roughly five more scores a year.
Why it matters. When a player's efficiency is unchanged and his scoring rate jumps, the explanation is almost always where the offense hands him the ball rather than anything he learned. Green Bay finished fourth in the league in value per play in 2025, which means more drives reaching the fringe, and it declines to run its quarterback near the goal line, which means those trips end with Jacobs. Both of those are properties of the team, and both are why his 2026 case is a call on the Green Bay offense as much as on him.
He scored in 10 of his 15 games. Only Christian McCaffrey hit the end zone more often week to week.
RareShare of games with a touchdown, 2025 running backs (12 or more games, 120 or more carries)
| Back | Games | Games with a TD | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Christian McCaffrey | 17 | 12 | 70.6% |
| Josh Jacobs | 15 | 10 | 66.7% |
| Zach Charbonnet | 16 | 10 | 62.5% |
| De'Von Achane | 16 | 10 | 62.5% |
| Javonte Williams | 16 | 10 | 62.5% |
| Jahmyr Gibbs | 17 | 10 | 58.8% |
| Jonathan Taylor | 17 | 10 | 58.8% |
Weekly fantasy is a series of coin flips on whether a back scores, and Jacobs won two out of every three of them. He reached the end zone in 10 of his 15 games, second only to McCaffrey among backs with a real workload, and finished ninth in points per game at 15.81 among backs with 10 or more games despite ranking near the bottom of that group in yards per carry. The scoring is doing all the work, and in 2025 it showed up almost every week rather than in three fireworks games.
Why it matters. A high share of games with a touchdown is the difference between a back who wins you weeks and a back who wins you one week and loses you four. Jacobs's version came without a single 20-carry, 150-yard explosion, which means the weekly floor is built on role rather than variance. The obvious fragility is that a touchdown rate this high has historically been the least repeatable part of any back's profile.
The 2026 file
His yards per carry fell 29 percent, then rose 28 percent, then fell again. The carries never noticed.
TrendJosh Jacobs, yards per carry and workload by season (regular season)
| Season | Carries | Yards per carry | Change from prior year |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | 242 | 4.75 | rookie year |
| 2020 | 273 | 3.90 | -17.9% |
| 2021 | 217 | 4.02 | +3.1% |
| 2022 | 340 | 4.86 | +20.9% |
| 2023 | 233 | 3.45 | -29.0% |
| 2024 | 301 | 4.42 | +28.1% |
| 2025 | 234 | 3.97 | -10.2% |
Back-to-back offseasons produced the two biggest swings of his career in opposite directions: down 29.0 percent in 2023, up 28.1 percent in 2024. Across all seven years his average has never held steady for two seasons running, and it has spanned 3.45 to 4.86. Over that same stretch his carry count has never dropped below 217. The efficiency is a weather report. The workload is the climate.
Why it matters. This is the cleanest single illustration of why touches out-predict per-touch efficiency at running back: the same player, the same body, the same style, producing a 41 percent range in yards per carry across seven seasons while his role barely moved. Blocking, scheme and schedule move an average around far more than talent does year to year. Anyone pricing Jacobs off his 2025 average is pricing the noisiest number in his file.
WHAT HAPPENS NEXT: nobody has ever repeated this season. Twelve backs tried, twelve scored fewer.
Josh Jacobs, 2025 (regular season)
| Measure | Value |
|---|---|
| Carries | 234 |
| Rushing yards | 929 |
| Rushing touchdowns | 13 |
| Total touchdowns | 14 |
| PPR finish among RBs | 13th |
Backs with 13 or more rushing TD on under 1,000 rushing yards, 1999-2024: the next season
| Back | Season | Rush TD | Next-year rush TD |
|---|---|---|---|
| James Stewart | 1999 | 13 | 10 |
| Marion Barber | 2006 | 14 | 10 |
| Maurice Jones-Drew | 2006 | 13 | 9 |
| Jerome Bettis | 2004 | 13 | 9 |
| James Conner | 2021 | 15 | 7 |
| Priest Holmes | 2004 | 14 | 6 |
| Alvin Kamara | 2018 | 14 | 5 |
| Austin Ekeler | 2022 | 13 | 5 |
| Alvin Kamara | 2020 | 16 | 4 |
| Gus Edwards | 2023 | 13 | 4 |
| Damien Harris | 2021 | 15 | 3 |
| LenDale White | 2008 | 15 | 2 |
The call: Jacobs scores fewer than 13 rushing touchdowns in 2026. Since 1999, 13 running backs have scored 13 or more rushing touchdowns on fewer than 1,000 rushing yards. Twelve of them played the following season, and every single one of the twelve scored fewer rushing touchdowns, and half of them dropped to five or fewer. The best follow-up any of them managed was 10. Jacobs is the 13th name on the list, and history has never once let this line stand.
Why it matters. The mechanism is arithmetic rather than decline: a back who scores that often on that little yardage is converting an unusually high share of a fixed number of goal-line chances, and goal-line conversion is close to a coin flip repeated 20 times. What survives is the role, and his role is unusually secure: 20 of Green Bay's 27 carries inside the 5, a quarterback who will not run there, no committee behind him. The likely 2026 shape is 9 or 10 scores rather than a collapse, which at an average draft position of 31.6 is roughly what a third-round pick is priced for.
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