The volume held. The finishing did not. Whether 2025 was the player breaking or the situation breaking decides what he is worth at 162.5 overall.
Dylan Sampson scored 87.6 fantasy points in 2025. The volume he earned was worth 104.4 — he finished 16.8 points BELOW what his own usage justified. That is a different problem from losing the job, and it is the single most important thing to understand before drafting him at 162.5 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 14: target share went up from 7.3 to 14.4, a 98.2% change, at 3.34 standard deviations. The cause was structural — the play-calling changed. He also missed Weeks 9, 15, 16.
He finished 5.84 points per game on 105 touches, his first full season. 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 104.4 points — 7 per game. He scored 16.8 FEWER than that, a 16.1% shortfall.
The expected line underneath the season was 284 rushing yards and 2.1 rushing touchdowns, plus 31.3 catches for 236 yards and 1.4 receiving touchdowns — and he came in under it.
Against the expected line, he finished 175 rushing yards, 33 catches, 271 receiving yards, 2 receiving touchdowns — against 284, 31.3, 236, 1.4 expected.
55% of the entire shortfall came from rushing yards alone. He hit 62% of his expected rushing yards, against 105% of his expected catches and 115% of his expected receiving yards and 143% of his expected receiving touchdowns.
That distinction matters more than the raw finish. A player who loses his role posts a low score and a low expected score. Dylan Sampson posted a low score on an expected total of 104.4 — 7 points a game of earned opportunity. The targets were still coming. What went wrong happened after the ball was in the air.
Not one of his 15 games cleared 25 points. His best was 17.3 in Week 1. For a player who had cleared it routinely before 2025, that is the clearest single symptom of the year — not a change in what he was asked to do, a change in what came of it.
A steady floor has its own value, but this was not a floor season by choice. 12 games came in under 10 points, including Week 3 against GB (0.2) and Week 4 against DET (-0.2).
The three largest overshoots — Week 12 (+7), Week 2 (+3.6), Week 13 (+-0.2) — are the same games. The spikes were not extra volume. They were finishing.
Not one of his 1 seasons is flagged as running hot. 1 came in below what the usage justified: 2025 (-16.1%). Across all 1 he has scored 16.8 points fewer than his usage was worth.
The reflexive read on a down year is decline. But the direction of the miss matters: finishing BELOW expectation is the more correctable of the two errors, because the hard part — earning the volume — is the part that held.
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 missed the number. It is whether there is a mechanism.
Cleveland returns 2 of 6 continuity slots — wr1, rb1 — with Deshaun Watson at quarterback, Todd Monken as head coach and Travis Switzer calling it. The offense projects to 32.16 pass attempts a game at low confidence.
That number is built from 25 comparable players — same age band, same prior share, same team, same coordinator — not from a depth chart. The closest three went Ty Johnson 9.8% to 7.8%, Jaleel McLaughlin 9.9% to 6.8%, Deon Jackson 11.6% to 15.4%. 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: 65 carries, 12.1% of his team’s red-zone carries, 2.9% of the goal-line work, a 26.5% snap share. His carries produced -0.259 EPA per play, and he ran a 10% target share out of the backfield.
Vegas sets an implied total for every team every week, and some offenses beat theirs systematically. Over 104 games, CLE has come in -0.39 points against its own implied total, clearing it in 43% 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 83 points, 5.2 per game across 16 expected games — 250 rushing yards, 1.2 rushing touchdowns, 24.1 catches for 195 yards. That is RB6, 175 overall, and -74 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.
not an early-down runner, only shows up in clear passing-down/2-min situations
The books do not agree on him. Dylan Sampson is a board split: Yahoo takes him ~132, Sleeper lets him slide to ~195 (63.5-pick gap). That 63.5-pick gap between Yahoo 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 162.5 overall on consensus, and the books are far apart — 63.5 picks between cheapest and priciest, which is a real value window. He is latest on sleeper and earliest on yahoo: sleeper 195.1, espn 170.8, yahoo 131.6, underdog 175, cbs 152.4.
He goes at 162.5 and our board has him 175. That is 12.5 picks of premium on a RB6 projection — the room is paying ahead of where the numbers put him. That does not make him a bad player; it makes this a bad price.
The case for: a 99% boom rate.
The case against: a 34% bust rate; 3 games missed in the anchor season.
The call: let the room have him at that price, and be glad to take him if he falls.
Ask the Coach about Dylan Sampson 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. 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.