Zach Charbonnet

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• 2026 PreviewJul 3, 2026

  Zach Charbonnet 2026 Season Preview — what repeats, what doesn't

  Charbonnet played all 16 games and averaged 10.7 half-PPR points per game, finishing as the RB23 on the strength of a full workload in Seattle's backfield. His 96.1% availability rate from 2021–25 signals that durability is a genuine part of his profile, not a one-year anomaly. The foundation here is opportunity-driven — the kind of inputs that tend to carry forward — though any efficiency layer baked into his scoring will be harder to count on repeating.

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  Show notes & transcript

  Zach Charbonnet scored 12 rushing touchdowns last season — only five players in all of football had more — and he goes off boards as the 40-seventh running back, pick one-49. The market discounted him twice: once for the touchdown math, once for the knee he tore in January. Only one of those discounts is negotiable, and this episode separates them.

  The season was the best of his career: 16 games, a hundred 84 carries for 730 yards, those 12 scores — most on the team, fifth-most among running backs league-wide — +20 catches for a hundred 44. 10.7 Half-PPR points a game, 20-eighth among backs per game, 20-third in total, splitting a champion's backfield with Kenneth Walker and owning the goal line. Then January seventeenth: five carries into the divisional-round rout of San Francisco, the knee — coach Mike Macdonald two days later: pretty sure it's ACL — and Seattle won the Super Bowl three weeks after that without him. Surgery came February twentieth.

  The career had been ascending in a straight line: five-six a game, nine-eight, 10-seven — year three the best, powered by a role that kept growing inside the league's best ground game.

  Now both discounts, priced separately. The touchdown one is ours: his TD share, point-four-oh, is the highest in this entire batch and far past the point-two-nine-eight line where our running back fade cohort begins — top-quartile TD-dependent backs give back 3.1 points a game the next season, n of 72, −2-nine in the early era, −3-three since. Take the full fade off 10-seven and the healthy version of him still prices out around back 40 — seven spots above this price. Read that again: the market's number is below his own regression case. Which means the second discount — the tendon — is doing all the remaining work.

  The tendon file, dated and honest. Surgery February twentieth, per PFT; the general manager called it, quote, very positive, per SI; ESPN's Jeremy Fowler reported in late June he's progressing well with a check-up scheduled for late July, right as camp opens. The beat consensus, per Pro Football Rumors and Heavy: a stint on the physically-unable-to-perform list to open the season is the expectation — that costs at least four games — with mid-fall the realistic return window. Macdonald hasn't formally ruled anything out. Meanwhile the room moved on without waiting: Walker left for Kansas City in free agency, Seattle spent the 30-second overall pick on Jadarian Price, added Emanuel Wilson, and George Holani took the June first-team reps, per SI's minicamp notes. New coordinator Brian Fleury inherits the champion's scheme with orders to maintain it.

  The price: RB47 at pick one-49 for a back whose faded, fully-regressed, healthy projection is RB40 — the knee is charging you seven-plus slots beyond what the math already took. Our verdict: watchlist. The touchdown fade is real and we just quoted it against him; the tendon is unpriceable and we won't pretend otherwise; and a price below his own worst-case healthy math means the market has already paid for a lot of bad news. The caveat, spoken: PUP means October at the earliest, a first-round rookie may own the job by then, and goal-line roles — the thing his value was made of — are the first thing coaches stop scripting for a back coming off reconstruction.

  Watch the camp-opening PUP decision and that late-July check-up, then watch who scores Seattle's short touchdowns in September — if the rookie takes the goal line, the role that made him isn't waiting for the knee. If he's on your roster, this show covers all of it — every player, every week, all season.