Is 2026 The Perfect Storm For A Zero RB Bounce Back?

**SPEAKER_2** (0:03)
It's McBride! Oh, one-hander, CD Lamb!

**Colm Kelly** (0:12)
The Zero RB Blueprint for 2026 We're here to talk about why maybe it hasn't worked in the last couple of years and why it can bounce back in a big way in 2026, or maybe it can't. That's what we're gonna talk about on RotoViz Overtime today, and then we're gonna follow it up by putting these principles in to a live draft. Myself, Colm Kelly, along with Kevin Szafraniec, who are here talking through this today, are going to put those words to the test and go from the 104 to a true Zero RB build and try and really push it. Because let's talk about the reasons why we should push it, Kevin. And let's talk about the reasons why people are not pushing it as much. So over the last couple of years, we have seen the evolution of fantasy. Let's say from, let's say a couple of years, I'm going to spread that out to the last decade, go all the way back to 2013 when Shawn Siegel brings out the Zero RB piece. And it starts to grow in terms of people implementing it into their drafts. And it went from the thing that people talked about is like, wow, that's absolutely wild that you actually try and do that in drafts. That's like, why are you not drafting running backs in the first two rounds? And then it gets to the point where we have the explosion of basketball. We have best ball mania with underdog. And we have a couple of times where either in the season long versions or in the overall contest, huge prize money.
The thing that had been used at that stage to continue to say that Zero RB wouldn't work was to go the route of, well, it's never won a major tournament. It's never won, you know, you may win your 12 team league with it, but it won't win a high stakes league. Then it had won high stakes formats. Then it became, well, it hasn't won the best ball championship. Well, it has. But what happened then is it went from being niche and growing and growing and growing, to then being implemented massively from that point forward. So we get to the stage, maybe two to three seasons ago where it hits its peak, and two years ago, if we remember back to then, it became quite hard in drafts to draft a Zero RB team that you would feel really good about. The reason for that became a lot of teams in your 12-team pod would have been trying to implement some of the same ideas or some of the same tenets that we would class as being a true Zero RB roster, maybe trying to put in the elite tight ends and so on and how you want to pair the roster together. But that made it hard, but also the rate because of that of teams drafting. I don't have the numbers in front of me right now, but I believe there was around 20% of teams two years ago when BBM drafted Zero RB-style rosters, where that was classed in that particular kind of research as after round four, having no running backs. And then you get into a situation where because so many people, maybe we could use the word, got converted over to Zero RB drafting. But with that in mind then, you get burned, you draft a lot of teams, maybe in basketball formats, you try it in other leagues. And it had some of the reasons that you'll probably talk about in a minute RB health, RB performance, maybe a downturn in scoring in the NFL, leading to less fantasy points to those wide receivers. For example, people really backed out of it last year, dropped down to around about 9% in terms of people implementing it in those kind of basketball formats. So then again, the success that was brought about by the running backs, particularly the early running backs in 2025, how the scoring continued to kind of tail down in the NFL, that set us up for this year, where it feels like people have completely reverted back to where we were maybe in 2015, 2016, where it's kind of like, I don't know why you're doing this Zero RB thing, it doesn't work, but we go back three years ago to work massively. So that's what we're going to talk about a little bit. Then we're going to go into what we think could work, and then what we're going to do is what we're going to show you when we do that live draft, which will come out in a couple of days time. Kevin, I'll let you take the floor for a moment.