The Lions traded David Montgomery to Houston this offseason, and that single transaction is why Gibbs is sitting at the top of every fantasy board. For three years he split carries and split goal-line work with a bruiser who ate short-yardage touches. That's over. Detroit's running backs coach Tashard Choice has been raving about camp, saying this is the best he's looked in his career, and the staff is clearly excited to hand him a bigger workload rather than protect his touches.
Look at what he did even with Montgomery still stealing goal-line work: over 1,200 rushing yards, 13 rushing touchdowns, 77 catches for 616 yards and 5 more scores through the air last season. Over the final 8 games of that season he was already trending toward a true three-down role, pushing a nearly 20% target share and finishing just shy of 100 targets on the year. Strip out the Montgomery touches and hand those to Gibbs, and you're looking at a back who threatens 20-plus touches a game in an offense that consistently sits near the top of the league in scoring.
The touchdown equity is the real separator. Detroit runs it in from close range as much as any team in football, and Gibbs is now the first man up on every one of those looks instead of splitting them. That's why the Kalshi market has him at 17.5% to lead the league in rushing touchdowns, a number that looks light given he's also catching passes at a wide receiver's clip out of the backfield.
Here's where the market gets interesting. ESPN and crowd ADP both have Gibbs going 1.9 overall, basically the second pick in every draft, but Kalshi only gives him a 26.5% shot at finishing as the No. 1 running back. That's a gap worth sitting with. A field with this much shared touch volume, receiving work and touchdown equity should be commanding a number closer to 35% if the market fully believed in the bell-cow framing. The 12.0% Offensive Player of the Year number and 7.5% rushing yards leader number tell the same story: real respect, but the market isn't fully pricing in what an unshared workload behind this offensive line could look like.
I'm siding with the draft cost over the hedge. Gibbs at 1.9 isn't a reach, it's the market catching up to a role change that only became official this offseason. If you've got the 2, take him and don't overthink it. If you're picking outside the top 3 and he somehow falls, you sprint to the podium. There's contract-extension noise swirling too, reportedly in the $20 million-per-year range, which is the kind of thing teams do for players they plan to feed, not manage down. Draft him at cost. This is a locked-in top-2 pick, not a name to fade because Montgomery's shadow is still fresh in people's heads.
