RB tiers for 2025 Fantasy Football rankings: Why Saquon Barkley doesn't crack the top tier after monster year

The 2024 season brought about a renaissance for the running back position led by Eagles star Saquon Barkley, who rushed for 2,005 yards despite sitting out the final game of the regular season. Barkley added another 499 yards in the postseason to give him the all-time record in yards gained during a single regular season and postseason combined. But when all was said and done, Barkley carried the ball 436 times with another 46 receptions, a workload big enough to be a screaming red flag for some managers in 2025 Fantasy Football drafts.

Barkley became the first back since DeMarco Murray in 2014 to touch the ball more than 450 times in a season and the third back to reach that number since Larry Johnson in 2006, with Arian Foster also hitting that level in 2012. No player has had 450 touches in back-to-back seasons since Eddie George and Edgerrin James accomplished the feat in 1999 and 2000, and aside from a 23-year-old LaDanian Tomlinson, all those who had a chance to repeat that level saw at least 100 fewer touches in the regular season alone. While the lack of true year-to-year workhorses at that level in the modern NFL is not enough to just avoid Barkley in drafts, it is enough to keep him from being our RB1 in 2025 and even cracking the top tier for the position.

We're getting you ready for your 2025 Fantasy Football drafts by sharing our positional tiers, including the running backs below, to help you build your rankings and determine when those tier breaks will occur in each draft. Using tiered rankings should give you the best chance for a successful draft by scooping up the best values throughout the proceedings and knowing the likelihood of similarly valued players at positions you skip in a round making it back to your next pick.

So who is in the top tier of running back ahead of Saquon Barkley? And where are the drops in tier later in the draft that you'll want to avoid? ... Join SportsLine here to see SportsLine expert R.J. White's Fantasy football rankings!