Here are two 2025 seasons. One quarterback threw for 4,564 yards and 34 touchdowns. The other threw for 3,224 and 25. That is an elite passing year against an ordinary one, and it is not close.
The first is Jared Goff. The second is Jalen Hurts. In a full-PPR league this site has Goff finishing 2025 on 297.1 fantasy points and Hurts on 301.1. Hurts, the worse passer by a distance, scored more.
The whole difference is 421 rushing yards and 8 rushing touchdowns. That is the article. The rest is just why it works out that way, and what to do about it in three weeks when you are on the clock.
A rushing yard is worth two and a half passing yards
Standard fantasy scoring pays a passing yard 0.04 points and a rushing yard 0.1. So every yard a quarterback gains with his legs is worth two and a half of the yards he gains with his arm. A passing touchdown is four points; a rushing touchdown is six. The game hands a running quarterback a better exchange rate on everything he does, and it never stops.
Run Hurts's legs through it. His 421 rushing yards and 8 rushing scores are worth about 42 and 48 points, so a little over 90 of his 301 came from running. Goff ran for 45 yards and no touchdowns all year: about 4 points. Before either man threw a pass, Hurts was 86 points ahead.
Goff earned most of that back through the air, because 4,564 yards and 34 touchdowns is a lot of passing to make up ground with. He nearly did. That is the point. It took a career passing season to draw level with a quarterback whose passing was unremarkable, and the thing that made up the gap was the one thing you cannot coach into a pocket passer in August.
Josh Allen is the argument in one line
Josh Allen threw 25 touchdowns in 2025 and ran for 14 more, and finished on 364.6 PPR points, clear of both. Twenty-five passing touchdowns is a good year. It is not what separated him. The 14 rushing scores are 84 points on their own, and there is no version of Goff's season that finds 84 points lying on the ground.
This is why the position sorts the way it does. Look at any season-long quarterback finish and the top of it is not the best throwers. It is the men who run, with the best throwers filling in behind them. The arm sets the floor. The legs are the separation.
The part that should keep you honest
None of this is free. Lamar Jackson, the most extreme version of a running quarterback there is, finished 2025 on 214.9 PPR points. The legs do nothing for you on the weeks the player is not on the field, and a quarterback who runs is a quarterback who gets hit by people paid to hit him. The same trait that raises the ceiling is the one that puts a floor under the risk.
So this is not "draft the running quarterbacks and stop thinking". It is that when you are choosing between two of them, and the projections are close, the tiebreaker is already in the box score. Take the legs. When the projections are not close, the projections already know all of this — the site's numbers price rushing in — and you should listen to the gap, not the vibe.
How I use it on draft night
I do not reach for a quarterback early. The position is deep and a good rushing quarterback tends to be available later than his finish suggests, precisely because the room drafts arms and remembers legs too late. What I do is refuse to break a tie in favour of the prettier passer. If two are close on this site's rankings, I take the one who ran last year, and I do it without feeling clever about it, because the maths is doing the work.
All of these numbers were read on 19 August 2026 from this site's own player pages, which update most nights, so by the time you read this they will have moved a little. The shape will not. A rushing yard will still be worth two and a half of the other kind, and that is the only number in here you actually need to remember.