Jacory Croskey-Merritt 2026 Season Preview — what repeats, what doesn't | Muffed

Only three rookies out-rushed Jacory Croskey-Merritt last season, and all three were drafted inside the top forty picks. He was drafted two hundred forty-fifth — and now the market pays pick one-twenty-three for the encore. The question isn't whether the yards were real. It's what currency the points came in.

The season: all seventeen games, a hundred seventy-five carries for eight hundred five yards — four-point-six a carry — and eight rushing touchdowns, on a five-and-twelve Washington team. Nine catches all year. Eight-point-oh Half-PPR points a game, thirty-eighth among backs who played half the season, thirty-first in total points. The club's own June retrospective notes the workload arrived early — the carries became his when Austin Ekeler's Achilles gave out in September — and he kept the job the rest of the way. Among his rookie class, only Ashton Jeanty, TreVeyon Henderson, and Quinshon Judkins gained more on the ground.

There is no arc yet — one season, and a seventh-round draft slot that says the league needed convincing once already.

The pattern read requires precision, so here it is. Our running back touchdown-fade cohort — the one that gives back three-point-one points a game the next season, n of seventy-two, replicated in both halves of the decade — conditions on top-thirty-six per-game production. His touchdown share, point-three-four, is comfortably over that cohort's line; his production, forty-second by rate, is just outside the door. So the fade does not fire, and we won't round him into it. What we'll say instead is arithmetic: touchdowns were roughly a third of his fantasy value, touchdown rate is the least repeatable stat we track, and nine catches means Half-PPR pays him almost nothing for the plays between the scores. And the year-two running back leap? We tested a year-two pattern; it didn't replicate; it's on our public kill list. Nobody gets it, including him.

[[SITUATION]]

The situation is a team talking itself into him, carefully. The club site's June feature says Washington is pushing him toward an every-down role — his coach's phrase for the offseason was that he's, quote, hungry for it — while Dan Quinn also told reporters he doesn't know yet whether this backfield has a main guy. Both halves of that sentence matter. The receiving work is the audition: Quinn named the passing game and the return game as the two things to elevate. Around him, Washington signed Rachaad White in March as the veteran passing-down complement, re-signed Jeremy McNichols, added Jerome Ford, and drafted Kaytron Allen in the sixth round, per the team site and beat coverage. David Blough — promoted in January, a first-time play-caller — runs the offense. Ekeler, medically cleared this spring, remains unsigned.

The price: RB41 at pick one-twenty-three, for the thirty-eighth back by rate and thirty-first by total. The market is paying him almost exactly his scoreboard, maybe a click under. [pause] Our verdict: no call. The price is fair — and we'll say the quiet part of fair out loud: his points were built from the least repeatable material a back can use, and the club just stocked the room with pass-catchers. The caveat runs the other way too: if the every-down push is real and the catches come, the touchdown dependence dissolves and RB41 was cheap for a seventeen-game starter.

Watch his targets in the preseason — anything past a courtesy screen is news — and who takes the two-minute snaps, because that package is the one Quinn said he has to win. A back who adds three catches a game to this profile changes tiers; a back who doesn't is renting his touchdown rate. [[CLOSE]] If he's one of your guys, this show exists for your whole roster — every player, every week, all season.