We read every 2025 QB run: scrambles made 80% of the rushing yards, designed runs 60% of the touchdowns

We pulled the complete 2025 regular-season play-by-play from nflverse and read every rushing attempt charged to a quarterback — the 38 who threw at least 200 passes, the full-time-starter pool. Each carry falls into one of two kinds the box score sums into a single line: a designed run the offense called, or a scramble the charting flags as a quarterback bailing out of a broken pass play. We set kneel-downs aside — 433 of them across the pool, clock plays, not rushing offense — which is why our per-quarterback totals run a touch under the season aggregate that folds them in: Josh Allen's 94 designed-and-scramble carries plus 18 kneels equal the 112 the aggregate lists, and his 599 rushing yards less 20 lost to those kneels equal its 579. Across the 38, the two halves are lopsided in opposite directions. Scrambles produced 7,072 of the pool's 8,801 rushing yards — 80% — on 944 of the 1,552 carries, gaining 7.49 yards a pop. Designed runs produced 1,729 yards on 608 carries, just 2.84 apiece — but they produced the scores: 58 of the pool's 97 quarterback rushing touchdowns, 60%, on carries that averaged under three yards. Priced on the two positive rushing inputs alone — 0.1 point per yard, 6 per rushing touchdown, a rushing figure identical in standard, half-PPR and PPR because no reception enters it — scrambles account for 941 of the pool's 1,462 rushing fantasy points and designed runs 521. Josh Allen led all 38 with 143.9 rushing points, and his line is the split in miniature: 426 of his 599 rushing yards came scrambling, but 11 of his 14 rushing touchdowns came on designed runs — the short-yardage keeper. Jalen Hurts scored 6 of his 8 on called runs and took 54 of his 94 carries by design (57.4%). Patrick Mahomes is the mirror: 72.9 rushing points, but 4 of his 56 carries were designed (7.1%) and 420 of his 429 rushing yards came improvising. Among the 13 quarterbacks with 40 or more non-kneel carries, the designed-run share of carries ran from Mahomes's 7.1% to Justin Fields's 59.4% (41 of 69). Fields (62.7 rushing points) and Mahomes (72.9) finished about 10 points apart on the ground and built it from opposite ends.

The following is analysis, not fact. A quarterback's rushing line is two different things wearing one number. One is a play the coordinator drew up — a keeper, a sneak, a read-option give kept — initiated by the offense before the snap. The other is what happens when a pass play collapses and the quarterback takes off, initiated by the pass rush. The nflverse charting separates them; the counting stat a single-team manager reads does not. So the phrase "rushing quarterback," the thing drafts pay a premium for as a floor, resolves into two mechanisms that in 2025 pointed opposite ways: the yards lived in scrambles, and the touchdowns — the six-point events that decide a fantasy week — lived in the called runs inside the five. That is why Allen and Mahomes read so differently under the same heading. Allen's rushing points are anchored by a designed goal-line role his offense chose to give him, 11 scores on it; the yards on top are scramble variance. Mahomes reached nearly as many rushing points with almost no designed role at all — 7.1% of his carries — meaning essentially all of it came off broken plays. Which of those two inputs repeats from one season to the next is not a question a single year can answer, and we are not claiming it here ^mmodeled. What one year can show is that the pool's rushing production is not one signal but two, sorted by who started the run.

This is a description of how 2025's quarterback rushing points were assembled, not a forecast and not a draft board ^mmodeled. Whether a designed-run role is stickier than a scramble rate — the intuition that a schemed goal-line keeper repeats while broken-play yards scatter — is a claim about the future this one season does not test, and outside analysts who model it find both inputs predictive, with only a modest edge to designed runs ^mmodeled. The 200-attempt cutoff is a choice; a lower line would add part-time runners and could shift the pool's edges, though the named quarterbacks sit far from any boundary. Game script muddies the split, too: a quarterback trailing scrambles more and one leading gets more called runs to bleed clock, so a single season's designed-versus-scramble mix carries some of each offense's win-loss shape, not only its intent ^sspeculative. And nothing here says which quarterback to draft — only that two players can reach the same rushing total from opposite halves of the position.

A manager who rostered a rushing quarterback in 2025 saw a rushing total and a floor, and mostly got one. The pool read is the part a single roster cannot show: that the floor was built two different ways, and that the yards a scrambler piles up and the touchdowns a schemed short-yardage runner scores are not the same asset stacked under one number.