David Montgomery has finished RB47 and RB36 the last two weeks, on 17 carries for 43 yards. The FantasyPros consensus has slid him to RB22. He is one of our 12 Must Start running backs this week, and the reason is a test we ran rather than a feeling about him.
We went back over 17 weeks of results, every week of 2025 from Week 4 plus the first three weeks of 2026, and re-ran a dozen ways of picking the top 12 running backs using only what was known before each week. Ranking on last week's points was the worst of them: 39% of those picks finished inside the top 12. Ranking on the projection plus the team's estimated total from Vegas was the best, at 50%.
On that ranking Montgomery is ninth. Houston is expected to score 25.75 points at home against Dallas, a defense that has allowed the eighth-most fantasy points to running backs so far, and Nico Collins is back at practice, which should help the offense around him.
The role is also better than the results. He played 62% of the snaps last week to Woody Marks' 37%, his largest share of the season, and in Week 1, the one game Houston scored more than 17 points, he ran in three touchdowns and finished RB7.
This is the model's call more than ours, and it will be graded like every other call on the Check Sheet. If two bad weeks really were a signal, the record will show it.