5 Wide Receivers to Draft (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 Target

Fantasy Football Draft Picks to Target

Wide Receivers I Like More Than ECR

Pat Fitzmaurice’s Rank	Player	ECR	Diff.
4	Brian Thomas Jr. JAC – WR	8	4
21	Tetairoa McMillan CAR – WR	29	8
28	Calvin Ridley TEN – WR	33	5
29	Jerry Jeudy CLE – WR	36	7
37	Stefon Diggs NE – WR	43	6

Brian Thomas turned in a sublime rookie season, catching 87 passes for 1,282 yards and 10 touchdowns. He thrived even when backup QB Mac Jones was forced to fill in for injured starter Trevor Lawrence. And Thomas passed every eye test: running crisp routes, making touch catches, and doing heavy damage after the catch. There was nothing fluky about this performance. Expect more of the same.

Tetairoa McMillan topped 1,300 receiving yards in each of his last two college seasons at the University of Arizona and is now poised to immediately become the Panthers’ No. 1 receiver after Carolina took him with the eighth overall pick in the draft. The 6-foot-5 McMillan is a classic X receiver — although he can also be a matchup nightmare as a big slot receiver. He has a planetary catch radius and good, strong hands. He also has advanced route-running chops, a good feel for attacking zone coverage, and he’s no shrinking violet when asked to go over the middle.

Since missing the 2022 season due to a gambling suspension, Calvin Ridley has produced two straight 1,000-yard seasons and hasn’t missed a game over that span. He endured gruesome quarterbacking in Tennessee last year, and now Ridley gets to play with top overall draft pick Cam Ward, an aggressive downfield thrower. Ridley is the Titans’ undisputed No. 1 receiver, and I think he’s likely to see more than the 120 targets he had last season. There’s a good chance Ridley will provide WR2 numbers at a low-end WR3 price.

Stefon Diggs tore his ACL last October, which is why he’s a relative afterthought in early 2025 fantasy drafts, his ADP sitting in WR4 range. Diggs says he’s ahead of schedule in his recovery and is trying to be ready for Week 1. Dr. Deepak Chona, a well-regarded sports injury analyst, believes there’s a two-thirds chance that Diggs will be good to go for Week 1, and that Diggs will be at 90% of full capacity about a month into the season. Diggs is immediately going to become Drake Maye’s No. 1 receiver in New England. Before his injury-shortened 2024 season, Diggs had topped 1,000 yards in six straight seasons, and he was on a 1,000-yard pace when he got hurt last year. He may not be the same player he was in 2020, when he had 127 catches and 1535 yards and helped Josh Allen make the jump from promising young QB to superstar, but can he be a top-25 receiver? I believe he can be, which is why Diggs is one of my favorite draft targets.