5 Wide Receivers to Avoid (2025 Fantasy Football)

When preparing for your fantasy football drafts, knowing which players to target and others to avoid is important. The amount of information available can be overwhelming, so a great way to condense the data and determine players to draft and others to leave for your leaguemates is to use our expert consensus fantasy football rankings compared to fantasy football average draft position (ADP). In this way, you can identify players the experts are willing to reach for at ADP and others they are not drafting until much later than average. Let’s dive into a few notable fantasy football players below. And you can check out which experts are higher or lower than our expert consensus rankings using our Fantasy Football Rankings Comparison Tools.

Fantasy Football Draft Advice: Players to Avoid

Fantasy Football Draft Picks to Avoid

Wide Receivers I Like Less Than ECR

Expert Consensus’s Rank	Player	Pat Fitzmaurice’s Rank	Diff.
16	Rashee Rice KC – WR	20	4
23	Courtland Sutton DEN – WR	27	4
24	Zay Flowers BAL – WR	30	6
26	Jameson Williams DET – WR	31	5
31	Travis Hunter JAC – WR	35	4

Rashee Rice was electric early last season, averaging 21.6 PPR fantasy points per game over the first three weeks of the season. But he tore his torn LCL and PCL in Week 4, and he also needed surgery to repair a hamstring tendon. It’s possible Rice goes right back to being Patrick Mahomes’ favorite short-area target and picks up where he left off. But young WR Xavier Worthy asserted himself for the Chiefs down the stretch last season, and it’s possible Rice doesn’t have quite the same juice this year post-injury. A lot of people think Rice is worthy of a second-round fantasy draft pick this year. I see him as more of a third- or fourth-round value.

Zay Flowers is very talented and worth the first-round pick the Ravens spent on him in 2023, but the nature of the Ravens’ offense works makes Flowers an inconsistent fantasy performer. There were eight games last season in which Flowers had six or fewer targets. There were also eight games in which Flowers finished with fewer than 40 receiving yards. The problem is that the Ravens ran the ball on 52.5% of their offensive snaps this year. Only the Eagles were run-heavier. That probably won’t change much this year with Lamar Jackson at quarterback and Derrick Henry at running back for Baltimore, so we should probably expect more inconsistency from Flowers in his third NFL season.

Jameson Williams had a nice little third-year breakout for the Lions in 2024, finishing with 58-1,001-7 in 15 games. The former first-round draft pick oozes big-play potential, but it’s going to be a bumpy ride, because Jamo isn’t a high-volume guy. He averaged 6.1 targets per game last year. The departure of the Lions 2024 offensive coordinator, Ben Johnson, could lead to an overall offensive downturn in Detroit, and it’s unlikely that Jared Goff’s career-high 6.9% TD rate from last year will stick. Williams is certainly worth your attention, but don’t overpay.