Fantasy Football Rankings: Dave Richard's RB Tiers pinpoint how to draft running backs in 2025

One of the great things about Fantasy football drafts is that every flavor of strategy can come into play depending both on the format of the league and the unique way each draft unfolds and shrinks the player pool pick by pick. As we've talked about in the past, you can have a successful draft whether you go Zero RB, Hero RB or RB Heavy early. But how do you determine which strategy makes the most sense as your draft unfolds? That's where our positional tiers come in.

Positional tiers are Fantasy football rankings broken into groups of players with similar value, and using them in your draft allows you to track where the gaps exist between the best players available at each position and the next tier, allowing you to make quick decisions about who to draft when you're on the clock.

For example, if you're picking near the end of Round 2 and see one running back remaining from Tier 2 below but three or four WRs left in a similar tier, it would make sense to take the running back even if in a bubble he's ranked behind the best WR available, because you can feel good about landing a similarly-valued receiver in the following round. This in particular helps know when to take the plunge on a quarterback or tight end as those player pools start to thin out.

Dave's rankings: QB tiers | RB tiers | WR tiers | TE tiers | K/DST tiers

Running back PPR tiers

Running back non-PPR tiers