Travis Etienne Jr. vs Bhayshul Tuten: Fantasy Football Outlook for Jaguars RBs in 2025

July 8, 2025

John Johnson's fantasy football outlook for Jacksonville Jaguars running backs. Should you draft Travis Etienne Jr. or Bhayshul Tuten in 2025? Read the expert draft advice.

The backfield of the Jacksonville Jaguars is confusing many fantasy managers right now. The clear top-4 candidates for the positions of RB1 and RB2 are likely Travis Etienne Jr., Tank Bigsby, Bhayshul Tuten, and LeQuint Allen Jr., so at least we know that.

Etienne is a veteran entering his fourth season, while Bigsby was drafted in the 2023 NFL Draft and will be entering his third year. Meanwhile, Tuten and Allen are both rookies, selected (importantly) by the new coaching and management staff, headed by general manager James Gladstone and head coach Liam Coen.

While sometimes you should make assumptions that seem obvious -- for example, that RB Saquon Barkley will be the workhorse back for the Philadelphia Eagles in 2025 -- it's sometimes not the best idea to immediately assume the veteran back will be the clear RB1 on a team. So, will Tuten or Etienne be better producers for fantasy football in 2025? Let's dive in!

Travis Etienne Jr. Fantasy Football Outlook

I've researched Etienne extensively over the past few months as a player, and while training camp reports from beat writers have indicated that he'll be the lead running back, my analysis has led me to believe that that simply would be a horrible idea. And I don't think Coen, who is a great offensive coordinator, would make such a choice.

To understand why, we need to first clear some things up about production versus efficiency. Production is nice, it is. But NFL coaching staffs aren't concerned with only that. Players can produce very well, but if they're highly inefficient, those same offenses are often likely to want changes.

This is because giving the ball to a player a million times and only getting three to four yards per play is simply not a good formula for offenses to succeed. They simply need more production per play to overcome turnovers, incomplete passes, and other mishaps that regularly happen on offenses.

Travis Etienne actually averaged nearly the same yards per carry in 2024 (RB35 finish) that he did in 2023 (RB3 finish). This is why it's so dangerous to trust RBs who have terrible efficiency. You're reliant on huge volume and TDs to make up for it. pic.twitter.com/g8pCV6QV1h

— JohnJohn Analysis (@JohnJohnalytics) May 25, 2025

So when Etienne averaged a miserly 3.78 yards per carry in his 2023 season, after racking up an excellent 5.11 yards per attempt in 2022, the community should have been extremely on edge about drafting him the next season. But he finished as the RB3 overall in PPR scoring leagues, so that wasn't about to happen.

The overall finish was buoyed by a ton of touches, including 58 receptions. His yards per catch declined, though less sharply, by 0.5 from 2022 to 2023. But the over 26 percent decline in rushing efficiency was a screaming, flashing warning signal that shouldn't have been ignored.

The irony of not understanding that Travis Etienne is basically Rachaad White (2 years of under 3.8 yards per carry) and Bhayshul Tuten is basically Bucky Irving (elusive, also a rookie, productive and highly talented) is palpablehttps://t.co/bHCAZ3RvhQ

— JohnJohn Analysis (@JohnJohnalytics) July 2, 2025

Just because Etienne has decent receiving production, too much of the community thinks he'll serve as the "Bucky Irving" of the offense, but I just find that incredibly hard to believe. Irving averaged 5.4 yards per carry in his first season in the NFL. Etienne's production profile mirrors that of Bucs RB Rachaad White much more closely.

Bucky Irving in 2024:

-0.26 MTF/Att (3rd in NFL. Min. 50 Att)
-3.02 YaCon/Att (4th)
-6.8% 15+ yd rush rate

Travis Etienne in 2024:

-0.09 MTF/Att (T-60th, worse than Javonte Williams)
-2.36 YACon/Att (32nd)
-4.0% 15+ yd rush rate

Stop comparing ETN to Bucky please

— JohnJohn Analysis (@JohnJohnalytics) July 2, 2025

And Etienne is one of the least elusive backs in the league right now. His 0.09 forced missed tackle rate on runs was one of the worst in the NFL. Worse than Javonte Williams and Alexander Mattison, both of whom had dreadful production profiles in 2024.

And ETN, despite having so much less production, really didn't decline much in pure rushing efficiency. He only averaged 0.06 fewer yards per carry last season than he did in 2023. That was a dip of less than two percent. The Jaguars just saw how inefficient he was in 2023 and acted upon it.

I think this is very relevant for 2024. Travis Etienne lost a ton of volume due to being horribly inefficient in 2023. Credit @RyanJ_Heath for the great article on weight opportunity, which I'll link below, where I pulled this chart from.https://t.co/HdHQkvLuYG pic.twitter.com/bU6ARB12DC

— JohnJohn Analysis (@JohnJohnalytics) July 2, 2025

There's plenty of historical precedent for workhorse running backs losing their big roles after inefficient seasons. I encourage you to read Ryan Heath's article on running back weighted opportunity, if you don't believe me. But we've now had two hyper-inefficient seasons from Etienne.

Why do you think his backup, Bigsby, finally got a crack at the starting job in 2024? It's because teams don't want to feed RBs that average well under four yards per carry. We have a ton of evidence of this. And it's not like Etienne's inefficiency was solely the fault of the team around him.

We proved that above. Etienne was horrible at forcing missed tackles and played very sluggishly. I don't imagine the team will be interested in extending him after the season. So I doubt he has a highly productive 2025. He should be a backup.

Bhayshul Tuten Fantasy Football Outlook

Things look a lot different for Tuten than for Etienne. But first, I guess I should justify why I have Tuten on this list ahead of Bigsby. The Tank got his opportunity in 2024, and he had a few big games, but started to fall off like clockwork toward the end of the season.

It got so bad that the Jags ended up giving Etienne more volume, despite his horrible efficiency, in the latter half of the year. That's not a good sign. Aside from a few explosive plays, Bigsby didn't impress much. In his last eight games of the season, he averaged above four yards per carry in just one game.

The cool thing about Tank Bigsby is that when he doesn’t score two touchdowns he’s completely useless. pic.twitter.com/DZU4aF30r5

— Sean Banister (@seanbanister1) June 30, 2025

And despite his big role for a portion of the season, he was terrible for fantasy football managers. It doesn't help that he has virtually zero pass-catching upside, so poor efficiency in the run game can easily spell doom for his volume projections.

Now, Coen, the head coach, has zero attachment to Etienne or Bigsby. And you have to wonder why the team double-dipped at running back in the 2025 NFL Draft, taking both Tuten (fourth round) and Allen (Round 7), if they believe Etienne and Bigsby were players they wanted to feature heavily and eventually extend.

Bhayshul Tuten is elusive all around but was notably productive up the middle at VT pic.twitter.com/Urax9F1lfV

— Football Insights 📊 (@fball_insights) May 14, 2025

Tuten, for starters, is an incredible athlete. He ran a 4.32-second 40-yard dash. That's elite. He's faster than Detroit Lions running back Jahmyr Gibbs, who's renowned for his elite speed. But Tuten isn't just a track star -- he's a legitimately elusive back with great tackle-breaking chops.

Notably, despite weighing under 210 pounds, he was fantastic on A-Gap runs. He even beat out Boise State phenom Ashton Jeanty in overall efficiency on these runs, averaging significantly more yards per carry, missed tackles forced, and explosive plays.

I firmly believe Liam Coen is salivating at the idea of scheming up outside runs for Bhayshul Tuten. Taking the handoff at the right hash and beating the entire secondary to the left for a touchdown is absurd. That's elite curvilinear acceleration pic.twitter.com/GW6MX19fCd

— JohnJohn Analysis (@JohnJohnalytics) June 22, 2025

The film is one of my favorites of the 2025 rookie running back group, too. Even though his efficiency statistics are less impressive on outside runs, he flashes incredible potential to stretch the field and stress defenses, and has earth-shattering curvilinear acceleration to beat swaths of defenders to the edge on outside runs.

His A-Gap run efficiency also suggests that he's no slouch at cutting it back inside and navigating between the tackles to pick up extra yards. And on well-blocked plays, his ludicrous acceleration helps him rip off very long touchdowns. He's easily the fastest Jacksonville running back right now.

So why's this so exciting? Well, we saw what Coen did with Irving last season. And turning on the Buccaneers' tape in the run game, we see elite blocking schemes. It's not just that the Bucs had a good offensive line, but Coen coached them way up. It's telling that the pass-catchers seemed to be in the right place for blocks often.

I firmly believe Liam Coen is salivating at the idea of scheming up outside runs for Bhayshul Tuten. Taking the handoff at the right hash and beating the entire secondary to the left for a touchdown is absurd. That's elite curvilinear acceleration pic.twitter.com/GW6MX19fCd

— JohnJohn Analysis (@JohnJohnalytics) June 22, 2025

Under Coen, the highly inefficient White lost his lead role to Irving last season. And under Coen, I strongly believe, with my analysis backing me up, that Etienne will lose his lead role to Tuten. There are a ton of similarities between each situation that are just too difficult for me to ignore.

So make sure you draft a lot of Tuten in 2025. I've been doing so.

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