Despite what droves of sports movies would have you believe — Invincible, The Natural, The Rookie, Rocky Balboa, The Wrestler, I could go on — every athlete eventually hits a cliff, and the other side is usually not pretty. Once upon a time, Ezekiel Elliott was a perennial RB1 with six straight seasons of 1,200-plus scrimmage yards to start his career. Then 2022 arrived. And he was never the same again.
Spotting these cliffs before they hit — and moving the players in question while they still hold value — is one of the underrated keys of dynasty fantasy football. If you wait until a former star’s efficiency plummets or until he’s signing one-year rental deals, you’re not going to get a valuable return.
I’m here to help. While all players, all positions and all cliffs aren’t created equal, we can usually follow the data and the trends — and the warning signs — to make smart moves before our league mates are the wiser. With that in mind, here are five names to note with dynasty cliffs fast approaching.
Disclaimer: You will not find Derrick Henry‘s name in this piece, despite the reality that he’s well past multiple dynasty cliffs. The man is superhuman, and I’m no longer interested in predicting his downfall. I’ll likely be drafting Henry until the day he retires.
How dare I? Saquon Barkley? Coming off the best season of his career, third in the NFL MVP voting, fantasy superstar … and I’m giving up!? To a degree, yes. First off, as I covered in detail in my mid-June Moves to Make column where Barkley appeared as a “Sell” candidate, he is facing a major year-to-year cliff after the volume he shouldered in 2024. Even if he was squarely in his prime, I’d be concerned about Barkley — and his top-four RB value — coming off a 378-touch season (plus another 104 in the playoffs).
But, like it or not, Barkley is not in his prime. He just hit two major running back cliffs: reaching 1,500 career carries in December and turning 28 years old in February (of 2025). Both benchmarks are major concerns at the position, and hitting both at once, at the end of a massive workload season, is a recipe for (relative) disaster heading into 2025. Remember the Ezekiel Elliott story earlier? He passed 1,500 carries during the 2021 season and then turned 27 in July of 2022 — notably, 27 or 28 can mark the RB cliff, depending on the player and other contextual clues. In 2022, his yards per carry dropped below 4.0 for the first time (and continued dropping for the rest of his career), and he missed 1,000 scrimmage yards for the first time.
Most likely, Barkley will still be solid in 2025. He’s a generationally talented back on an elite offense. But the odds are very high that he’ll take a step back from last season’s production, and it’s plenty possible he hits the cliff at some point this year. Despite all this, he’s currently valued as the RB4 in dynasty, amidst eight other backs who are all under 25 years old. I’m willing to state with confidence that this is the highest Barkley will be priced for the remainder of his career, which means now is the time to move on, before the production cliff ends his reign as an RB1.
