The tell was a number that didn't happen
Start with Houston, because the most useful fact from Sunday's 26-3 Texans win is a non-event. After David Montgomery left with a groin injury, the Texans did not give a single carry to another back. Dare Ogunbowale, the other name on the depth chart, was not used at all.
That is the whole signal. Rivers McCown of NBC Sports had been ignoring the Woody Marks case, partly because it conflicted with his priors and partly because, in his words, nobody on this team can run the ball anyway. What changed his mind was not a highlight. It was an absence: when the lead back went down, the coaching staff reached for no one else.
This is the mechanism worth learning. We usually evaluate a replacement back by asking whether he is good, or whether his offense is good. Those are the wrong questions, because both are slow to answer and noisy when you do. The faster question is whether anyone is standing between him and the football. In Houston, apparently, nobody is. McCown makes Marks a favorite for at least 70 percent of the backfield touches, and he does not pretend it is glamorous: low-end RB2, short term, in a bad situation.
Note the caveat baked into that projection. Ryans said Montgomery could miss some time, not all of it. The trust you are extending is real, but it has a return date on it, and the date belongs to somebody else's groin.
Two more rooms with the lights off
Miami offers the same lesson in slower motion. Since De'Von Achane tore his ACL, Ollie Gordon II and Jaylen Wright have been trading snaps, and the trade has stopped being close. In Week 4, Gordon had nine carries on 22 offensive snaps; Wright had five on 12. In Week 5, Gordon took 18 carries on 43 snaps, with a touchdown, while Wright got six carries on nine snaps. Wright also re-injured his foot in practice, which helps explain the split, though McCown reads it as Gordon being entrenched as the head of a committee. He now rates Gordon closer to a low-end RB2 than a flex.
The Jets version is blunter. With Breece Hall out, Braelon Allen ran 24 times for 116 yards and a score, and USA Today's Tom Vecchio singled out the detail that matters: Isaiah Davis was the only other back to touch the ball on the ground, and he got two carries. A workhorse is not defined by his own stat line. It is defined by what the next man's stat line looks like.
The pattern across all three is that the evidence is subtractive. You are not hunting for a back who did something spectacular. You are hunting for a depth chart where the alternatives did nothing at all.
What a vacancy does not buy
Here is the part where I talk you out of getting carried away. An empty depth chart guarantees volume. It says nothing about what a back does with it.
The cautionary case is RJ Harvey. FantasyPros describes him entering 2025 as a second-round pick in a wide-open Denver backfield, under a coach who had hoped he would be a Kamara or Bush type. He carried 153 times and averaged 3.7 yards per carry, more than a full yard worse than J.K. Dobbins on nearly the same workload (147 carries). He had just two games with more than 40 receiving yards. Opportunity was not the problem. Efficiency was.
Apply that to this week's trio and the ceilings come into focus. Marks inherits a run game that, by McCown's account, was bad before Montgomery got hurt. Gordon works for a 0-5 Dolphins team with Malik Willis under center. Allen's 116 yards needed 24 carries to arrive. Every one of these projections lands at RB2, and the analysts writing them say so plainly.
That is fine, so long as you price it correctly. Buy the touches, accept the RB2 scoring, and do not budget for the long run or the spike week. The people who get burned here are the ones who see 24 carries and assume a good back must be attached.