The best fantasy football running backs, No. 7: Jamaal Charles

Coming off another ACL surgery, Jamaal Charles is a big risk, but the upside is too tempting.

Charles is one of the trickiest players to rank this season. He’s 29 and coming off the second ACL tear of his career, but has been one of the most productive per-game players since entering the league in 2008, and ripped off three of the best seasons of his career between ACL injuries. Both Charcandrick West and Spencer Ware showed something to the Kansas City coaching staff last season, meaning Charles might share a sizeable portion of his workload for the first time in his career.  But might the company serve to protect him and keep him on the field for 16 games? With Charles, the good still comfortably outweighs the bad. He played a bit more than four games last year, running for 364 yards on 71 carries, catching 21 passes for 177 yards, and scoring five touchdowns. That comes out to an average of 16 fantasy points per game in standard-scoring leagues, just 0.3 points behind 2015’s leader, Devonta Freeman. Charles displays the inherent risk in drafting running backs early, but within the position, he remains one of the most bankable assets in the fantasy game