Cam Skattebo: Giants' Rookie Gem or Risky Fantasy Bet in 2025?

This article series will look at 2025 NFL rookies and break down the full scope of their situation – their talent level and their projected opportunity – and weigh its merits against the emerging ADPs of those rookies following the NFL Draft.

This article will look at Cam Skattebo, the Arizona State running back selected in the fourth round (105th overall) by the New York Giants. As of Friday the ADP on Underdog registers Skattebo at 99.5.

Previous posts in series: Dallas Cowboys running back Jaydon Blue (here), Chicago Bears wide receiver Luther Burden (here), New England Patriots running back TreVeyon Henderson (here), and Cleveland Browns running back Quinshon Judkins (here).

Evaluate trades or get ready for a first-year draft with fantasy football dynasty rankings on RotoWire.

SKILL SET

Skattebo (5-10, 216) is a short and sturdy back whose build lends itself to an extreme amount of natural anchor. Skattebo is 5-foot-9 and ½ to be exact, but he runs with a lean of someone shorter yet. Very few running backs come close to Skattebo's ability to get leverage underneath defenders, and when combined with his standout raw power it makes him a uniquely difficult one-on-one tackle, even in a phone booth.

Skattebo is slow, but his methods as a runner don't really rely on speed. If his elite production at Arizona State and Sacramento State had been driven by corner-turning runs with broken angles left and right then it would pose a complication to his NFL projection, but Skattebo instead wins with off-the-charts instincts and forced missed tackles.

Despite the lack of speed, Skattebo is actually quite explosive in short spaces, and he can make the defense pay for poor gap discipline by making ambitious and sudden cutbacks, easily dropping or lifting anchor at any time all the while. While working between the tackles Skattebo shows memorable vision and instant trigger, constantly making the absolute most efficient use of whatever opportunity there might be to advance the ball.

While there probably won't be many 40-yard carries in Skattebo's NFL box score, there could be enough 20-yard bursts to keep his rushing average at 4.5 yards per carry or more. In general, though, he needs to and likely is able to win with efficiency rather than long-range plays.

In addition to what could be considerable rushing upside, Skattebo poses obviously standout pass-catching upside as a running back. Skattebo's overall from-scrimmage upside is therefore uniquely high, even as a fourth-round pick. He withstood massive volume at Arizona State – 26.04 touches per game in 2024 – and over his last two years Skattebo turned 88 targets into 69 receptions for 891 yards and four touchdowns (78.4 percent catch rate, 10.1 YPT).

Skattebo's lack of speed is an ongoing concern, but one that arguably doesn't negate the unique sum of other traits present in Skattebo's game. He did not win with speed in college, so the heightened difficulty of the NFL might not be a problem for Skattebo if he maintains the same advantages otherwise that he did in college, and on those other fronts he grades so uniquely well there's reason for optimism.

Head to our advanced fantasy football stats page for advanced NFL stats such aDOT, catch rate, YAC% and more to help you make the best player evaluation decisions.

ATHLETICISM

Skattebo's lack of speed is not just bad – it's probably about as bad as it can be while still remaining a productive NFL starting running back. Skattebo wisely avoided the 40 at the NFL Combine, instead running it on the more friendly Arizona State track and logging a 4.66.

If Skattebo were capable of running a 4.66-second 40 on the combine track then he almost certainly would have, meaning in combine terms Skattebo's 40 is more like a 4.7 or even a 4.75. The more the True measure of Skattebo's 40 trends toward 4.75, the rapidly more perilous his projection gets. It's hard enough to make it in the NFL as a 4.66 back, but there are fewer 4.7 success cases yet and by 4.75 you're almost exclusively talking fullbacks.

With that said, there are also very few 4.7 running backs who boast Skattebo's short-area explosiveness. While it doesn't negate the concern over his speed, it's encouraging that Skattebo logged a 39.5-inch vertical and 123-inch broad jump – figures which respectively rank 92nd and 78th percentile for running backs, according to Mockdraftable.

Luckily, Skattebo's speed is his only athletic deficiency. The quickness, burst, balance, power and pass-catching fluency are all effortlessly present.

How does Cam Skattebo stack up against the rest of the NFL? Visit our fantasy football half-PPR rankings for a list of the top players.

COMPARISON AND 2025 PROJECTION

More than most players, you can safely say that there is no direct comparison for Skattebo. He's a weird one, in mostly good ways. There are some players who had somewhat similar profiles, though.

COMPARISON: Your closest aesthetic match for Skattebo might be someone like Duce Staley – a stocky, powerful runner with 600-yard receiving upside but a potential lack of big plays as a runner. Other players with potentially similar production profiles include Kyren Williams, James Conner and Joique Bell, in terms of standing out mostly for short-yardage and pass-catching ability, though none of those three is a great aesthetic match to Skattebo.

2025 PROJECTION AND ADP: As of Friday the Underdog ADP for Skattebo was 99.5, which registers around the beginning of the ninth round.

The appeals and risks with Skattebo are obvious enough. His usage volume upside gives him a very high ceiling for fantasy purposes, but his usage volume floor is probably lower than the vast majority of running backs in the top 100, too. For this reason it's best to understand Skattebo as a high-ceiling, low-floor kind of pick.

Compelling as Skattebo's talent might be, Tyrone Tracy is still the incumbent starter for the Giants and was the self-made author of a legitimately promising rookie year in 2024, which was just his second season playing running back after previously playing receiver at Iowa and Purdue. As much as there are faults to point out in Tracy's 2024 numbers – namely, he hit the Rookie Wall after Week 10, his five fumbles were a problem, and he dropped too many passes – there's also a chance Tracy takes another step forward in his development this year.

With that said, Skattebo still out-grades Tracy in every running back variable except for speed, and in that one regard Tracy is merely good (4.48 combine 40) rather than great. If Tracy doesn't catch up to Skattebo in the other areas then the speed likely can only carry Tracy so far. Similarly, Tracy's advantage in terms of open-field speed is no greater than Skattebo's advantage between the tackles, and Tracy is unlikely to ever project well as a short-yardage or power runner due to lack of anchor.

Even if the Giants absolutely love Tracy, they'd still have reason to immediately plug in Skattebo as a complement to the power functions where Tracy is less than a natural. Allowing Tracy to specialize on in-space functions and off-tackle runs might be the best way to optimize him, but the risk for Tracy is that a guy like Skattebo has a way of prying the door open once he gets his foot inside. The power run designs are an obvious, immediate way for Skattebo to do that.

As much as Skattebo and Tracy will fight for over the same, potentially limited pie, there is a slight chance they're able to coexist at ADP. That's especially because the Russell Wilson offense is one that is necessarily run-heavy, and the pass plays that do occur disproportionately check down to the flats. As a generally safe rule, if Wilson doesn't throw to the boundary on a given play then he's throwing it to the flats.

What might develop is a situation where the Giants throw the ball fewer than 30 times per game, with something like 12 of those targets going to Malik Nabers and a few moonballs to Darius Slayton most weeks. Wan'Dale Robinson might or might not be involved – Wilson can't regularly target that range of the field outside of screen setups – but the tight ends should be only minimally involved as targets otherwise. With Wilson so dependent on moonballs and corner shots it also makes the offense more dependent on deeper dropbacks, which sometimes requires extra blocking help from the tight end.

In this scenario there's a chance that Skattebo and Tracy both emerge as top-four pass catchers for the Giants. After Nabers takes his 1/3 or so and Slayton gets his four or five long-range bombs, there might not be much else for Wilson to do than check down to Skattebo and Tracy. With the Giants so dependent on the run and potentially dependent on running back targets to accommodate Wilson, the pie shared between Skattebo and Tracy might prove bigger than someone would expect based on just the Giants' projected point total.

The three runners ahead of Skattebo in the nearby order are Aaron Jones (82.7), Isiah Pacheco (88.3) and Brian Robinson (88.9), while the ones immediately following are Jordan Mason (101.5), Tyrone Tracy (104.7) and Jaylen Warren (104.8).

This is an interesting range of the running back market, and I'd personally argue the public has not deciphered it particularly well. I don't see why Jones is more valuable than Warren, for instance, and I'm not sure if the people bidding that way have had a chance to think it through yet. This range of the ADP might fluctuate in upcoming weeks as people have more time to look through the magnifying glass.

Skattebo's price might or might not change along with it. An ADP stalemate could be ahead between Skattebo and Tracy, and there's only so much room in the ADP for two running backs on one of the worst projected offenses. In that sense there might not be any urgency to prioritize Skattebo as a target – his main obstacle in the ADP is Tracy, and nothing new is likely to emerge between the two until at least training camp.

In the meantime, though, Skattebo's upside justifies his risks at ADP. There simply are not many running backs capable of accumulating the from-scrimmage volume that Skattebo can, and if Skattebo's game really translates to the NFL then there might not be many running backs better than Skattebo generally. The presence of Tracy and the general dysfunction of the Giants organization are good reasons to keep your Skattebo exposure rate in check, but unless you have too many shares already there's no reason to avoid Skattebo in the present or foreseeable future.

For up-to-the-minute updates on injuries, news and everything going on around the NFL, head to RotoWire's NFL Fantasy Football News Today or follow @RotoWireNFL on X.