Every September there is a night when my group chat stops being about anything except one name, and this year the name is Roschon Johnson. I have been in the same leagues with the same friends long enough to know how the week before kickoff goes: somebody grabs a guy off the wire, somebody else cuts the same guy to make room for a kicker, and each of them thinks the other has lost it. What I had never seen until this weekend was all of Sleeper doing it at once.
Our trending feed reads Sleeper's adds and drops over the last 24 hours, and at 1 a.m. Eastern on Monday Johnson led both lists, about 216,000 adds against about 46,000 drops. Devaughn Vele was the second most added player at roughly 119,000, and Alvin Kamara the second most dropped at about 32,000. For one player to lead both columns, tens of thousands of managers have to be picking him up in the same window that tens of thousands of others cut him.
What happened in Chicago is not a mystery, and none of it is new this week. Kyle Monangai, the rookie who ran for 783 yards and five touchdowns last season as the complement to D'Andre Swift, hyperextended a knee at practice on Aug. 16, and head coach Ben Johnson was still calling him week to week last week. Then on Thursday Swift walked off a padded practice with a trainer, holding his side, which is the sight that empties a fantasy manager's stomach. ESPN's Adam Schefter reported within hours that it was a cramp, and the Associated Press had Swift telling reporters that Monangai is running and that nobody is rushing him back. The Bears open Sunday in Carolina at 1 p.m. Eastern. Swift is expected to play; Monangai's status for the opener is still open.
That leaves Johnson behind two players with question marks, on a team that kept only three running backs when the roster went to 53 on Aug. 30. Salvon Ahmed is on the practice squad. Offensive coordinator Press Taylor told reporters last week that Johnson "really had a great finish to camp here, somebody that earned a lot of trust through the last couple weeks," and that with Monangai out and the reps piling up, he "proved to us that he's trustworthy." Johnson finished the preseason with 15 carries for 52 yards and a touchdown.
None of that changes what he did last year, which is the part the droppers are looking at. Johnson played seven games in 2025, carried the ball twice for 17 yards, and went to injured reserve in November with a thumb injury. Our 2025 game log has him on the stat sheet in six weeks for a total of 1.7 PPR points, all of it in Weeks 6 and 7. He was a fourth-round pick out of Texas in 2023 with 136 carries across his first two seasons, including six touchdowns on 55 attempts in 2024, so he has been a usable back before. He simply was not one a year ago.
Chicago is not the only place this is happening, which I missed on the first read. Our injuries feed follows ESPN's designations, and tonight it lists 41 running backs: 15 on injured reserve, three out, 23 questionable. Two of those backfields produced adds nearly as loud as Johnson's. The league announced on Aug. 30 that it had placed Josh Jacobs on the commissioner's exempt list, which bars him from practising or attending games while the matter is reviewed, and Matt LaFleur, asked whether Jacobs would be available for the opener, said "I can't really comment on that because I don't know." MarShawn Lloyd is now the fourth most added player in the game at about 62,000, and our model has already moved him ahead of Jacobs, RB34 against RB44. In New Orleans, Schefter reported on Aug. 18 that Kamara had sprained an MCL in a joint practice with Dallas and would miss at least a month, and Kamara is the second most dropped player tonight while the Saints open in Detroit without him. One feed, one night, one crowd buying a backup and another selling a starter: the injury report has replaced the draft board.
Here is what the two crowds see in Chicago, as best I can read it. Johnson has no average draft position inside the top 200 of our 12-team PPR consensus, so almost everyone holding him got him for free off waivers after the Swift scare. Our trade analyzer projects him for 21 points on the season and ranks him 115th of 154 running backs, with Swift at RB19 and Monangai at RB36, both flagged questionable. A projection like that is really a projection of him staying the third back. If he becomes the first back for even a month, the number is meaningless, and that gap is the whole argument.
Price the gap, then, because that is what a waiver bid actually is. Spread over 17 games, our model has Swift at 12.7 points a week and Monangai at 9.2, while Johnson sits at 1.2. Say Swift's side turns out to be more than a cramp and Johnson runs the backfield for four games. What he produces in that month lands somewhere between the second back's pace and the lead back's, so 37 to 51 points, against the roughly 5 our model expects from him over the same stretch. Call the upside 32 to 46 points, all of it contingent. Then put a probability on it, the part nobody wants to write down. If you think there is a one-in-four chance the injury opens up the way you are imagining, your expected gain is 8 to 12 points across a month, or two or three a week. For scale, the entire season-long distance between our RB19 and our RB36 is 60 points, about 3.6 a week. You are bidding for less than one tier of running back, in a scenario that mostly does not happen.
That is where a finite budget starts to matter. A hundred FAAB dollars has to cover the whole year, and a claim made in the first week of September competes with the one you will want in the second week of November, when a real starter goes down and the replacement sits there for anyone with money left. I have been on both ends of that, and the November version hurts more.
Our own 2025 logs hold both endings. Sean Tucker scored 0.2 PPR points in Tampa Bay across the first four weeks of last season, behind Bucky Irving's 72.0 and Rachaad White's 28.2 over the same stretch, then finished the year with 91.4, including 34.0 in Week 11 alone. That is the version everybody is picturing tonight. The other version is Isaac Guerendo, who went into last season expected to back up Christian McCaffrey in San Francisco and did not get a carry all year. Our log has him on the sheet in seven weeks and scoring zero in every one of them, while McCaffrey played all 17 games and finished with 416.6. A handcuff is not really a bet on the backup. It is a bet on the starter getting hurt in a particular way at a particular time, and most seasons that bet loses.
The other half of this is the roster, and it changes with league size in a way the talk never accounts for. Take a 15-man roster as the standard. A 10-team league has 150 players spoken for, so roughly 50 of the top 200 in our consensus sit in free agency at any moment, and a bench spot on a third-string back is one not given to someone who might start for you. A 14-team league has 210 players rostered, more than the entire top-200 list, so the wire is genuinely bare and a contingency is often the best thing on it. Same player, same news, opposite answer, and the difference is arithmetic rather than opinion.
One number worth having before Sunday: Carolina allowed 24.2 PPR points a game to running backs in 2025, ninth most in the league against a median of about 22. That is last season's picture, since the 2026 numbers do not exist yet, but it is the one we have.
In a 12-team league I would hold him for a week if I already have him, and I would not spend a waiver claim to get him if I do not. The reason is the roster, not the player. Whoever has Swift in your league should be the one paying for Johnson, because the handcuff is worth the most to the person who loses everything if Swift's side turns out to be more than a cramp. If that is you, keep him through Wednesday's injury report and decide then. If it is not, the free-agent pool a week from now will look nothing like the one you are staring at tonight, and the spot you are protecting is worth more than the lottery ticket.