What the expected-points record, the coverage data and the market say he is worth at 145.2 overall.
Alvin Kamara scored 265.3 fantasy points in 2024. The volume he earned was worth 285.6. That gap of 20.3 points is the single most important thing to understand before drafting him at 145.2 overall.
Rather than reading a season average, it is worth finding the point the season actually turned. Our shift detector flags in-season changes large enough to clear a statistical threshold, then asks what moved around them.
The largest single move was Week 4: snap share went down from 79.7 to 57.8, a 27.5% change, at 2.73 standard deviations. The cause was structural — the offense collapsed. He also missed Weeks 11, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18.
Year over year the engine classifies 2024 as a role that shrank. That is the label to carry into the projection, because it separates a player who lost snaps from one who kept them and converted worse.
2025 was cut short. He played 11 games at 9.15 points per game, too few to read a season from. Everything below is built on 2024, his last full year, with the missed time treated as the risk it is rather than as a new baseline.
He finished 18.95 points per game on 317 touches — a 5.7% jump on his 2023 rate with NO. Every part of that is real and none of it is in dispute.
What is worth separating is how much of it he earned. Expected points strip out the finishing and ask a narrower question: given the carries he took, where on the field they started, and the targets he drew out of the backfield, what was that usage worth? For 2024 the answer was 285.6 points — 20.4 per game. He scored 20.3 FEWER than that, a 7.1% shortfall.
The expected line underneath the season was 1,004 rushing yards and 7.6 rushing touchdowns, plus 70.9 catches for 535 yards and 2.6 receiving touchdowns — and he came in under it.
Against the expected line, he finished 471 rushing yards, 1 rushing touchdowns, 33 catches, 186 receiving yards — against 1,004, 7.6, 70.9, 535 expected.
32% of the entire shortfall came from rushing yards. He hit 47% of his expected rushing yards, against 13% of his expected rushing touchdowns and 47% of his expected catches and 35% of his expected receiving yards.
2 of his 14 games produced 25 or more points: Week 2 against DAL (44), Week 9 against CAR (27.5). Strip them and the remaining 12 games average 16.2.
Spike weeks win fantasy games and a player who produces them is more valuable than one who never does — he is a ceiling play with real weeks off. 1 game came in under 10 points, including Week 7 against DEN (8.4).
The three largest overshoots — Week 2 (+26.5), Week 15 (+6), Week 1 (+4.6) — are the same games. The spikes were not extra volume. They were finishing.
Not one of his 6 seasons is flagged as running hot. 2 came in below what the usage justified: 2022 (-16.8%), 2025 (-30.3%). Across all 6 he has scored 35.5 points fewer than his usage was worth.
The reflexive read is regression. Finishing above expectation is unstable, and a player who does it repeatedly is usually one whose luck has not run out yet.
But an expected-points model has a specific blind spot, and it is worth naming: it converts usage at league-average rates. A target twenty yards downfield is worth what the average receiver does with a target twenty yards downfield. If a player is reliably better than average at winning a particular kind of target, he will beat the model every single year, and calling that luck is just mislabelling a skill.
So the question is not whether he beat the number. It is whether there is a mechanism.
Across 292 targets and four seasons — a back’s pass-game role rather than his primary work, so read it as a tiebreaker and not as the case for him, he has been a different pass-catcher depending on what the defense played. Against man he has caught 75% for 6.98 yards per target and 0.002 expected points added per target. Against zone: 82.3%, 5.28 yards, -0.094 EPA.
That is a gap of 0.095 EPA per target on a sample of 88 man targets against 203 zone. The catch rate goes the other way — he catches more against zone — which is exactly what you would expect from a back used as a checkdown outlet rather than as a downfield threat.
The shell detail sharpens it. Cover 3 is the look he has faced most: 70 targets, 4.06 yards per target, -0.11 EPA. His best is Cover 2 at 0.128 on 49 targets.
The weakness is specific. Against Cover 4 quarters he has caught 79.5% for 4.18 yards a target and -0.33 EPA across 39 looks — a gap of 0.5 expected points a target between his best coverage and his worst.
This does not prove the overshoot repeats. It does mean the pattern has a stated cause rather than being a coin that keeps landing heads.
Across 100 graded prop lines, he has gone over 45.0% of the time. On rushing yards specifically the number is 40.0% across 25 lines, missing the posted number by an average of 0.2%.
That cuts against him. A book that has him beaten 60% of the time on his primary market is not a market being slow — it is a market that has him priced correctly and a player who keeps falling short of it.
Touchdowns are the control. His anytime-TD market implied a 48.9% rate and he converted at 24.0% — a gap of -24.9 points, which is worth noting.
New Orleans returns 5 of 6 continuity slots — qb1, wr1, te1, hc, oc — with Tyler Shough at quarterback, Kellen Moore as head coach and Doug Nussmeier calling it. The offense projects to 34.1 pass attempts a game at high confidence.
That number is built from 22 comparable players — same age band, same prior share, same team, same coordinator — not from a depth chart. The closest three went Cordarrelle Patterson 10.2% to 11.1%, Cordarrelle Patterson 10.8% to 6.9%, Jerick McKinnon 10.3% to 7%. One held, 2 did not.
Across 2,022 player-seasons we swept every stat for whether it predicts NEXT year's points, and kept only the ones that replicated in all five. time to the line of scrimmage (r 0.128), snap-share trend (r 0.103), recent scoring form (r 0.078) carry. week-to-week volatility (r -0.163) and receiving EPA per game (r -0.143) run negative — a player who was hyper-efficient on low volume tends to come back down, so a gaudy per-touch number is a warning rather than a selling point.
So the figures worth weighing for him: 131 carries, 25.4% of his team’s red-zone carries, 20% of the goal-line work, a 63.7% snap share. His carries produced -0.22 EPA per play, and he ran an 11.7% target share out of the backfield.
Vegas sets an implied total for every team every week, and some offenses beat theirs systematically. Over 103 games, NO has come in +0.2 points against its own implied total, clearing it in 50% of weeks.
That is close to neutral — the offense performs about where the market expects, so there is no environment bonus or penalty to apply to him either way.
One related finding worth carrying: across 1,280 cases we measured what happens after a team's implied total slides, and the correlation is -0.37 — negative, meaning the market over-corrects. A falling team total is more often a buying window than a warning.
Our board has him at 122.8 points, 7.7 per game across 16 expected games — 343 rushing yards, 2.1 rushing touchdowns, 38.4 catches for 249 yards. That is RB5, 131 overall, and -34 points of value over a replacement starter.
It is a step down from 2024, and the reason is volume rather than efficiency. The projection assumes he keeps doing what he does on slightly fewer looks.
The books do not agree on him. . That 35.3-pick gap between Yahoo and Underdog is the practical thing to act on: in a Underdog-priced room he is available later than his consensus number suggests.
He goes at 145.2 overall on consensus, and the books are far apart — 35.3 picks between cheapest and priciest, which is a real value window. He is latest on underdog and earliest on yahoo: sleeper 162, espn 156.7, yahoo 126.7, underdog 163, cbs 135.5.
He goes at 145.2 and our board has him 131. That is 14.2 picks of discount on a RB5 projection — you are getting the RB5 outcome at a price the room has set below it.
The case for: a 99% boom rate.
The case against: a 65% bust rate; 7 games missed in the anchor season.
The call: take him at his ADP and do not talk yourself out of it.
Ask the Coach about Alvin Kamara Every number in this piece, plus your league's roster and scoring, in one answer.Expected points are computed from realized usage — targets, air yards and field position — against league-average conversion, not from projections. Prop records cover 100 graded lines. Projections are anchored to consensus with our engine applied as a capped tilt; the raw engine figure is stated where it differs. Nothing here is betting advice.