Christian McCaffrey Fantasy News and Statistics

During his time with the Stanford Cardinal, Christian McCaffrey proved that he would be famous for more than just being Ed McCaffrey’s son and Olympian Dave Sime’s grandson. Even out of high school, McCaffrey was a seriously hyped player. He was the third-best running back in the Class of 2014, so he let his talent take care of the rest when he arrived at Stanford. His success in Palo Alto allowed him to become one of the newest members of the NFL’s Carolina Panthers.

The running back situation was far from ideal for Stanford when McCaffrey arrived. The Cardinal did not have one standout, although redshirt junior Remound Wright took the bulk of the carries at the start of the year. By the end of the season, however, McCaffrey was receiving ample opportunities to prove his worth. In his team’s double overtime loss to Utah, he had eight carries for 77 yards. During Stanford’s Foster Farms Bowl win, he received seven carries and gained 57 yards. Although he did not have a rushing touchdown on the year, he did average 7.1 yards per carry on 42 touches. That was hard for the Stanford coaching staff to ignore the following season.

Even with Wright still on the team the next year, Stanford realized its best chance of playing in an elite bowl game would involve giving the ball to McCaffrey, who was a true sophomore at the time, a lot more often. The Cardinal did just that as he smashed Pro Football Hall of Famer Barry Sanders’ NCAA record for single season all-purpose yards (3,250) and set the new mark at 3,864. On 337 carries, McCaffrey ran for 2,019 yards during the 2015 season.

Although he did not particularly dominate the first two weeks of the season, he put up a 100-yard rushing game against USC during Week 3 and had his first 200-yard rushing contest against Oregon State a week later. For the rest of the season, he ran for at least 100 yards on all but one occasion. If college football fans had not heard of him yet, the entire country noticed McCaffrey’s dominance in his team’s 45-16 Rose Bowl win over Iowa. Against the Hawkeyes, he ran for 172 yards on just 18 carries and had over 100 receiving yards, making him the first player in Rose Bowl history to get 100 of each.

McCaffrey was a force yet again his junior year, drawing speculation that he would be an early first-round draft pick thanks to his collegiate dominance. He would not rush for 2,000 yards again, however, because he was removed from his team’s game against Washington State with an undisclosed injury and missed the following week because of it. The other factor that prevented him from potentially meeting the mark was his surprising decision to sit out the Sun Bowl to avoid an injury. Both he and Leonard Fournette did not make themselves available for their respective postseason games, so they may have set a precedent for years to come.

Sitting out of the bowl game had no repercussions on McCaffrey’s draft stock, however, as the Panthers selected him eighth overall this past April. Immediately, he has become a highly targeted fantasy pick because of his dominance at the collegiate level.

Although there is no doubt he was a talented college football player, he enters an offense in Carolina that has both Jonathan Stewart and Cam Newton. Stewart is a 2015 Pro Bowler who has been on the team for a decade, and Newton runs more than any other quarterback in the league. Even so, McCaffrey’s talent will likely force him into the first-team offense, providing Carolina with another dynamic running option. If there are any significant backfield injuries, then McCaffrey could emerge as a workhorse yet again.