The volume held. The finishing did not. Whether 2025 was the player breaking or the situation breaking decides what he is worth at 144.6 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 144.6 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 offense surged. He also missed Weeks 6, 16.
He finished 9.22 points per game on 269 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 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 1,000 rushing yards and 7.4 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 832 rushing yards, 3 rushing touchdowns, 26 catches, 227 receiving yards, 3 receiving touchdowns — against 1,000, 7.4, 31.3, 236, 1.4 expected.
45% of the entire shortfall came from rushing touchdowns. He hit 41% of his expected rushing touchdowns, against 83% of his expected rushing yards and 83% of his expected catches and 96% of his expected receiving yards and 214% 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. 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 47 graded prop lines, he has gone over 53.2% of the time. On rushing yards specifically the number is 61.5% across 13 lines, beating the posted number by an average of 17.2%.
A projection model can be wrong about conversion. A book adjusting weekly, with money on the other side, being wrong 62% 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 offense projects to 34.02 pass attempts a game at high 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 Raheem Mostert 8.6% to 7.3%, Ronald Jones 8.8% to 4.3%, Darrell Henderson 8.7% to 7.4%. Two held, one 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: 229 carries, 50.6% of his team’s red-zone carries, 47.4% of the goal-line work, a 51.5% snap share. His carries produced -0.155 EPA per play, and he ran a 7% target share out of the backfield.
Vegas sets an implied total for every team every week, and some offenses 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 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 100.4 points, 6.3 per game across 16 expected games — 468 rushing yards, 2.5 rushing touchdowns, 17.6 catches for 144 yards. That is RB5, 144 overall, and -57 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. . That 23-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 144.6 overall on consensus, and the books are far apart — 23 picks between cheapest and priciest, which is a real value window. He is latest on sleeper and earliest on yahoo: sleeper 155.3, espn 151.7, yahoo 132.3, underdog 141.1, cbs 138.9.
He goes at 144.6 and our board has him 144. Those agree, so there is no market disagreement to exploit here — the question is whether you want the RB5 profile, not whether it is mispriced.
The case for: a 59% boom rate.
The case against: a 98% bust rate.
The call: fair value — draft him because you want this running back, not because you are getting a deal.
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 realized 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.