The 2026 Flag Plant: Jadarian Price

SEATTLE — Every year since 2017 I have picked one rookie and committed to him in writing before the season starts. Not a sleeper list, not a tiered ranking with hedges built in. One name, published before any evidence exists, graded honestly when the year is over.

This year it is Jadarian Price.

He is the last pick of the first round, he is the Week 1 starter for the defending Super Bowl champions, and he is being drafted as the 26th running back off the board.

That last sentence is the entire reason we are here.

What is actually open in Seattle

Kenneth Walker III left in free agency. Zach Charbonnet tore his ACL in January, had reconstructive surgery in February, and opens the season on the PUP list — which by rule means a minimum of four games.

Here is what those two accounted for last season:

	Carries	Receptions	Touches	Rush TD
Kenneth Walker III	221	31	252	5
Zach Charbonnet	184	20	204	12
Combined	405	51	456	17

Two hundred and fifty-two touches gone permanently. Another two hundred and four unavailable for at least the first quarter of the season.

And this is not a small pie. No team in the NFL gave its running backs more carries than Seattle last season, and no team gave its running backs more red zone carries either. The volume is already there. It has been there. It just needs somebody to take it.

The goal-line detail is the one I keep coming back to. Charbonnet's twelve rushing touchdowns led the team and made him the first Seattle player since Marshawn Lynch in 2014 to reach double digits. That role currently has no incumbent.

The Walker comparison

This is the cleanest way I can make the argument.

Kenneth Walker ran for 1,027 yards in this exact offense last season. He played all seventeen games. He finished RB22 in total PPR points and RB28 in points per game, averaging 11.3.

A thousand-yard rusher on the eventual Super Bowl champion, and he was barely a startable fantasy asset.

Why? Because he split everything. He shared passing-game work with Charbonnet, and in games where Charbonnet was active, Walker saw only 34.8% of the running back red zone rushing work. He was not being failed by the offense. He was being failed by the arithmetic of a two-man committee.

Price does not have to split. Not in September, and I do not think in November either.

So why is he cheap?

Three reasons, and all three are legitimate. I want to name them properly rather than wave at them.

One: Charbonnet comes back. PUP means four games minimum, so realistically Week 5 or later, coming off a reconstructed knee. This is the objection everybody makes and it is the weakest of the three.

Two: Price has only 113 college carries. He split the Notre Dame backfield with Jeremiyah Love, who went third overall to Arizona. Nobody has seen Price carry a real workload, at any level, ever. This is the objection almost nobody makes and it is by far the strongest.

Three: there is an Achilles tear in his history and he is 203 pounds. Evaluators flagged both — durability concerns lingering from the injury, and a lighter frame that raises questions about a bell-cow workload. This is the objection nobody makes at all, and it is quietly doing a lot of work in his price.

The part nobody is talking about

Klint Kubiak left Seattle to become head coach of the Las Vegas Raiders. The Seahawks replaced him with Brian Fleury.

Fleury spent seven seasons in San Francisco. His most recent title there was tight ends coach and run game coordinator. He has been in Kyle Shanahan's orbit since Cleveland in 2014.

Read that again in the context of the table above.

A team that just vacated 456 backfield touches handed play-calling to a run game specialist from the Shanahan tree.

That system has been manufacturing usable fantasy running backs for two decades, largely independent of pedigree — that is the entire history of the scheme, from Denver through Cleveland through San Francisco. And the archetype it is built around is a one-cut back with vision and burst who can press a hole and get vertical.

Every scouting report on Price says the same things. Outstanding vision beyond the line of scrimmage. Big-time acceleration and long speed. Low center of gravity, good knee bend, patient with clean footwork. Specializes in creating chunk plays.

That is not a coincidence you have to squint at. That is a team drafting for a scheme and then hiring the coach who runs it.

There is continuity here too, which matters. Kubiak and Fleury share the same coaching lineage, so Seattle did not change offensive philosophy — they changed the person calling it. The fit that justified spending pick 32 on Price in April is intact.

The honest risk: Fleury has never called plays. Not in the NFL, not in college, not anywhere. That is a real unknown, and it is part of why a first-round back on the defending champion is available in the sixth round.

What the history says

Since 2016, thirteen running backs have been taken in the first round. Twelve of them played as rookies.

Year	Player	Pick	PPG rank
2016	Ezekiel Elliott	4	RB2
2017	Leonard Fournette	4	RB8
2017	Christian McCaffrey	8	RB15
2018	Saquon Barkley	2	RB1
2019	Josh Jacobs	24	RB14
2020	Clyde Edwards-Helaire	32	RB22
2021	Najee Harris	24	RB4
2021	Travis Etienne	25	missed season
2023	Bijan Robinson	8	top-12
2023	Jahmyr Gibbs	12	top-12
2025	Ashton Jeanty	6	RB16
2025	Omarion Hampton	22	RB14

Ranks are points-per-game, not total points.

Six of twelve finished as top-12 backs per game — a coin flip. But eleven of twelve finished top-24, and the only miss was an injury. Nobody in this group finished worse than RB22.

Which brings me to the comp I have to acknowledge, because somebody will raise it if I do not: Clyde Edwards-Helaire was also the 32nd pick, and he is the RB22 at the bottom of that list.

The difference is workload security. Edwards-Helaire walked into a healthy Kansas City backfield and immediately started sharing. Price walks into a backfield where the two men who took 456 touches last year are gone and hurt, and the depth behind him is George Holani — an undrafted free agent with 25 carries across two NFL seasons — and journeyman Emanuel Wilson.

The committee argument requires somebody to form a committee with. For the first month, there is not one.

What the model says

I should tell you where the numbers land before I tell you where I do, because they are not the same thing and this site is built on showing both.

The projection model behind the rankings starts from Seattle's team totals, gives Price a conservative share of them — I set it lower than I believe, on purpose — and comes out with him as RB17, well inside the top 30 overall, before any judgment is applied. That is with no film, no gut, no Fleury argument. Just vacated volume and a share of it.

The market has him RB26. The model has him RB17 on shares alone. Everything below is the case for why the model is still too low.

The film

[Costa's film read goes here — the specific thing you see on tape that 113 carries cannot show, and why you believe it holds up at a larger workload.]

The call

Jadarian Price, RB26, and I think that number looks silly by November.

I will grade this in January the same way I grade all of them. The full record is here — nine years of calls, the ones that hit and the ones that did not. That is the whole point of writing it down before the games are played — an opinion you cannot check is not worth reading.

If I am wrong, the archive will say so.