He has beaten his expected points in 6 of 6 seasons. Whether that is a skill or a countdown decides what he is worth at 19.4 overall.
Derrick Henry scored 279.5 fantasy points in 2025. The volume he earned was worth 226.7. That gap of 52.8 points is the single most important thing to understand before drafting him at 19.4 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 15: receptions went down from 1.2 to 0, a 100% change, at 4.63 standard deviations. The cause was structural — the offense collapsed. He also missed Week 7.
Year over year the engine classifies 2025 as a genuine decline in play. 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.
He finished 16.44 points per game on 328 touches — down 18.1% from his 2024 rate with BAL. 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 2025 the answer was 226.7 points — 13.3 per game. He scored 52.8 more than that, a 23.3% overshoot.
The expected line underneath the season was 1,340 rushing yards and 9.9 rushing touchdowns, plus 16.4 catches for 124 yards and 0.8 receiving touchdowns, and he cleared it.
Against the expected line, he finished 1,595 rushing yards, 16 rushing touchdowns, 15 catches, 150 receiving yards — against 1,340, 9.9, 16.4, 124 expected.
55% of the entire gain came from rushing touchdowns alone. He hit 162% of his expected rushing touchdowns, against 119% of his expected rushing yards and 91% of his expected catches and 121% of his expected receiving yards.
2 of his 17 games produced 25 or more points: Week 1 against BUF (29.2), Week 17 against GB (45.6). Strip them and the remaining 15 games average 13.6.
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. 3 games came in under 10 points, including Week 2 against CLE (2.3) and Week 4 against KC (7.8).
The three largest overshoots — Week 17 (+22.9), Week 1 (+16.3), Week 16 (+11.5) — are the same games. The spikes were not extra volume. They were finishing.
4 of his 6 seasons ran hot: 2020 (+11%), 2021 (+15.3%), 2023 (+12%), 2025 (+23.3%). Across all 6 he has scored 272.2 points more 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 120 graded prop lines, he has gone over 50.8% of the time. On rushing yards specifically the number is 54.8% across 31 lines, beating the posted number by an average of 18.8%.
That is close enough to a coin flip that the market has him fairly priced on his primary market. There is no edge to claim in either direction.
Touchdowns are the control. His anytime-TD market implied a 66.0% rate and he converted at 64.5% — a gap of -1.5 points, which is noise.
Baltimore returns 4 of 6 continuity slots — qb1, wr1, rb1, te1 — with Lamar Jackson at quarterback, Jesse Minter as head coach and Declan Doyle calling it. The offense projects to 30 pass attempts a game at medium 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 Latavius Murray 6.7% to 0%, Ezekiel Elliott 7.7% to 0%, Alfred Morris 6.4% to 0%. Every one of them lost share.
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: 307 carries, 63% of his team’s red-zone carries, 80% of the goal-line work, a 54.5% snap share. His carries produced 0.03 EPA per play, and he ran a 6.4% target share out of the backfield.
Vegas sets an implied total for every team every week, and some offenses beat theirs systematically. Over 108 games, BAL has come in +0.84 points against its own implied total, clearing it in 54% 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 228.1 points, 14.3 per game across 16 expected games — 1,217 rushing yards, 12.3 rushing touchdowns, 13.2 catches for 122 yards. That is RB3, 18 overall, and 71 points of value over a replacement starter.
It is a step down from 2025, and the reason is volume rather than efficiency. The projection assumes he keeps doing what he does on slightly fewer looks.
deliberately ranked at exactly his *pre-Week-17-nuke* pace, not his final-week- inflated season average, because the receiving role decline (33→28→19→15 receptions across seasons) is a real, gradual, age-management trend — not noise, not missed-games-driven. Some real OC-change risk (Todd Monken left for Cleveland) offset by Ben Johnson having personally hand-picked the replacement.
That is the current read. It has held since 2026-08.
The books do not agree on him. Derrick Henry is a board split: CBS takes him ~15, Sleeper lets him slide to ~23 (7.4-pick gap). That 7.4-pick gap between CBS and Sleeper is the practical thing to act on: in a Sleeper-priced room he is available later than his consensus number suggests.
He goes at 19.4 overall on consensus, with a 7.4-pick spread between cheapest and priciest. He is latest on sleeper and earliest on cbs: sleeper 22.8, espn 20.8, yahoo 18.4, underdog 17.2, cbs 15.4.
He goes at 19.4 and our board has him 18. Those agree, so there is no market disagreement to exploit here — the question is whether you want the RB3 profile, not whether it is mispriced.
The case for: 71 points of value over a replacement starter; a 64% boom rate; 80% of his team’s goal-line carries, which is the most repeatable touchdown source at the position.
The case against: 4 of 6 seasons flagged as running hot — not simply finishing above expectation, but far enough above it to classify, which is the pattern that regresses; 272.2 career points scored above expectation — real, and not something to underwrite twice.
The call: fair value — draft him because you want this running back, not because you are getting a deal.
Ask the Coach about Derrick Henry 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 120 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.