By Adam
Ashton Jeanty carried the ball 3 times against Arizona on August 14 and went to the bench. The rookie who replaced him ran 6 times for 63 yards.
That is 10.5 a carry, and the name attached to it is Mike Washington Jr., who nobody in your league has heard of.
Washington is 23 years old, 6-2 and 228 pounds, and he came to Las Vegas this spring as a 2026 draft pick out of Arkansas. He got there the long way, through New Mexico State and Buffalo before his last stop in Fayetteville. He wears No. 30. He is not guaranteed to be on the Raiders' roster in September, either. Rookies in his spot spend August auditioning, and cuts land next week.
He has had a good August.
The two nights
Against Arizona he took 6 carries for 63 yards while Jeanty, the back he sits behind, finished with 3 attempts for 16 yards and a single target. That is the shape of a preseason opener. The starter shows his face and leaves, and the depth runs the rest of it.
At Houston on August 21 he did it again with more volume and a different flavor: 9 carries for 56 yards, and this time he caught the ball, 2 receptions for 18 yards on 3 targets. Backs who can only run get cut in September. Backs who catch it stick around.
Put the two nights together and Washington has 15 carries for 119 yards. That is 7.9 a carry.
The two backs he is competing with were on the same field. Dylan Laube has run 11 times for 48 yards, 4.4 a carry, with a touchdown at Houston. Roman Hemby has gone 9 for 34, 3.8 a carry. Washington has more rushing yards than the two of them combined, 119 to 82, on five fewer attempts.
Fifteen carries is a small sample. Preseason defenses in the third quarter are not the ones he would face in October, and one good month has sold people on worse ideas than this. But the gap between him and the other two is not a rounding error, and the coaching staff watched both nights from the sideline.
The thing that makes it matter
Our injuries feed lists Jeanty questionable. That is ESPN's designation, last updated the evening of August 23, with no body part attached and no practice note. Questionable is the whole report. He is not on injured reserve, he is not out, and a questionable tag in the last week of August is frequently nothing at all by kickoff.
Look at what sits behind it, though. Jeanty ran 266 times last season for 975 yards and 5 scores and caught 55 passes for 346 yards and 5 more. That is 245.1 PPR points, and more to the point it is a team that put the ball in one back's hands on nearly every down. A backfield built that way is the only kind where owning the backup is worth a roster spot, because those carries do not get split three ways if the starter misses time. They go to whoever is next in line.
Nobody has established who is next in line. That is the whole bet.
The price
Washington costs a 13th-round pick. Our ADP feed, 12-team PPR, updated August 24, has him at 148.5, which is pick 13.05 and RB48 of the 66 backs in the file.
The more telling number sits beside it. He was drafted in 96 of 7,658 drafts, about one in 80. Nobody in your room is taking him, so you never have to reach. He is the pick you make with the last slot on your board while somebody else spends theirs on a kicker.
The range is the real tell. His earliest selection in that sample was 79 and his latest was 209, a 130-pick spread on a player almost nobody takes at all. That is what it looks like when a few people have seen something and everyone else has not gone looking. Jeanty goes 15th, pick 2.03, with a high of 6 and a low of 23. The market is certain about the starter and has no opinion at all about the man behind him.
What to watch
The Raiders host San Francisco on August 28. It is the last preseason game, the starters will not play, and the backs fighting for the final roster spot will play most of it. Watch who gets the first carry after the ones come off, and watch whether Washington is still there when cuts land.
If he survives the week and Jeanty's questionable tag turns into something with a name attached, the 13th-round pick you spent on the Raiders' backup becomes the best one you made. By then he will not cost a 13th-round pick.