SF · RB
Projected Points (PPR)
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Christian McCaffrey sits atop the San Francisco depth chart as the running back, and the 2025 season showed exactly what that job is worth when the offense runs through him. He played in seventeen games, started all of them, and handled eighty-three percent of the offensive snaps, a share that leaves almost no room in the game plan for a committee approach. The volume followed the role: three hundred eleven carries, one hundred two receptions on one hundred twenty-nine targets, and seventy-one of his carries came inside the red zone, which is where touchdowns get created rather than just yardage. Through the first two games of 2026, his snap share has settled at fifty-three point eight percent, with twenty carries and twelve targets producing nine receptions. Even at a reduced rate, that is still a back who is catching passes on the majority of his targets and touching the ball as both a runner and receiver on early downs, which is the profile that makes a running back matter in PPR scoring regardless of what the raw carry count looks like in a given week. Brock Purdy remains the starting quarterback distributing the ball, Mike Evans is the outside receiving option, and George Kittle continues to occupy the tight end role underneath and down the seam. None of that changes what McCaffrey is asked to do: he is the back who both starts and finishes drives, taking red zone work that other backs on this roster simply do not see. The role itself has not been contested this season. The question is whether the early usage numbers represent a true shift or a small sample that will normalize as the year goes on.
The case for Christian McCaffrey starts with what he did across a full season: four hundred sixteen point six PPR points, twenty-four point five points per game, and a finish of first among all players at his position in PPR scoring. That was not a product of one dominant month — it was built on three hundred eleven rushing attempts, one hundred two catches, and seventeen touchdowns split between rushing and receiving. A back who is targeted one hundred twenty-nine times in a season and still gets seventy-one carries inside the red zone is getting used in every situation an offense creates, which is the definition of a fantasy asset who does not depend on garbage-time volume or one specific game script to produce. The case against him is sitting right in the 2026 numbers. Two games in, his snap share has fallen from eighty-three percent to fifty-three point eight percent, and his points per game have dropped from twenty-four point five to eighteen point two, with his positional finish sliding from first to ninth. His yards per carry has actually ticked up, from three point nine to four point six, which suggests the efficiency is still there when he touches the ball — the issue is that he is touching it less. Twenty carries and twelve targets across two games is a real pace reduction from the three hundred eleven and one hundred twenty-nine marks of a full season ago, and six red zone carries in two games, while still touchdown-productive with two rushing scores already, is a smaller rate of red zone work than the seventy-one carries he saw over seventeen games last year would suggest. The honest read is that both things can be true at once. The talent and the role at the top of the depth chart have not gone anywhere — nobody else on this roster is positioned to take over the passing-down work or the red zone carries that defined his 2025 season. But a snap share drop of roughly thirty percentage points is not noise; it is a change in how the offense is using its personnel through two weeks, whether that reflects game script, a change in offensive approach, or simply early-season variance that will regress toward last year's pattern as the season lengthens. A manager has to weigh a proven, league-leading track record against a two-game sample that shows real erosion in usage, and the answer depends on whether that erosion continues into a third and fourth week or reverses back toward the levels that made him the top scorer at his position a season ago.
Start him. Even with the snap share decline, eighteen point two points per game is a strong weekly floor, and a ninth-place finish among his position through two weeks is still firmly in usable territory for any lineup. The receiving work is the anchor: nine catches on twelve targets in two games shows the passing-game role remains intact, and that kind of target share is what keeps a running back's floor high even in a week when the ground game stalls. Do not bench him based on the snap share number alone — snap share can fluctuate week to week based on game script, and two games is not enough evidence to conclude that his role has permanently shrunk from what produced four hundred sixteen point six points and a first-place finish a season ago. What would change the calculus is a third or fourth straight week of snap shares in the fifties rather than the eighties, paired with red zone touches drying up further. If the carries inside the twenty stay in the low single digits per game rather than climbing back toward last year's pace, that is a real signal the offense has shifted its approach around him rather than just navigating an early-season wrinkle. Until that pattern shows up across more games, treat the current numbers as a dip to watch rather than a redraft of his role, and keep him in the lineup as a confident starting option.
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