Woody Marks

Woody Marks finished his rookie year as the thirty-fifth running back in football per game. Houston's response was to trade for David Montgomery. The market's response is RB44, pick one-forty — pricing the trade, not the tape. Both of them might be right, which is exactly the problem.

The season: sixteen games, a hundred ninety-six carries for seven hundred three yards — three-point-six a carry, and we'll come back to that number — plus twenty-four catches on thirty-six targets for two hundred eight yards, and five total touchdowns — three of them through the air, which is the shape of his value in this scoring format. Eight-point-three Half-PPR points a game, thirty-fifth among backs per game, thirty-second in total. Two hundred twenty touches for a fourth-round rookie on a twelve-and-five wild-card team is a real season; among his rookie class, only five backs out-rushed him. The three-six a carry is the asterisk the market holds against him — volume arrived, explosion didn't — and one ankle-sprained game in December was the only absence.

One season, no arc. The draft slot carries a footnote with predictive juice, though: Houston traded up to take him at pick one-sixteen, per the team site — backs cost staffs something to acquire, and this staff paid twice now.

The pattern beat has to start with a confession: our library has nothing licensed for him. We tested a year-two running back pattern; it failed replication; it lives on our public kill list, and we don't resurrect killed patterns because a situation is interesting. His touchdown share is modest — point-two-one, under the fade line — so there's no luck to unwind. What's left is composition: twenty-four catches at half a point each gave him a floor his yards-per-carry couldn't, and receiving work is the skill that travels between committee roles.

The committee, dated. Houston sent a package built around offensive lineman Juice Scruggs and day-three picks to Detroit for Montgomery in early March, per NFL.com and SI — a veteran the beat immediately installed as the lead, and one who arrived wanting work: he'd sought the trade as his Detroit touches shrank from two hundred twenty-one to one eighty-two, per ESPN's Jeremy Fowler. Marks took it with a shrug and a scouting report, per Click2Houston: love him as a back, we've already reached out, time to get to work. The rest of the room cleared out — Nick Chubb remains unsigned, Joe Mixon was released in March after missing all of last season, per PFT — so this is a two-man job now. SI's June framing gives Marks the passing downs and change-of-pace work under returning play-caller Nick Caley, in an offense that just rebuilt its line with Braden Smith and Wyatt Teller, per ESPN.

The price: RB44 at pick one-forty for the thirty-fifth back by rate — a nine-slot discount that is entirely a bet on Montgomery's gravity. Our verdict: watchlist. We can't underwrite a touch split that hasn't been rehearsed, and we won't fade two hundred twenty rookie touches on a playoff team either. The caveat cuts both ways, and here it is out loud: Montgomery arrives with a proven lead-back résumé and a trade request that says he expects the job, so the downside case is real — and if the split lands even sixty-forty, Marks' receiving role means RB44 bought the more valuable Half-PPR half of a wild-card backfield.

Watch the preseason two-minute and third-down packages — the passing-down job is the fantasy job — and whether the efficiency ticks up behind the rebuilt line, because three-six a carry is the number that keeps this price down and it's also the number new guards fix. He's one of your guys? Every player on your roster gets this treatment — every week, all season.