BAL · RB
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Derrick Henry sits atop the depth chart at running back in Baltimore, and the offense treats him accordingly. His snap share sits at 54.4% through the first two games, essentially identical to the 53.9% he carried across the full 2025 season, which tells you the coaching staff has made no adjustment to how much of the game plan runs through him. Forty carries in two games projects to a workload consistent with last year's 307 attempts, and the early returns include ten red zone carries and four touchdowns, both of which point to continued trust near the goal line. His role is almost entirely a rushing one — four targets and four receptions through two games mirror the 21 targets and 15 receptions he posted across all of 2025 — so any fantasy value he generates comes from volume and touchdowns on the ground rather than receiving work. Quarterback Lamar Jackson runs an offense built around designed run concepts, and wide receiver Zay Flowers and tight end Mark Andrews occupy the passing-game roles that keep defenses from loading the box exclusively against the run. That context matters for Henry's role: he is not competing for touches with any other back on this roster, and the offensive structure funnels early-down and red zone work to him by design, not by accident.
The case for Derrick Henry starts with continuity. Nothing about his role changed from a 2025 season that produced 279.5 PPR points and a finish of eighth among all backs at the position. If anything, the early 2026 numbers look stronger — 5.3 yards per carry against 5.2 a year ago, 26.5 points per game against 16.4, and a current finish of fourth at the position through two games. Ten red zone carries in two games is a rate that, if sustained, would blow past the 62 he logged over seventeen games last season. A back getting this many carries inside the ten with a full season's worth of proven usage behind him is about as stable a fantasy asset as the position offers. The offense is not changing its identity, and as long as that holds, the volume holds too. The case against him is less about role and more about what a decade of this kind of workload eventually does to production. He is in his tenth season of the sort of high-carry, high-contact usage that this role requires, and backs who carry the ball at this rate for this long do not always decline gradually — sometimes the drop is sudden. That is not a statement about his current status, which the numbers above do not support in the slightest; the yards per carry, the red zone volume and the touchdown rate through two games are all strong. It is a caution about durability of production over a full season given the pattern such workloads have shown across many players at the position, and it is the single biggest variable a manager should weigh when deciding whether to buy in. There is also the touchdown-rate question that any evaluator has to address honestly. Sixteen rushing touchdowns on 307 carries last season is an efficient rate, and four touchdowns on 40 carries so far in 2026 is even more efficient. Touchdown rates at this level are difficult to sustain over a full season purely because scoring opportunities are not evenly distributed week to week — some games will not offer ten red zone carries. But the underlying driver, the sheer number of chances he gets near the goal line, is a function of his role rather than luck, and that role has not wavered. The receiving profile — 150 yards on 15 receptions last season, 38 yards on four receptions so far this year — caps his ceiling in points-per-reception formats relative to backs who catch more passes, but it does not undercut the floor his carry volume provides.
Start him without hesitation in any format that rewards rushing volume and touchdowns. The numbers through two games — 212 rushing yards, four touchdowns, 26.5 points per game and a finish of fourth at the position — are not a fluke sample size problem so much as a continuation of exactly what he did across all of 2025, when he finished eighth among backs with 279.5 PPR points. There is no competing back on this roster carving into his workload, and the offensive approach around quarterback Lamar Jackson has not shifted toward the passing game in a way that would reduce his carries. Managers who drafted him for a lead role got exactly what was advertised and should continue deploying him as a start every week barring a change in his weekly workload that the live card would already reflect. The one thing that would change this recommendation is a sustained drop in red zone carries or overall attempts — if the ten red zone carries through two games start trending toward single digits over a longer stretch, the touchdown rate will normalize downward and some of the current point total will look more like an early-season outlier than a new baseline. Until that shows up in the box score, treat him as a locked-in weekly starter in all standard and PPR formats.
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