Javonte Williams

Javonte Williams finished 2025 as the number 12 running back in total PPR scoring and the number 12 running back in PPR per game. A clean, matched ranking — and it tells you everything about the kind of year this was in Dallas. Williams stepped into a true workhorse role behind one of the most efficient passing offenses in football, and he delivered. Not a league-winning ceiling play, not a weekly disaster — a back-end-of-the-first, top-of-the-second return who showed up sixteen times and found the end zone again and again. The story of his year: touchdowns and steady touches on a team that could move the ball but couldn't stop anybody.

Now let's dig into the numbers. Williams carried 252 times for 1,201 yards — 4.8 a pop — and punched in 11 rushing touchdowns, tied for eighth in the league. The efficiency held under the hood: plus 156.5 rushing yards over expected, plus 0.6 per attempt, seventeenth among qualified runners. He did that with a stacked box on roughly 23 percent of his carries — defenses knew he was coming and he still moved the chains. The passing-game role was modest: 35 catches on 51 targets for 137 yards and a 9 percent target share. A rushing-down profile, not a dual-threat. And the consistency was the real fantasy selling point — this was a steady floor, not a boom-or-bust shape. Williams cleared 10 PPR in thirteen of his sixteen games, hit 17 or more in eight, and his worst weeks — 6.3 against the Chargers, 7.3 against the Cardinals — were bad, not catastrophic. He averaged 15.2 PPR per game. The ceiling weeks were quieter than you'd want from a top-twelve back — only one game above 26 — but the floor is what got him to number 12.

The defining moment wasn't a 70-yard burst — it was a 30-yard touchdown run in Week 2 against the Giants. Third quarter, Dallas down 13-10, Williams takes the handoff right tackle and walks it in untouched. That play captures the season: a back getting volume on an offense that ranked fourth in passing expected points added, finding paint when his number got called, turning a competitive game into a Dallas win. With 11 rushing touchdowns on a team that scored 48 red-zone touchdowns, Williams was the finisher on a top-five scoring offense — and that's how a 4.8-yard-per-carry back without a real receiving role smashed his way to number 12.