He has beaten his expected points in 2 of 3 seasons. Whether that is a skill or a countdown decides what he is worth at 135.8 overall.
Zach Charbonnet scored 183.4 fantasy points in 2025. The volume he earned was worth 157.1. That gap of 26.3 points is the single most important thing to understand before drafting him at 135.8 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 16: fantasy points went up from 9.2 to 20.8, a 126.7% change, at 3.78 standard deviations. The cause was structural — the play-calling changed. He also missed Weeks 3, 8.
Year over year the engine classifies 2025 as a breakout that leaned on touchdown luck. 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 10.79 points per game on 213 touches — down 0.2% from his 2024 rate with SEA. 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 157.1 points — 9.2 per game. He scored 26.3 more than that, a 16.7% overshoot.
The expected line underneath the season was 825 rushing yards and 6.1 rushing touchdowns, plus 18.8 catches for 142 yards and 0.9 receiving touchdowns, and he cleared it.
Against the expected line, he finished 750 rushing yards, 12 rushing touchdowns, 20 catches, 144 receiving yards — against 825, 6.1, 18.8, 142 expected.
80% of the entire gain came from rushing touchdowns alone. He hit 197% of his expected rushing touchdowns, against 91% of his expected rushing yards and 106% of his expected catches and 101% of his expected receiving yards.
1 of his 16 games produced 25 or more points: Week 17 against CAR (26.2). Strip it and the remaining 15 games average 10.3.
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. 7 games came in under 10 points, including Week 2 against PIT (1) and Week 6 against JAX (4.7).
The three largest overshoots — Week 17 (+11.7), Week 7 (+8.8), Week 12 (+5.7) — are the same games. The spikes were not extra volume. They were finishing.
1 of his 3 seasons ran hot: 2025 (+16.7%). 1 came in below what the usage justified: 2023 (-14.6%). Across all 3 he has scored 23.8 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 119 graded prop lines, he has gone over 48.7% of the time. On rushing yards specifically the number is 38.7% across 31 lines, missing the posted number by an average of 3.6%.
That cuts against him. A book that has him beaten 61% 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 38.6% rate and he converted at 48.4% — a gap of 9.8 points, which is worth noting.
Seattle returns 4 of 6 continuity slots — qb1, wr1, te1, hc — with Sam Darnold at quarterback, Mike Macdonald as head coach and Brian Fleury calling it. The offense projects to 30.43 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 Jeffery Wilson 8.7% to 7.2%, Miles Sanders 8.1% to 9.3%, A.J. Dillon 7.9% to 0%. 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: 189 carries, 46.4% of his team’s red-zone carries, 59.6% of the goal-line work, a 48.4% snap share. His carries produced -0.012 EPA per play, and he ran a 7.6% target share out of the backfield.
Vegas sets an implied total for every team every week, and some offenses beat theirs systematically. Over 106 games, SEA has come in +1.16 points against its own implied total, clearing it in 54% 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 87 points, 5.4 per game across 16 expected games — 451 rushing yards, 3.9 rushing touchdowns, 8.7 catches for 62 yards. That is RB6, 156 overall, and -70 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 23.9-pick gap between CBS and Underdog is the practical thing to act on: in a Underdog-priced room he is available later than his consensus number suggests.
He goes at 135.8 overall on consensus, and the books are far apart — 23.9 picks between cheapest and priciest, which is a real value window. He is latest on underdog and earliest on cbs: sleeper 138.3, espn 150.2, yahoo 128.5, underdog 160.7, cbs 126.3.
He goes at 135.8 and our board has him 156. That is 20.2 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 98% boom rate; 59.6% of his team’s goal-line carries, which is the most repeatable touchdown source at the position; an offense that beats its own implied total by 1.16 points a game.
The case against: a 46% bust rate.
The call: let the room have him at that price, and be glad to take him if he falls.
Ask the Coach about Zach Charbonnet 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 119 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.