What the expected-points record, the coverage data and the market say he is worth at 119.1 overall.
Jacory Croskey-Merritt scored 140.3 fantasy points in 2025. The volume he earned was worth 130.9. That gap of 9.4 points is the single most important thing to understand before drafting him at 119.1 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: target share went down from 4.6 to 0, a 100% change, at 5.98 standard deviations. The cause was structural — the offense around him got worse at moving the ball. He also missed Week 12.
He finished 8.25 points per game on 188 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 130.9 points — 7.7 per game. He scored 9.4 more than that, a 7.2% overshoot.
The expected line underneath the season was 764 rushing yards and 5.6 rushing touchdowns, plus 10.2 catches for 77 yards and 0.5 receiving touchdowns, and he cleared it.
1 of his 17 games produced 25 or more points: Week 5 against LAC (27). Strip it and the remaining 16 games average 7.1.
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. 12 games came in under 10 points, including Week 2 against GB (1.7) and Week 4 against ATL (7.7).
The three largest overshoots — Week 17 (+15.6), Week 5 (+15), Week 1 (+6.3) — are the same games. The spikes were not extra volume. They were finishing.
Not one of his 1 seasons is flagged as running hot. Across all 1 he has scored 9.4 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 49 graded prop lines, he has gone over 36.7% of the time. On rushing yards specifically the number is 33.3% across 15 lines, missing the posted number by an average of 20.4%.
That cuts against him. A book that has him beaten 67% 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 34.7% rate and he converted at 33.3% — a gap of -1.4 points, which is noise.
Washington returns 4 of 6 continuity slots — qb1, wr1, rb1, hc — with Jayden Daniels at quarterback, Dan Quinn as head coach and David Blough calling it. The offense projects to 30.05 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 Gus Edwards 4.9% to 0%, Gus Edwards 5.1% to 0%, Brian Robinson 6.1% to 9.1%. 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: 175 carries, 36% of his team’s red-zone carries, 38.9% of the goal-line work, a 39.5% snap share. His carries produced -0.037 EPA per play, and he ran a 5.1% 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, WAS has come in +0.51 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 132.6 points, 8.3 per game across 16 expected games — 690 rushing yards, 5.9 rushing touchdowns, 13 catches for 98 yards. That is RB5, 105 overall, and -25 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.
The books do not agree on him. Jacory Croskey-Merritt is a board split: CBS takes him ~105, ESPN lets him slide to ~142 (37.2-pick gap). That 37.2-pick gap between CBS and ESPN is the practical thing to act on: in a ESPN-priced room he is available later than his consensus number suggests.
He goes at 119.1 overall on consensus, and the books are far apart — 37.2 picks between cheapest and priciest, which is a real value window. He is latest on espn and earliest on cbs: sleeper 111.8, espn 142.2, yahoo 117.4, underdog 109.5, cbs 105.
He goes at 119.1 and our board has him 105. That is 14.1 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 55% boom rate.
The case against: a 38% bust rate.
The call: take him at his ADP and do not talk yourself out of it.
Ask the Coach about Jacory Croskey-Merritt 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 49 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.