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What Is a QB Rushing Yards Prop?

A QB rushing yards prop is a bet on whether a quarterback's net rushing yards finish over or under a posted number. Sack yardage never counts, because the NFL books it as passing. Scrambles, designed runs, sneaks and kneel-downs all do, which is why carry volume and rushing yards so often disagree.

What counts as a rushing yard for a quarterback

The market settles on the official box score, and the official box score is built by the NFL's published Guide for Statisticians. Four of its rules do almost all the work on a quarterback prop.

Everything is netted. The guide is explicit that there is "no separate category for yards lost rushing," and that individual and team totals are found "by deducting the minus figures from the plus figures to arrive at net yards gained." A 12-yard scramble and a 3-yard loss are two attempts for a net of 9.
The line of scrimmage is the switch. If a quarterback is tackled behind or at the line after showing an apparent attempt to pass, it is a sack. The guide's parenthetical is the whole rule: "Should he advance the ball across the statistical line of scrimmage, it is a rushing play." One yard past the line is a carry. One yard short of it is a sack, and it lands in a different column entirely.
Laterals cut the run short. A quarterback who runs and then pitches the ball is credited only "with yardage gained to the point of the second player's possession." He keeps the attempt. He does not keep the rest of the play.
Some carries never happen at all. When a penalty is enforced from the previous spot, the guide records no rushing attempt, no pass and no sack. A scramble erased by a hold behind the line vanishes from the box score. And a run can be shortened by a flag downfield: the guide's own example gives a back 20 yards on a 25-yard run when a teammate clips 20 yards past the line, because the credit stops at the point of the infraction.

One more that catches people out: a run out of a fake punt or fake field goal formation is a rushing attempt like any other.

The sack rule is the single biggest thing to understand

In the NFL, sack yardage is charged to the passing game. The guide files it under "sacks and yards lost attempting to pass." It does not touch a quarterback's rushing line, and it never has.

Josh Allen's 2025 season is the clean illustration. He was sacked 40 times for 298 yards lost, and he finished the year with 579 rushing yards on 112 carries. Not one of those 298 yards came off the rushing number. A bettor who watched a quarterback get buried for eight sacks and assumed the rushing under was safe was reading the wrong column.

The practical version: pressure hurts a quarterback rushing prop by suppressing the scrambles that would have produced yardage, not by subtracting from it. That is a real effect, but it is much smaller than it looks on the broadcast. For the market built on the other side of that play, see the sacks prop explainer.

A quarterback carry is not the same thing as a running back carry

This is where most of the mispricing lives. A running back's carries are mostly attempts to gain yards. A quarterback's carries are a mix of four different jobs: designed runs, scrambles off a broken pass play, quarterback sneaks, and end-of-game kneel-downs. Three of those four are not trying to produce yardage at all.

The box score shows it plainly. In 2025 Allen turned 41.1 percent of his carries into a first down, 46 of them on 112 attempts. Among the 25 highest-yardage rushers in the league that season, the best first-down rate belonged to Kyren Williams at 28.6 percent, and the range ran down to 16.5 percent. Allen was not more explosive than those backs. He was being handed the ball in situations that only needed two yards.

The same split shows up in touchdowns. Allen scored 14 rushing touchdowns in 2025, more than every back in the league's top 25 rushers except Jonathan Taylor (18) and Derrick Henry (16), while his 579 yards would not have come close to that top 25 (J.K. Dobbins sat 25th at 772). Goal-line sneaks pay in the anytime touchdown market and pay almost nothing in the yardage market.

And the ceiling is different. Allen's longest run all season was 40 yards, with two carries of 40 or more. Bijan Robinson had a single 93-yard run. A quarterback prop rarely gets rescued by one explosive play the way a back's does, which matters a great deal when you are pricing an over.

The sharpest single-game example of all of this sits in Allen's own 2025 log. In Week 1 against Baltimore he carried 14 times, his highest total of the year, for 30 yards and two touchdowns. The following week he carried six times for 59 yards. Half the volume, double the yardage. If you had projected off carries alone you would have had both games exactly backwards.

The tiers, and how fast a profile moves

Quarterback rushing is not one market. It is three, and they want completely different bets.

The volume runners. Allen in 2025: 112 carries, 579 yards, 5.2 a carry, 14 touchdowns. A real number every week, and lines in the 25 to 40 yard range.
The efficient scramblers. Lamar Jackson has run for 6,562 yards at 6.0 a carry across his career, but his 2025 season was 67 carries for 349 yards in 13 games, about 27 a game.
The pocket quarterbacks. Joe Burrow has 867 career rushing yards in 78 games, 11.1 per game at 3.6 a carry, with exactly one run of 40 or more in six seasons. In 2025 he ran 14 times for 41 yards in eight games. Many of these quarterbacks get no rushing line at all, and when they do it is a number built on sneaks and clock management.

The tier is not permanent, and that is the part worth stealing. Jackson averaged 53.8 rushing yards a game in 2024 on 139 carries, then 26.8 in 2025. Same player, same offense, and the per-game rushing output roughly halved while his yards per carry barely moved. The volume changed, not the ability. Jayden Daniels went the same direction, from 52.4 rushing yards a game across a full 2024 season to 39.7 across seven games in 2025.

The lesson for a prop bettor is that last season's reputation is a bad prior and a full-season average is a lagging one. Usage is a coaching decision, and it gets revised. That is the same argument as the one behind a running back's carry prop and behind a quarterback's attempt prop: project the role first, then the yardage.

The game-to-game distribution is lumpier than the average suggests

Season averages hide the shape, and the shape is what you are actually betting.

Allen played 16 games with a carry in 2025 and his game-by-game rushing yards, from lowest to highest, were 7, 17, 19, 20, 25, 27, 30, 31, 38, 40, 42, 45, 48, 53, 59 and 78. The mean is 36.2. The median is 30.5. That gap is the whole problem: a line set near the season average sat above his typical game, because three outings (78, 59 and 53) carried nearly a third of his season yardage between them.

Two things follow. First, a quarterback rushing over is usually a bet on a specific kind of game rather than a bet on a player. Second, the floor is real. Allen had games of 7, 17, 19 and 20 yards in a season where he led the position in volume, and none of those were injury games.

What makes the difference is almost always script. A quarterback protecting a two-score lead in the fourth quarter kneels and hands off. A quarterback chasing from behind drops back more, which creates more scramble opportunities but also more sacks and more clock pressure. A close game is generally the friendliest environment for a rushing over, because it keeps the offense in normal down and distance without pushing it into pure drop-back mode. How game script moves prop markets covers that mechanism in full.

Kneel-downs, and why you should read your book's rules once

A victory formation kneel is a run play. The guide credits the rushing attempt to the last offensive player to possess the ball behind the line of scrimmage, sets out no exception for it, and nets the lost yardage against the total. So in the official box score, a quarterback who kneels three times to end a game has three more carries and a few fewer yards.

Sportsbooks do not all treat it the same way. Some grade the official number as published. Others strip kneel-downs out on the grounds that they are not an attempt to gain ground. The difference is usually small, a handful of yards, but on a prop priced at 30.5 a handful of yards is the bet. It is also asymmetric: it only ever bites the over, and it bites hardest in exactly the games where the over was otherwise safe, when your quarterback's team is winning comfortably.

This is a one-time piece of homework. Find the house rules page, find the quarterback rushing section, and know before kickoff whether your book counts kneels. The same page will tell you how the market voids if the quarterback does not take a snap, which is the other rule worth knowing in advance rather than at 12:55 on a Sunday.

A workable routine

1. Start with carries, not yards. Recent carries per game tells you the role. Yards per game tells you what the role produced in a handful of specific scripts.
2. Split the carries by job. Sneaks and kneels inflate attempts and deflate the average. A quarterback whose carries are mostly short-yardage work is a touchdown bet, not a yardage bet.
3. Use the median, not the mean. The distribution is right-skewed for nearly every running quarterback, so the average game is below the average number.
4. Bet the script, not the reputation. Close games and negative game script produce scramble volume. Comfortable leads produce kneel-downs.
5. Ignore the sack count. It does not touch the rushing line. It only matters as a rough signal of how a game is going.
6. Read the house rules on kneels once. Then never think about it again.

How BetLogic helps

Our NFL quarterback sheet carries the rushing side of a quarterback's usage next to the passing side, so a mobile starter and a pocket starter do not read as the same player, with the last five games of carries and yardage beside each name rather than a single season average. Our NFL slate projects the expected margin and the run and pass split for each game, which is the script input a rushing prop actually turns on, and our rushing yards sheet covers the backfield share of the same carries. We do not post a projected kneel-down count, and if a matchup is unresolved we drop the row instead of guessing at it. For the yardage market on the other side of the backfield, see the NFL rushing yards props guide, and for the wider map start with the NFL player props overview. Today's board updates through the morning, and the timestamp on the page is the freshness signal.

Frequently asked questions

Do sacks count against QB rushing yards in the NFL?

No. The NFL books sack yardage under passing, in a category the league's Guide for Statisticians calls sacks and yards lost attempting to pass, so it never touches a quarterback's rushing total. Josh Allen lost 298 yards on 40 sacks in 2025 and still finished with 579 rushing yards. The dividing line is the statistical line of scrimmage: cross it and the play is a rush, get stopped at or behind it after showing an attempt to pass and it is a sack.

Do quarterback kneel-downs count toward a rushing yards prop?

In the official box score, yes. A kneel is a run play, the attempt is credited to the quarterback, and the lost yardage is netted against his total. Sportsbooks differ: some grade the published number as is, others exclude kneels on the grounds that they are not an attempt to gain ground. It is usually only a few yards, but it only ever hurts the over and it hits hardest when a team is winning comfortably, so check your book's house rules before you bet the over.

Why does a quarterback get lots of carries but few rushing yards?

Because a quarterback's carries are a mix of jobs, and most of them are not attempts to gain yardage. Designed runs and scrambles produce yards. Sneaks and kneel-downs do not. Josh Allen's highest-volume game of 2025 was 14 carries for 30 yards and two touchdowns against Baltimore, and the following week he ran six times for 59 yards. He converted a first down on 41.1 percent of his carries that season, far above any of the league's top 25 rushers, which is what short-yardage usage looks like in a box score.

How many rushing yards is a good line for a mobile quarterback?

It depends entirely on the tier, and the tiers move year to year. In 2025 Josh Allen ran for 579 yards on 112 carries, about 36 a game. Lamar Jackson averaged 26.8 a game after 53.8 the season before, on roughly half the carry volume. A pocket passer like Joe Burrow sits near 11 per game for his career. Use recent carries per game rather than last season's reputation, and check the median game rather than the average, because the distribution is skewed by a few big outings.

What makes a quarterback rushing over more likely to hit?

Game script, more than matchup. A close game keeps an offense in normal down and distance, where designed quarterback runs and scrambles both live. A comfortable lead turns the fourth quarter into handoffs and kneel-downs, and a heavy deficit turns it into drop-backs, which creates scramble chances but also sacks and hurry-up clock management. Allen's three biggest rushing games of 2025 carried nearly a third of his season total, which is a reminder that the over is usually a bet on one kind of game rather than on a player.

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