The rookie-year stat line for Ashton Jeanty, the sixth pick of the 2025 draft, is ugly in a way that top-12 running backs almost never post. In 17 games, he took 267 carries for 975 yards — a 3.65 yards-per-carry average — with just five runs of 15+ yards and an EPA/carry of -0.244. Whatever archetype the Raiders drafted at #6, it is not what showed up in Vegas last fall.

But the number that reframes the whole season isn't Jeanty's. It's what every other Raider ball-carrier did with the same offensive line and the same play-caller.

Table of Contents

1. How bad was Jeanty's rookie year, in historical terms?
2. The explosive-run problem
3. The LV-without-Jeanty split
4. What the split implies

1. How bad was Jeanty's rookie year, in historical terms?

I pulled every running back drafted in the top 12 of the NFL Draft from 2005 through 2025, then their rookie-year rushing lines from play-by-play. That's 19 backs. Ranked by rookie EPA/carry, worst to best:

Two things stand out. First, Jeanty's -0.244 EPA/carry is second-worst in the group — beaten only by Cedric Benson's 67-carry cameo — and it comes on the third-largest sample size (267). Every marquee name the angle brings up — Barkley, Bijan, Elliott, Peterson, McCaffrey, Gurley, Fournette — had a rookie EPA/carry better than Jeanty's. In most cases considerably better.

Second, the yards-per-carry gap is real, not a fluke of small samples. Jeanty's 3.65 YPC ranks 17th of 19 in this group; only Moreno (3.56) and Benson (4.06 on 67 carries) are close on the low end, and Benson had five 15+ runs in 67 attempts.

2. The explosive-run problem

The single sharpest indicator of the broken ground game was Jeanty's explosive-run rate — one 15-yard carry every 53.4 attempts.

For the seven star backs above (Barkley, Bijan, Elliott, Peterson, McCaffrey, Gurley, Fournette), rookie-year carries-per-15-yard-run were:

• McCaffrey: 30.8
• Fournette: 30.8
• Bijan Robinson: 21.4
• Elliott: 15.0
• Gurley: 14.4
• Barkley: 13.2
• Peterson: 10.8

Even the two least-explosive of that group (McCaffrey and Fournette, both around a 15+ every ~31 carries) generated big runs at nearly twice Jeanty's rate. Against the group median (Elliott, ~15), Jeanty produced explosive runs about 28% as often. Against the group's most-explosive rookie years (Peterson, Barkley), he was closer to a fifth.

You can build a decent rushing profile without huge chunks — Fournette did it — but you cannot build one when you're also averaging 3.65 a pop. Jeanty was doing neither.

3. The LV-without-Jeanty split

Here's where the angle turns. Removing Jeanty and looking at everyone else on the Raiders who took a designed carry as a running back (Raheem Mostert, Zamir White, Sincere McCormick / Tucker, Dylan Laube, Sherman Jackson):

• 53 carries, 199 yards, 3.76 YPC, -0.431 EPA/carry, one run of 15+ yards.

Jeanty's line, restated for comparison: 267 carries, 3.65 YPC, -0.244 EPA/carry, one 15+ run every 53.4 attempts.

The other Vegas backs averaged slightly more yards per carry than Jeanty but hemorrhaged nearly twice as much EPA per touch. They generated exactly one explosive run in 53 attempts — one 15+ in what amounts to three games' worth of workload. Jeanty's explosive rate was already historically low; his teammates' was lower still.

The team-level number closes the case. Across all of 2025, the Raiders finished dead last in offensive run EPA/play at -0.260, more than 0.15 EPA/play worse than the 31st-ranked team (New Orleans at -0.101). That gap between LV and 31st is roughly the same as the gap between 31st and league average. This wasn't a bottom-five run game — it was its own tier of bad.

Vegas finished the regular season 3-14.

4. What the split implies

The temptation with a headline rookie having a rough year is to argue about the player. Did he lose burst? Was the tape always overrated? Was the draft slot wrong? Those are fine questions, and the numbers here don't answer them.

What the numbers do say is this: the 2025 Raiders' rushing offense produced -0.244 EPA/carry with Jeanty and -0.431 EPA/carry without him, on a team that finished last in the NFL in run EPA by a large margin. Whoever you handed the football to in that building lost you expected points. Jeanty lost the fewest.

That's a strange thing to write about a season that will be remembered as a rookie-year disappointment — and it's what makes the disappointment worth interrogating. If Jeanty had been the cause of the run game's collapse, you'd expect the rest of the room to look average when he wasn't on the field. Instead, they looked considerably worse. My read: the historically low explosive-run rate probably says more about the blocking and design in front of the ball than about the runner carrying it. I'd expect a scheme-and-line reset in Vegas to move Jeanty's 2026 EPA/carry substantially, even if the raw talent evaluation from April 2025 turns out to be exactly correct.

The rookie-year stat line will follow Jeanty for a while. It probably shouldn't follow him alone.