Fantasy Football Draft Strategy: Wide Receivers (2025)

Pat Fitzmaurice has gone position-by-position to provide you with fantasy football draft strategy and advice. Here’s how Fitz is preparing for his fantasy football drafts. His primers include fantasy football draft strategy, targets, rankings, tiers, and more.

Here are each of Fitz’s complete Fantasy Football Draft Primers: QB | RB | WR | TE

Below we dive into some of his fantasy football draft strategy and advice.

Fantasy Football Draft Strategy & Advice

Let’s explore some fantasy football draft strategy and advice from Pat Fitzmaruice.

Wide Receivers

The most important setting is the number of wide receivers you have to start each week.

If you’re only required to start two wide receivers, it’s OK to be somewhat laissez-faire in your approach to drafting wide receivers. It’s acceptable to merely keep pace with your competitors at the WR position, provided you’re building positional advantages elsewhere.

But if you’re required to start three receivers, you should invest heavily in the WR position.

Wide receiver is a crucial position in 3WR leagues simply because receivers make up such a large percentage of your starting lineup. If your league requires you to start 1 QB, 2 RBs, 3 WRs, 1 TE and 1 FLEX, at least 37.5% of your non-defense, non-kicker starters will be WRs. That percentage jumps to 50% if you put a WR in the flex spot.

Your goal in 3WR leagues should be to overwhelm your competitors with superior WR firepower. Ideally, your WR4 will be better than everyone else’s WR3 and perhaps even better than some people’s WR2.

In my 3WR leagues, at least three of my first five draft picks are wide receivers, and in many drafts, four of my first six picks are receivers.

The scoring system is another important league setting.

Full-point PPR leagues tend to drive up the overall value of wide receivers — particularly the high-volume receivers. Standard (or, if you prefer, “non-PPR”) leagues reduce the overall value of receivers and close the gap between high-volume receivers such as Garrett Wilson and lower-volume, big-play receivers such as Jameson Williams.

Player Notes

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.

Garrett Wilson has started his NFL career with three straight 1,000-yard seasons, overcoming terrible quarterbacking in his first two seasons, and being forced to share targets with Aaron Rodgers’ bestie Davante Adams last year. Now, Wilson is being reunited with former Ohio State teammate Justin Fields. By no means is Fields a great passer, but he could nevertheless be an upgrade for Wilson.

Check out Fitz’s full Wide Receiver Fantasy Football Draft Primer