5 Wide Receivers Experts 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: Wide Receivers

Let’s dive into players Pat Fitzmaurice likes less than the expert consensus rankings.

Players to Avoid

Wide Receivers to Avoid at ADP

Expert Consensus’s Rank	Player	Pat Fitzmaurice’s Rank	Diff.
11	Ladd McConkey LAC – WR	15	4
22	Courtland Sutton DEN – WR	27	5
24	Jameson Williams DET – WR	30	6
25	Zay Flowers BAL – WR	31	6
36	Jakobi Meyers LV – WR	40	4

Ladd McConkey was wildly efficient as a rookie, averaging 2.59 yards per route run and 10.3 yards per target en route to an 82-catch, 1,149-yard season. McConkey only had 112 targets in 16 games, and there might not be much room for target growth in Greg Roman’s slow-paced, run-heavy offense — and the Chargers’ early-August signing of Keenan Allen won’t help in that regard. McConkey offers a sturdy floor, but his ceiling may not be as high as some people imagine.

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.

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.