The volume held. The finishing did not. Whether 2025 was the player breaking or the situation breaking decides what he is worth at 152 overall.
Isiah Pacheco scored 87.3 fantasy points in 2025. The volume he earned was worth 115.6 — he finished 28.3 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 152 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 13: rushing yards went down from 41.1 to 26.6, a 35.3% change, at 2.43 standard deviations. The cause was structural — the offense collapsed. He also missed Weeks 9, 10, 11, 12, 18.
Year over year the engine classifies 2025 as a stable year. 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 6.72 points per game on 144 touches — a 2.9% jump on his 2024 rate with KC. 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 115.6 points — 8.9 per game. He scored 28.3 FEWER than that, a 24.5% shortfall.
The expected line underneath the season was 515 rushing yards and 3.8 rushing touchdowns, plus 20.3 catches for 153 yards and 0.9 receiving touchdowns — and he came in under it.
Against the expected line, he finished 462 rushing yards, 1 rushing touchdowns, 19 catches, 101 receiving yards, 1 receiving touchdowns — against 515, 3.8, 20.3, 153, 0.9 expected.
58% of the entire shortfall came from rushing touchdowns alone. He hit 26% of his expected rushing touchdowns, against 90% of his expected rushing yards and 94% of his expected catches and 66% of his expected receiving yards and 111% of his expected receiving touchdowns.
That matters because touchdowns are the least repeatable part of a scoring line. Volume and yards reflect a role; touchdowns reflect a role plus a quarterback putting the ball where it can be caught in a nine-yard window. A player who holds his catches and yards while losing five touchdowns has not lost his job — he has lost the coin flips.
That distinction matters more than the raw finish. A player who loses his role posts a low score and a low expected score. Isiah Pacheco posted a low score on an expected total of 115.6 — 8.9 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 13 games cleared 25 points. His best was 13.5 in Week 16. 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. 10 games came in under 10 points, including Week 1 against LAC (4.8) and Week 2 against PHI (3.9).
The three largest overshoots — Week 4 (+3.6), Week 13 (+0.2), Week 7 (+-0.2) — are the same games. The spikes were not extra volume. They were finishing.
Not one of his 4 seasons is flagged as running hot. 2 came in below what the usage justified: 2024 (-30.8%), 2025 (-24.5%). Across all 4 he has scored 27.4 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.
Across 72 graded prop lines, he has gone over 43.1% of the time. On rushing yards specifically the number is 50.0% across 18 lines, beating the posted number by an average of 3.9%.
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 37.1% rate and he converted at 16.7% — a gap of -20.4 points, which is worth noting.
Detroit returns 5 of 6 continuity slots — qb1, wr1, rb1, te1, hc — with Jared Goff at quarterback, Dan Campbell as head coach and Drew Petzing calling it. The offense projects to 33.86 pass attempts a game at medium 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 Zack Moss 8.3% to 10.5%, Phillip Lindsay 9.3% to 3.5%, Wayne Gallman 8.3% to 5%. 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: 118 carries, 26.7% of his team’s red-zone carries, 17.5% of the goal-line work, a 51.7% snap share. His carries produced -0.116 EPA per play, and he ran a 9.8% target share out of the backfield.
Vegas sets an implied total for every team every week, and some offenses beat theirs systematically. Over 105 games, DET has come in +1.99 points against its own implied total, clearing it in 53% of weeks.
That is a real structural tailwind. Every skill player in this offense gets a small, repeatable bonus the market prices late.
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 91.9 points, 5.7 per game across 16 expected games — 342 rushing yards, 4.3 rushing touchdowns, 15.2 catches for 106 yards. That is RB6, 167 overall, and -65 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.
Lions backfield scored the most combined RB fantasy points/gm in the NFL last year; even a partial (~30%) share of an elite-scoring committee compares favorably to a bigger share of a mediocre one; Dan Campbell loves his physical running style
The books do not agree on him. Isiah Pacheco is a board split: Yahoo takes him ~127, Sleeper lets him slide to ~187 (60.7-pick gap). That 60.7-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 152 overall on consensus, and the books are far apart — 60.7 picks between cheapest and priciest, which is a real value window. He is latest on sleeper and earliest on yahoo: sleeper 187.4, espn 158, yahoo 126.7, underdog 160.7, cbs 136.
He goes at 152 and our board has him 167. That is 15 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: an 88% boom rate; an offense that beats its own implied total by 1.99 points a game.
The case against: a 61% bust rate; 5 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 Isiah Pacheco 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 72 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.