Darius Taylor’s Injury History Makes Him a Risky College Fantasy Football Pick
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Pro Football Network has Texas Tech running back Cameron Dickey sixth on its college fantasy football board. Yahoo’s July 17 top 300 has him 33rd. On Minnesota’s Darius Taylor, the boards invert. Yahoo says No. 9 overall. PFN says 74.
That’s 92 combined spots of disagreement on two backs, and both arguments run through the same question: what happens when the thing that capped a player’s 2025 usage goes away?
Why PFN Ranks Cameron Dickey a First-Round College Fantasy Football Pick
Dickey’s sophomore year was quietly one of the better ones in Texas Tech history. He ran 209 times for 1,124 yards and 14 touchdowns, added 25 catches for 224 yards and two more scores, and landed on the media’s All-Big 12 first team and the coaches’ second team for a squad that won its first Big 12 title and reached the College Football Playoff. His 263-yard night against Kansas on Oct. 11 was the biggest single-game rushing total in FBS all season.
“We’re high on him, looking at what he did last year as a sophomore,” PFN’s Jacob Infante said on the Football Debate Club. “He was running back 12 in fantasy football formats. A lot of those guys ahead of him went over to the NFL.”
The usage argument is the real one. Dickey shared a backfield with J’Koby Williams all season, the two combining for nearly 2,000 rushing yards and 25 total touchdowns, and he started only nine of Texas Tech’s 14 games. Williams is back in 2026, as is USC transfer Quinten Joyner. Yahoo’s own board treats that committee as resolved, though, with Williams 163rd and Joyner 253rd. What changes is everything around them.
“There’s PPR value there, and with Brendan [Sorsby] not in Texas Tech anymore, they’re gonna rely on him a lot more in the run game,” Infante said.
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Sorsby’s exit is the least normal storyline in college football this year. Texas Tech signed the top quarterback in the portal on a blockbuster NIL deal to replace Behren Morton, then watched the NCAA declare him ineligible over a sports-betting history that included wagering on his own Indiana games. He won an injunction in a Lubbock County court, then chose the NFL supplemental draft instead, and in June the league declined his application. Will Hammond, working back from a torn ACL, projects as the starter.
That’s the case for Dickey at No. 6. A defending Big 12 champion with an unsettled quarterback room leans harder on the ground game. “There’s a lot of upside for him to grow and be worth a first-round pick,” Infante said. The counterargument sits in the Orange Bowl, where Oregon held Texas Tech to 78 rushing yards on 2.6 per carry in a 23-0 shutout. Volume only pays if the line moves people.
Darius Taylor’s Injury History Makes Him a Risky College Fantasy Football Pick
Taylor is the better player. That isn’t in dispute, and Infante doesn’t dispute it. “He’s a very talented player, he’s gonna be drafted, he’s gonna play on Sundays,” he said. “But the durability and just the overall lack of consistency on a week-to-week basis makes it a little bit risky as a first-round pick.”
The record backs him. Taylor pulled his right hamstring on Sept. 6 against Northwestern State, missed Cal and Rutgers, came back for Ohio State, Purdue and Nebraska, aggravated it against Iowa and sat out Michigan State. He played 10 games and finished with 143 carries for 670 yards and four touchdowns, plus 34 catches for 245 yards. He also played six games as a freshman in 2023. Three seasons, 28 appearances.
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“There’s a lot of concern there given the injury history that he had, and even when he was healthy, he wasn’t quite somebody to use a first-round pick on,” Infante said. “Only finished short of 700 rushing yards.”
Here’s the thing worth sitting with. PFN is betting that Dickey’s ceiling was capped by circumstance, and circumstance moves. Yahoo is betting that Taylor’s was capped by his hamstring, and hamstrings heal. Both are bets on a constraint lifting. Only one of them is the kind of constraint you can actually forecast from a depth chart in August.
This article originally appeared on Pro Football Network.
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