Bucky Irving 2026 Season Preview — a top-18 rate on the league's worst rushing tape | Muffed

Bucky Irving averaged a top-eighteen running back's points per game last season — and ran the ball worse than almost anyone in football. Both of those are true, and squaring them is the entire 2026 question. The Muffed 2026 preview.

The surface line looks fine: in ten games, Irving posted thirteen-eight points a night, an RB18 per-game rate, on a hundred seventy-three carries and thirty catches. The signature was a Week 4 showcase against Philadelphia — sixty-three rushing yards, a hundred two receiving, the kind of pass-game value that travels. But the rate hides the problem: his efficiency cratered. He ran for a hundred twenty-six yards below expected — dead last, forty-ninth of forty-nine qualified backs — at three-four a carry, and he scored exactly one rushing touchdown all year.

The arc is just two seasons, and it's a step backward. As a rookie in 2024 he was a revelation: fourteen-four a game, eleven hundred yards, eight rushing touchdowns on real efficiency. Last year the per-game points held up, but the underlying running fell apart and the eight touchdowns became one. That's a lot of decline hiding under a stable-looking average.

Here's the honest read. We don't get to bank a year-two leap for running backs — we tested that pattern and it failed, so the rookie-flash upside isn't something the data will underwrite. And the 2025 efficiency was genuinely alarming. The one thing pointing up is the touchdowns: one rushing score is starvation, and that number almost has to climb. So the case is a young back with a real receiving role and positive touchdown regression, set against a season in which he was the league's least efficient runner — on a sample shortened by injury.

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The situation, per the reports, is the swing factor: Irving had shoulder surgery and missed Tampa Bay's offseason program, but he returned to practice at OTAs showing his explosion is intact, and he's expected back as the lead back, with Rachaad White expected to leave and Kenneth Gainwell in the third-down role. If the bad efficiency was the injury, the talent that made him a rookie standout is still in there. If it wasn't, the price is paying for a player who's already regressed.

The price: pick fifty-three, the twenty-third back. Verdict: WATCHLIST — the per-game rate and the lead role say draft him, the worst-in-the-league efficiency and the injury say demand a discount and proof. The counter for him: a lead back with a receiving floor and one-touchdown-to-give regression, healthy, is value at RB23. Against: you're paying for the rookie, and last year's tape was the worst rushing season in the league. Which one shows up is the bet.

September watch: the explosiveness first — is the burst back, or did the shoulder and the down year signal something real; then the touchdown rate, where one is the floor. Your guys, every week. Next preview's queued.