This article series will look at the top fantasy football rookies of 2026 and break down their fantasy football upside.
By examining the full scope of their talent level and their projected opportunity, the player's merit is weighed against their draft ADP to determine their cost-adjusted value to fantasy drafters.
This entry will look at Arkansas running back Mike Washington. Washington's current ADP on Underdog is 133.1, and 126.33 on FFPC.
SKILL SET
Washington (6-1, 223) is a big, extremely fast running back who has generated a substantial amount of hype in a weak running back class. He played three years at Buffalo before playing one year at New Mexico State and one season at Arkansas. The expectation is Washington will be a Day 2 selection in the 2026 NFL Draft.
Washington's 4.33-second Combine 40 was much better than expected, even though the assumption going into the Combine was that Washington would run some version of fast, especially for a big running back. Washington's combination of mass and speed is nearly unprecedented.
What remains to be seen is if Washington can actually harness his otherwise objectively rare athleticism. While athletes of his caliber are rare, the genre of hyper-athletic players who do nothing in the NFL is actually rather vast.
For clues on whether a given player can capitalize on their athleticism, we look to their collegiate production. Generally speaking, we determine a player's tools grade with athletic testing and we measure their skill level by determining the value of their production.
What do you find when you look at Washington's collegiate production? Not much good. Even the one arguably good season for Washington – his one year at Arkansas – Washington still had fumbling issues (four on 195 touches after seven on 167 touches the year before), and his pass-catching returns were poor, as they always were (66.7 percent catch rate, 5.4 YPT).
For his collegiate career, Washington somehow turned 117 career targets into just 73 receptions for 470 yards. A catch rate of 62.4 percent at 4.0 yards per target basically means Washington is unacceptably ineffective as a receiver.
Throw in the 11 fumbles in the last two years and you start to see how Washington was the RB2 behind not only fellow 2026 prospect Seth McGowan at New Mexico State, but even total non-prospect Ron Cook in Buffalo.
ATHLETICISM
At 6-foot-1, 223 pounds with a 4.33-second 40 along with strong jumps and solid agility scores, there's no doubt that in terms of athletic testing, Washington is blue chip.
Washington can run really, really fast in a straight line and he's a huge person to be moving so fast in said straight line. Can he do other things, though?
The answer appears to be 'No, mostly.' As an overall runner – a task which entails more varied demands than simply running in a straight line – Washington's production was clearly poor prior to joining Arkansas in 2024. In those four years (three at Buffalo, one at New Mexico State), Washington averaged just 4.39 yards per carry. Washington can absolutely murder if the task is to simply run straight through an open gap, but this scenario only occasionally occurs in football.
Fast and physically strong as he might be, Washington is a perfect example to illustrate the difference between raw athleticism and functional athleticism. Just as a baseball player can be outrageously physically strong yet pose poor in-game power due to a clunky swing or whatever, a football player can be extremely athletic in a track setting and still look patently out of place on a football field.
Part of Washington's issue might be his high posture -- Washington is 6-foot-1, but somehow looks even taller at times. If you're a tall running back then you better be flexible and agile enough to get low in the face of oncoming tacklers, because if you can't set anchor then you're getting lit up. Big and strong as he is, Washington often times cannot channel his strength into the play because he gets caught in awkward positions. Face Washington in a phone booth and he might crush you, but swarm him in the open field and he has trouble so much as setting his feet.
In short, there's something unwieldy about Washington's movement that might make it difficult for his athleticism to express on the football field.
It's a slightly off-topic example, but Dont'e Thornton had truly unprecedented athleticism as a 2025 wide receiver prospect. More specifically, his height/speed thresholds (6-foot-5, 4.30-second 40-yard dash) had never been seen before. Thornton's production at Oregon and Tennessee was not very good – plainly not NFL caliber. But, reasonably enough, some proponents suggested that tools this loud couldn't possibly fail, that despite whatever skill set limitations Thornton might have showed, it just isn't possible to fail when you're 6-foot-5 and run a 4.3 flat.
It is early, admittedly, but through one year Thornton demonstrated it very much is possible to fail, even badly so, when you're 6-foot-5 and run a 4.30. Being the first to do those two things has amounted to precisely nothing useful for Thornton so far in the NFL. Again, this outcome was foretold by Thornton's collegiate production.
Comparison and 2026 Projection
The more direct precedent than Thornton would probably be someone like Isaac Guerendo, who ran a 4.33 40 at 6-foot, 221 pounds. This is a bad sign not just because Guerendo fell off the map so badly in 2025, but even more that Guerendo was clearly a better prospect than Washington due to being a much more productive player. As a runner and pass catcher both Guerendo was the far better player in college, even with Guerendo missing so much time with injuries.
Guerendo is incredibly athletic in general but some of his explosiveness seems to occur at the expense of his coordination. Balance and start/stop limitations leave Guerendo limited mostly to power concepts, because the quick decisions required on zone designs are more burdensome on Guerendo's bandwidth than a running back who can gather themselves more easily mid-movement. Guerendo's limitations on that front are probably why 2025 fifth-round pick Jordan James is formally ahead of Guerendo on the depth chart at this point.
Limited by injury and whatever else, Guerendo easily advanced the football better than Washington did, even relative to Washington's one year at Arkansas. I feel completely comfortable saying that if Guerendo has it bad then so will Washington.
As much as Washington might be headed toward Day 2 of the 2026 NFL Draft, there's still a strong chance he plays very little in 2026. As Kaleb Johnson showed, even a Day 2 running back hyped by the media is capable of failing in fantasy, both short- and long-term. Just as Guerendo was a better prospect than Washington, the same is true of Johnson. I say that as someone who was low on Johnson last year and told people not to draft him.
Given that Guerendo and Johnson were both much more productive in college, I think they arguably outclass Washington as a comparison. We need to probably dig even deeper.
My comparison for Washington is less about trait specifics and more about broader theme.
COMPARISON: Arizona Chris Henry. Remember him? Second-round pick of the Titans in 2007?
Henry wasn't the exact same type of player – at 5-foot-11, 230 pounds was a lot stockier than Washington, and Henry's 4.40 40 wasn't quite as blazing – but the general deal with Henry is that he was unproductive in college and no one cared about him until he torched the NFL Combine that year.
To be fair to Washington, Henry was much less productive in college, as in multiple magnitudes. Henry finished his Arizona career with 892 yards rushing at 3.3 yards per carry – completely insane. Washington is better than that.
Even so, the genre as a guy whose athletic profile is in complete contradiction with his production profile raises a major red flag. Washington will be better than Henry, who logged 32 NFL carries in two seasons, but Henry is still a worthwhile comparison to outline the very real precedent that guys who don't produce in college almost never produce in the NFL, regardless of how athletic they might be.
I think Washington's absolute best-case outcome would probably be someone like Latavius Murray, though Murray too was a much more productive player in college and offered passing-down utility that Washington is unlikely to. James Starks with worse receiving ability is another idea that comes to mind.
For Washington to go earlier in the ADP than players like Chris Rodriguez, Jacory Croskey-Merritt and Emanuel Wilson might be a mistake. Those three are guaranteed at least rotational roles this year, and all of them possess higher upside than Washington.
