The volume held. The finishing did not. Whether 2025 was the player breaking or the situation breaking decides what he is worth at 140.5 overall.
Woody Marks scored 165.9 fantasy points in 2025. The volume he earned was worth 207.7 — he finished 41.8 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 140.5 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 4: carries went up from 4 to 14.2, a 253.8% change, at 5.49 standard deviations. The cause was structural — the offence surged. He also missed Weeks 6, 16.
He finished 9.22 points per game on 40 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 targets he drew, where they came from on the field, and how far downfield they travelled, what was that usage worth? For 2025 the answer was 207.7 points — 11.5 per game. He scored 41.8 FEWER than that, a 20.1% shortfall.
The expected line underneath the season was 31.3 catches for 236 yards and 1.4 touchdowns — and he came in under it.
The expected line was 31.3 catches for 236 yards and 1.4 touchdowns. He finished with 26, 227 and 3.
61% of the entire shortfall came from touchdowns alone. He hit 83% of his expected catches and 96% of his expected receiving yards — and 214% of his expected touchdowns.
That distinction matters more than the raw finish. A player who loses his role posts a low score and a low expected score. Woody Marks posted a low score on an expected total of 207.7 — 11.5 points a game of earned opportunity. The targets were still coming. What went wrong happened after the ball was in the air.
1 of his 16 games produced 25 or more points: Week 4 against TEN (27.9). Strip it and the remaining 15 games average 7.8.
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. 11 games came in under 10 points, including Week 1 against LA (0.3) and Week 2 against TB (6.1).
The three largest overshoots — Week 4 (+9.3), Week 2 (+2.6), Week 10 (+2.5) — 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 (-20.1%). Across all 1 he has scored 41.8 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.
Across 40 targets and four seasons, he has been a fundamentally different receiver depending on what the defence played. Against man he has caught 62.5% for 9 yards per target and 0.923 expected points added per target. Against zone: 65.6%, 4.84 yards, -0.02 EPA.
That is a gap of 0.942 EPA per target on a sample of 8 man targets against 32 zone. The catch rate goes the other way — he catches more against zone — which is exactly what you would expect from a receiver whose value is in winning contested downfield throws rather than in finding soft spots underneath.
The shell detail sharpens it. Cover 3 is the look he has faced most: 15 targets, 5.13 yards per target, 0.204 EPA. That is his best number against his largest sample, which is the opposite of a fluke.
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 47 graded prop lines, he has gone over 53.2% of the time. On rushing attempts specifically the number is 75.0% across 12 lines, beating the posted number by an average of 16.3%.
A projection model can be wrong about conversion. A book adjusting weekly, with money on the other side, being wrong 75% of the time on the same market is a harder thing to explain away.
Touchdowns are the control. His anytime-TD market implied a 32.4% rate and he converted at 28.6% — a gap of -3.9 points, which is worth noting.
Houston returns 5 of 6 continuity slots — qb1, wr1, te1, hc, oc — with CJ Stroud at quarterback, Demeco Ryans as head coach and Nick Caley calling it. The offence projects to 34.02 pass attempts a game at high confidence.
The pie is stable. His slice is the question. Our share model has him at 6% against the 7% he ran, with a range of 5.1% to 7.6%.
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 Raheem Mostert 8.6% to 7.3%, Ronald Jones 8.8% to 4.3%, Darrell Henderson 8.7% to 7.4%. Two held, one fell hard.
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. f_timeToLOS (r 0.128), f_snapTrend (r 0.103), f_fantasyForm (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: a 7% target share, 1.8% of the air yards, a WOPR of 0.12, on the field for 51.5% of snaps. He finished 28 at the position — RB3.
Vegas sets an implied total for every team every week, and some offences beat theirs systematically. Over 107 games, HOU has come in +0.33 points against its own implied total, clearing it in 45% of weeks.
That is close to neutral — the offence 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 100.4 points, 6.3 per game across 16 expected games — 17.6 catches, 144 yards, 1.1 touchdowns. That is RB5, 159 overall, and -55 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. Woody Marks is a consensus pick — every book within 19.2 picks of 141. That 19.2-pick gap between Yahoo 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 140.5 overall on consensus, and the books are far apart — 19.2 picks between cheapest and priciest, which is a real value window. He is latest on espn and earliest on yahoo: sleeper 141.2, espn 151.5, yahoo 132.3, underdog 141.6, cbs 136.8.
At 140.5 you are paying a WR2 price for a player whose median outcome is a WR2 season with five weeks that win you the game outright and four that lose it. The bust rate of 98% is real and so is the 59% boom rate.
The call: fair value, not a discount. The reason to take him is the ceiling and the betting record. The reason to pass is that you are buying a profile that has beaten its expected output four years running and only needs to stop once.
Ask the Coach about Woody Marks Every number in this piece, plus your league's roster and scoring, in one answer.Expected points are computed from realised usage — targets, air yards and field position — against league-average conversion, not from projections. Prop records cover 47 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.