CHI · RB
Projected Points (PPR)
This week
No projection changes recorded this week.
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D'Andre Swift sits atop the Chicago depth chart as the depth chart's RB1, with Kyle Monangai listed behind him as the backup. Through the season's first two games, Swift is playing 57.3% of the offense's snaps, which lines up almost exactly with the 57.8% share he carried across all of last season. That consistency matters: it tells you Chicago has not changed how it deploys him even with a new coaching voice calling plays. The volume backing that snap share is real early on — thirty-four carries and six targets in two games, with six catches on those targets. Last season he finished with two hundred twenty-three rush attempts and forty-eight targets across sixteen starts, so this year's early pace, if it held, would represent a real jump in usage. The red zone work stands out too: eight carries inside the red zone already, compared to forty for the entire prior season. That is the kind of early-season concentration that tends to normalize, but it also reflects that Chicago is trusting him near the goal line right now, which is where nine of his rushing touchdowns came from last year. Caleb Williams runs the offense as the starting quarterback, and the receiving corps around Swift includes Rome Odunze at wide receiver one and Luther Burden III at wide receiver two, with Colston Loveland the primary tight end. None of those pass-catchers change what Swift's role is on early downs; he remains the back Chicago hands the ball to and throws to out of the backfield.
The case for D'Andre Swift starts with the plain math of what he has already done. Two games in, he has 45.3 PPR points, good for a per-game average of 22.7, and that pace puts him fifth among all backs in points scored so far this season. Compare that to a season ago, when sixteen games produced 228.6 points and a 14.3 per-game average that finished fifteenth at the position. Something is different: the yards per carry sits at 5 so far this year versus 4.9 last year, a marginal but real improvement, and the touchdown rate is far ahead of pace — three rushing touchdowns in two games against nine across all of last season. The receiving work has ticked up too, with six catches on six targets already, a perfect catch rate that, if it persisted, would represent an efficient chunk of receiving production layered onto the ground game. The case against him is built on the same numbers read skeptically. Three touchdowns in two games, on eight red zone carries, is a scoring rate that outstrips what nearly every running back sustains across a full season. Last year's data point of forty red zone carries producing nine scores gives a rough sense of his true finishing rate, and it is lower than what he has shown so far this year. The receiving line — six for six — is too clean to expect at that percentage the rest of the way; targets will grow but so will incompletions and drops, pulling the catch rate back toward career norms. And the snap share itself, 57.3% early this season against 57.8% for all of last season, tells you Chicago has not actually expanded his role on paper; he is playing the same percentage of snaps as always, just producing more efficiently within it. That efficiency, particularly the touchdown clip, is the part of this profile most likely to cool. What should carry weight is the workload floor. Twenty-three rush attempts, six targets, and eight red zone carries in two games is a real allocation of touches, not a product of garbage-time snaps or a one-game outlier. Whether the touchdowns keep coming at this rate is a fair question, but the underlying volume — carries, targets, red zone work — is consistent enough with last year's pattern that a manager can trust the role even while discounting the scoring pace somewhat.
Start D'Andre Swift as a confident flex play right now, and in most formats he is defensible as a lineup fixture given the touch volume he is drawing. The twenty-two point seven per-game pace is unlikely to hold at that exact level across a full season, since it is being propped up by a touchdown rate — three scores on eight red zone carries — that outruns what even efficient backs sustain. But the floor underneath that ceiling is solid: thirty-four carries and six targets in two games mirror a snap share, 57.3%, that is consistent with the 57.8% he played across all of last year, a season that still produced 228.6 PPR points. That is a real, established role, not a hot streak built on opportunity that could vanish. The signal to watch is red zone volume. If Chicago keeps feeding him goal-line and short-yardage work near the rate of eight carries in two games, the touchdown production has a real chance to stay elevated. If that red zone share drops back toward last year's pace of forty carries across sixteen games, expect the per-game scoring average to come down toward last year's 14.3 baseline. Either way, the receiving work — six catches on six targets so far — adds a stable weekly floor that makes him usable even in a quieter rushing week. Hold him as an every-week play and reassess only if the red zone touches disappear.
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He was limited in practice with ankle and knee issues, so his workload and status should be monitored closely.
Sep 16, 7:25 PM ET
Source:NBC Sports
Swift was limited in practice with ankle and knee issues. He is still expected to be available, but his status should be monitored through the rest of the week.
Sep 16, 6:15 PM ET
Source:USA TODAY